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Darius Holbert: World's Greatest Composer
We all need to thank film composers like Darius Holbert for adding suspense, joy, peacefulness or any other emotion to our favorite flicks. Imagine Jaws without the warning music every time the shark is about to attack. There’s absolutely no suspense; it takes out all the horror and anticipation.
Born into a musical family, Holbert has won several awards at for his film scores. Most recently, some of his work can be heard in Jonas Pate’s Shrink and, on August 21, in Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad. It seems like Holbert can do just about anything in the music world, so he sat down and enlightened us—and made us laugh with the story of how he came to his current position in the film industry.
Katie Garton (MM): I read that you jumped into film scoring because you were “kinda beat up from the rock ‘n’ roll style.” What are the other reasons for beginning to compose for movies?
Darius Holbert (DH): Well, there’s a bunch of different reasons. I have a pretty big history as far as composition goes: I was a composer as a young man. I won a bunch of competitions and things like that, and have a couple degrees in composition and arranging. So it’s not like I just jumped in. It’s more like I deviated from that for a while.
I was playing in a bunch of bands and producing a bunch of records for different people. Then I moved to L.A. and was still playing in a band, doing session and studio work and I just got married last year.
MM: Congratulations!
DH: Thank you very much! I was getting kind of sick of the touring lifestyle and being out on the road. I decided to put a whole bunch of money into upgrading my project studio here. Rather than jumping into it, as corny as this may sound, it really felt like coming home. It felt like scoring films is sort of where I’ve been heading my whole career, if not my whole life. And ever since then, I’ve been really fortunate with the work I’ve gotten. It seems like, at least so far—fingers crossed—I’ve made the right choice.
MM: So when you first started making the shift, did you contact people or were people contacting you?
DH: It was interesting. I had been doing session and studio work in L.A. for six or seven years at least and I had established a pretty good rep in town, mainly for playing keys—piano or organ—but also for production and artist development. So I thought, naively, that I could translate this good rep and use all these contacts to help me get started in scoring film and TV. But when I actually made the conscious decision to make the shift, none of those contacts translated at all. They’re completely different fields, which meant that I had to start from the bottom again, which was a complete lesson in humility, but the best way to go about it.
I even went on Craigslist and Mandy.com to find student productions that would take a gamble on somebody who didn’t have much of a reel. And I did a lot of student theses that wanted single piano notes that were played over and over. It was definitely interesting. I don’t want to bag on these younger directors, because honestly that was one of the best things that could happen to me. A lot of these directors are the people that I’m still working with now that they are doing bigger projects with a lot more money. So it was definitely a lesson of humility at the time, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world.
MM: Do you have a favorite genre?
DH: I sort of established a reputation these days as somebody to go to if you need anything genre-wise. I have a fairly wide spectrum, stylistically, of stuff that I can do. I’m sort of like a jack-of-all-trades; I get calls all the time to sort of fill in the gaps. If a director needs similar music to something that’s already been composed, they’ll call me up and be like, “Can you mock up some music? We need some Tejano-death-metal-house music” or something.
MM: What director would you love to work with? If you could have anyone call you...
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Jeff on 8/20/09 at 10:02 pm
World’s GREATEST Composer? Get out of here…
- Comment by Jimmy on 8/28/09 at 3:33 pm
If you would have read the article, Jeff, you’d see that he worked on the film “Worlds Greatest Dad”, not that she thinks he is the world’s greatest composer. Another dead giveaway is that the “World’s Greatest” before “Composer” is in italics.
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