SEAN SMITH
John Nordstrom (pictured above l., with Executive Producer/Head Writer Bradley Bell) has added emotional punch to movies and television for decades by creating the background music heard on screen, a talent the Daytime Emmy-winning composer has been bringing to Bold And Beautiful since 2013. “We’re lucky to have him,” lauds John McCook (Eric). “What I love about John is he’s a traditional composer. Most of today’s [background] music is that electronic sound with the throbbing beat and that’s just not us. He brings us fully orchestrated compositions and we’re very grateful for his creativity and commitment.”
Digest checked in with Nordstrom to talk about his history of hitting all the right notes, and his recently released CD, The Bold and The Beautiful (Music from the Series Volume Two), which fans can find on Apple Music and Spotify.
The Music Man Speaks
Soap Opera Digest: How did your career in music begin?
John Nordstrom: What brought me to recording and mixing music was listening to great albums as a teenager and kind of visualizing, “Okay, how did they make this sound so amazing?” I would pore over the liner notes and look at the engineers and the producer and [wonder], what does that person do? I was obsessed with the technical part of music creation and all through high school and college, I was in a cover band where I was a drummer and singer and also played guitar and bass. I started out writing songs that kind of sounded like The Ramones or the Sex Pistols. I was really into punk music and hard rock and roll, but very simple rock and roll because that’s all I could play. So, I wrote a bunch of terrible songs and then they just slowly started getting better; plus I’ve always done all of my own engineering, mixing and the technical aspects of the music.
Digest: What was your first professional job?
Nordstrom: After high school, I went to USC and studied recording and mixing, and I had a professor who was doing sound effects for a children’s TV show on PBS called Storytime. Celebrities would read books to kids and to make the book come alive, the score would come in. So, I submitted a cassette tape for that through my teacher and they hired me even though I had no credit to my name. I learned the art of scoring while doing 110 episodes of a children’s TV show.
Digest: When did you make the transition into more adult TV fare?
Nordstrom: My big break [was] when Fox Network purchased the [broadcasting] rights to the NFL [games], so I was doing the music for sports promos and commercials as well as the promo music for all of the Aaron Spelling stuff — 90210, Melrose Place and then a new show called Models Inc. The week it was going to air, I got a call from one of the people at Fox Network and they said, “Can you write a theme for the new Aaron Spelling show tonight and turn it in at 8 a.m. tomorrow?” And I said, “Yes, I can, but what are you looking for?” And they said, “It’s 45 seconds and it needs to be sexy with a little bit of guitar.” That’s all they gave me. I went home and told my wife, “Please start the coffee maker. I’m going to be up all night.” I started with drums and layered in the guitar and the synthesizers and then the bass and recorded all night. As the sun was coming up, I was still mixing. This was pre-Internet, so I had to drive the digital cassette to Fox and when I walked into the office at 8 a.m., there were about a half dozen guys in suits and ties standing there with their arms folded waiting for me. My heart was just racing. I put in the cassette, hit play, and about 20 seconds in, they all started high-fiving each other and said, “It’s perfect. We love it.” And then a guy in a full leather motorcycle outfit walked in, grabbed the tape, and drove it to Hollywood. They cut picture to it all day and the next night it aired on national TV! I went from only doing children’s TV and promo music to having the biggest summer series’s theme. I got an agent and everything really happened after that. [I] did more Aaron Spelling shows and then I ended up doing the show Las Vegas on NBC with Josh Duhamel [ex-Leo, All My Children]. After that, I got another big break with the show One Tree Hill, which I scored for seven seasons.
Digest: How did the B&B gig come about?
Nordstrom: [Executive Producer/Head Writer Brad Bell] is a friend and when I was doing One Tree Hill, he’d come over to the studio once in a while and watch what I was working on. He said, “Man, I really love the sound that you’re coming up with. I want my show to sound like that.” And I said, “Any time you want me to work on your show, I will be there.” And in 2013, he called me and said, “Hey, I think there’s an opportunity for you to work on my show.” I said, “Great!” And now it’s 11 years later. I’ve probably composed about 2,000 themes for the show over the last 10 years. I feel very lucky. I was a teenager cranking out music in my parents’ attic and if I had known that I’d be paid to write music that people connect with and would want to listen to…all over the world, I never would have believed it. And Brad Bell is in a class by himself. I mean, I’ve worked for a lot of different bosses and a lot of different shows and he’s very supportive and a great person to work for.
Digest: When you’re creating the music we hear on B&B, do you both write the music and record it?
Nordstrom: Yeah, I layer all the instruments; I’m kind of mixing as I’m writing. I kind of have my set-up so that everything sounds pretty finished, even as I’m writing it, and then I do a lot of tweaks to really get it sounding good. But I also bring in incredible musicians to play on top of [what I’ve created], if I have the time and the budget. On some of the pieces that I’ve done for Bold and Beautiful, I’ve brought in incredible string players and for the Dubai episodes [the show’s location shoot in 2014] I brought in somebody to play an Arabic flute. I’m able to bring in these incredible people that will lift my music to another level, but I would say 95% of what you hear is, is me just layering all the instruments myself.
Digest: How did releasing your B&B music to the public come about?
Nordstrom: I just knew there would be a demand for [the show’s score music]. I wanted to release a CD of One Tree Hill music but Warner Brothers didn’t want to do it for whatever reason. When I told Brad, “I think the fans really want to hear [B&B] music,” he said, “Great, let’s do it!” He didn’t even hesitate, so we released Volume One in 2022 and it’s still very popular on Spotify and Apple Music. Hundreds of people all over the world listen on a daily basis. The fans can’t get enough. I don’t know if they listen for meditative reasons or put it on in the background while they’re driving or working at home or folding laundry, but they enjoy the music. In the last year and a half, I composed all of this new music that I was really happy about and proud of, so I approached Brad again and asked, “Hey, can we do a volume two?” He’s always ready to do anything that the fans wants, so we put out another volume and it’s already getting a lot of streams.
Digest: Tell us about the music found on the album.
Nordstrom: [It consists of] pieces of music that have all been used on the show. There are many, many versions of each theme that I write. I probably do 20 different versions of each them. [The album features] my personal favorite version of each one. “Finn and Steffy Reunited” is the first track and I basically took about four different versions and put them all together in one longer version, a four-minute version, so it’s almost like a medley of that theme. Each one, I kind of decided, “Okay, is the piece long enough that it can stand on its own or do I need to remix it in a way that makes it more listenable?” It’s my personal favorites and then there are some fan favorites in there, too. Some of them actually feel like a song that just doesn’t have vocals on it, you know? They sound like a fully fleshed-out song. There’s one called “Heartbreak,” there’s one called “Ascend,” there’s one called “Tender Guitar” — they feel like they could have vocals on top of them, but they’re really more kind of mood-setting cues or themes because a lot of these pieces, they use in the background while two people are talking, so you want to make sure that the music is subtle enough that it gives the scene some weight, but it doesn’t take over and make it hard for the viewer to hear the dialogue. You want it to kind of percolate underneath the acting and make sure you don’t step on [the performances] too much. This [volume] has 21 tracks, roughly an hour of music. It’s a pretty varied group of themes and different types of themes, but a lot of it is very meditative and it’ll kind of bring you to a different emotional place, hopefully.
