The ‘Landman’ Score Turned to Pump Jacks for Instrumentation and Billy Bob Thornton for Inspiration
The Paramount+ series “Landman” contains all the hallmarks of a show from “Yellowstone” and “Tulsa King” creator Taylor Sheridan: a return to form for an iconic leading man (in this case Billy Bob Thornton), an abundance of quotable dialogue that veers from the literary to the profane at high speeds, and a colorful milieu — the oil boomtowns of West Texas — that yields both delicious melodrama and moments of delicate humor and poignancy.
“Landman” also boasts a score by frequent Sheridan collaborator Andrew Lockington, whose work on “Mayor of Kingstown” and “Lioness” has made him a vital part of the showrunner’s team. On each series, Lockington has been tasked with finding the musical language to express the characters’ particular tensions and obsessions, and “Landman” is no exception.
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“Taylor and I always have a lot of conversations at the beginning of projects, but this one trumped those by far,” Lockington told IndieWire. “There was a lot of talk about what this world is and what the sound of the world is. One idea was that the music should give you that sense of emotion that you get when you’re at a bonfire in a field at two in the morning, when the party has died down and the people who are still awake sit around having conversations and there’s a truth and an honesty to those conversations. That should be the score.”
Lockington manifested that idea by scoring “Landman” with minimalist but melodically rich instrumentation. “We were trying to get as much authenticity as possible into the final product,” he said. “What that actually meant was not overproducing it, not overthinking it, not taking out all the little finger noises and the squeaks on the fretboard and the breaths. I have an amazing cello player that takes a big deep breath right before he plays a phrase, and we kept those things in.”
Keeping those moments was, for Lockington, a musical corollary for the series’ rough characters. “We didn’t want anything that rounded off the sharp corners too much,” Lockington said. “The idea was to keep it as similar to the storyline as possible and have these edges that make it feel human and relatable.”
Lockington also absorbed elements of the characters’ environment into the score. “Taylor and I were having a conversation one day, and he mentioned seeing a pump jack with a plaque that said 1925 on it,” Lockington said. “It made us realize, wow, that thing’s been pumping oil for 99 years. This story, while it takes place in the present day is the story of something that’s been going on for over 100 years. This idea of working the oil patch, providing for your family, of what a landman is, and mineral rights…it’s a much broader time period than just what takes place on the series he wrote.”
To convey that, Lockington used the materials of oil drilling themselves as parts of the score’s instrumentation. “One of our early ideas was to take a bunch of the pump jack elements and record them,” he said. On the show, the metals emerge as percussive elements alongside the drums. “I’m using these metals in different patterns and there are wrenches and pipes — though it’s not at the forefront. It’s funny, because ultimately the metals felt the least human of the different musical instruments that we were using, so we pulled back on that in the end.”
As he worked on the series, Lockington found another source of inspiration: the lead performance by Billy Bob Thornton. “I was on set for one of the scenes he shot in the first few weeks and heard how melodic his dialogue is,” Lockington said. ‘When I listened to his dialogue, I heard musical phrases, and it really informed the keys and the pitches and the sparseness of the instrumentation because I didn’t feel like I was scoring dialogue. I felt like I was scoring a singer. A vocalist.”
Lockington notes that Thornton’s power is often in the pauses between lines, something he tried to incorporate into his score. “So much acting happens in between the lines, and it made me think about the idea of some of the communication in the music being between the notes instead of being the notes themselves,” Lockington said. “There are a lot of places in Billy’s dialogue where he leaves these amazing pauses, and I was very conscious of not taking advantage of those spaces. You could try to make a broad musical statement there, but I tried to be restrained and say no, we’re going to let this hang for a minute.”
That said, one of the joys of the “Landman” score is its range, as it alternates between those quieter moments and more bombastic ones illustrating the epic quality of the characters’ lives. “I don’t think I’ve ever played so few notes on a piano and made so much noise on a piano at the same time,” Lockington said, adding that the key to creating an effective score is often simply staying out of one’s own way.
“Sometimes, in self-editing, you can lose the really amazing stuff,” he said. “As you keep regurgitating it and reworking it, sometimes the stuff you’re editing out is the magic. And The Beatles are a great example of a band where, when you listen now, you hear so many things that wouldn’t pass our discerning production quality nowadays — vocals that aren’t perfectly tuned, or a twang on the guitar, or somebody makes a little noise. But you realize that all these tiny things can be seen as imperfections or as art. And sometimes the art is in the imperfections.”
New episodes of “Landman” premiere Sundays on Paramount+ through the season finale on January 12.
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