Faced with the biggest, craziest Keanu Reeves kill-fest yet in “John Wick 4,” composer Tyler Bates upped the musical ante the only way possible: He added an orchestra to the essential “John Wick” palette of raw, headbanging guitars, drums and synths.
Bates – also known for his “Guardian of the Galaxy” scores – has collaborated with fellow composer Joel J. Richard on all of the “John Wick” music since the first film opened in 2014. “We share some very similar taste, and as friends, we’re just already on a subconscious wavelength,” says Bates.
“If you listen to the four scores, they’ve definitely grown as the scope of the films has. Not in the way that it’s now an orchestra and it’s larger; it’s just that the color palette has continued to develop throughout, still maintaining the fun, hybrid-rock foundation to the score.”
Director Chad Stahelski is “a rocker,” Bates reports, but it was also Stahelski’s idea to expand the Wick soundscape into “a huge orchestral score.” The problem, Bates says, was “how do we maintain the power, the edge and the aesthetic of the John Wick score while embracing an orchestra? It just doesn’t work as a straight orchestral action score.”
Bates and Richards play all the guitars (both electric and acoustic), bass and synthesizers, with Gil Sharone on drums. This time they added a 72-piece Nashville orchestra, mostly strings and woodwinds, “maintaining that rock aesthetic but expanding on it sonically and harmonically.
“When you’re creating a score that has so many unusual synth textures and modular synth sounds, as well as varied guitar, bass and drum sounds, it’s a lot of inventory to reconcile harmonically so that it all complements one another and at the same time serves the picture,” Bates says. “It’s very time-intensive.”
And, he reports, there’s a lot of music in “John Wick 4.” Bates and Richard recorded an estimated three hours of music. “The total minutes [of music] in this film probably doubles anything that I’ve been a part of,” Bates says.
Another challenge was how to create music for the many action sequences, with their dozens of shootouts, without being repetitive. “It’s looking for opportunities to hold back so that you can hit the throttle in the most important chapters of a fight,” Bates explains. “Sometimes we just ramp up, or have a lot of different beats in a sequence, so that we can slam where we really want to increase the intensity and the tempo.”
Probably the most fun for Bates was collaborating with his daughter, pianist-singer-songwriter Lola Colette, on a punk-rock cover of Martha and the Vandellas classic “Nowhere to Run,” heard in one of the Paris action sequences.
More than a year ago, as Bates was starting work on the score, he asked his daughter to sing a “guide vocal” on his punk-oriented cover “just to give them something to listen to.” Months later, director Stahelski (who didn’t realize it was Bates’ daughter) liked it enough to ask his composer to “tell her to cut loose and tear it up” for a final version.
Bates co-wrote and produced two more songs for the soundtrack: “I Would Die for You,” performed by Grammy-nominated In This Moment; and “Eye for an Eye,” sung by Japanese singer-songwriter Rina Sawayama. “I went a little bit more garage-punk in the production of the songs on this movie because there’s a lot more EDM-ish music incorporated into the film. I thought the punk aesthetic would be a little fresher sounding than the hard rock approach of the past films – a little more abrasive and a little more live,” Bates says.
Bates and Colette are currently on tour with Jerry Cantrell. He has also scored Netflix’s animated “Agent Elvis” with Matthew McConaughey voicing the Elvis character, and is producing Colette’s upcoming five-song EP.
Listen to “Nowhere to Run” below.
