music

For a decade now, I’ve been the resident composer for Cincinnati Playhouse’s Off the Hill series of touring children’s plays. In 2023, they commissioned me to write one. This is the opening track from my adaptation of The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s supposed to evoke the potential energy that’s stored up in a child’s bedroom, where any adventure is possible.

This show was a wild ride. The director decided a little late in the process that they wanted the eulogies underscored … all fourteen of them. What resulted was 30 min of some of my favorite music, composed over about 10 days.

I took as my inspiration Alexandre Desplat’s score to Moonrise Kingdom because it seemed like a good template to crank out tons of music relatively quickly. I don’t think they sound anything alike, but there’s definitely a shared DNA there.

On top of being a super fun piece of music - the HMWT theme has some special meaning to me. My Gampa passed away while recording our second episode (Episode 7 is dedicated to him) and I wrote this piece of music about a month earlier, sitting at his dining room table while I was back home in Alabama visiting him in the hospital.

You can also check out an acoustic version of the theme. Or, ya know, jump straight to the main event and check out the podcast.

This is one of Bridget’s favorite plays and has been on her list of shows to direct since it first came out in 2012. It’s a beautiful heartbreaker of a story and the Know Theatre’s 2026 production was such a gorgeous piece of theatre.

Most of the music for this show (76 of the 78 cues) was around 2 seconds in length (every time we shifted universes), so here’s some curtain call music.

The theme song for ZOiNKS! is only about a minute long, and I think Bridget is convinced that even that’s too long for a podcast theme song. She’s probably right, but I love it too much.

Here’s the full-throated, four minute version. It’s also probably too long. Enjoy!

This is less about the music and more about Jordan. Bridget really wanted the final monologue underscored and I wanted the piece to have a definite ending, which meant that Jordan had to just be perfect every night and hit all of her sync points with the music while also acting. Obviously, she did it - she’s amazing. I think she asked to hear the song twice before she was like, “yeah, I got it.”

Goddam, I love this lady.

I created a score for this play at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park way back in 2017. It was maybe the first time that I felt an entire score for a project had cohesion and an arc. I loved that score, but I also was really just beginning my journey on how to create cinematic music and the 2017 score was mostly piano and some strings.

When Playhouse decided to revisit the script in 2024, I knew it would mean getting to take my original ideas and stretch them farther than I had been able to the first time around.

I’m really proud of where this one ended up, and super grateful that I got the chance to revisit this music.

This is one of the few shows I’ve worked on where the music had to sit second fiddle to the rest of the sound design. This show had the cab of a garbage truck onstage, driving around a NYC block - the sound design for this show was massive.

That said, I still got the chance to write some fun music - this track being a particularly groovy little ditty.

Bridget and I went into rehearsal for this play 17 days after the birth of our kid. Needless to say, most of this score was written in a sleep-deprived blur.

There’s a lot of music here that I’m really proud of, but by God if I remember writing any of it …

This play was just a joy to work on. The story was divided across the four seasons and each season was made up of a different ensemble. Summer was a fun, bouncy theme played by a brass quintet.