Bluey soundtrack composer Joff Bush on how to make viewers cry
Joff Bush, 35, is a screen composer best known as the musical brain of Bluey, the extraordinarily successful ABC TV cartoon centred on a family of talking blue heelers.
Q: Before you do your amazing music work on each episode of Bluey, do you find yourself moved by the emotional undercurrents at play?
A: 100 per cent. I was working on another show for Ludo [Studio, the Brisbane-based animators], and they thought I’d be perfect for this other “little show”, as they called it then. They showed me a rough animatic of an episode called Teasing, and I was in tears by the end, even though it was just a rough storyboard. I think the stories are so good; I get a bit too much credit for the feels, because I’m just riding on their coat-tails. People say, “The music made me cry!” and I say, “No, no, no, that story made me cry when I first saw it, too”.
I think you’re being modest. There’s a Bluey soundtrack being released soon — is this the first time your screen work has made the leap to another medium?
I’ve played on other albums and stuff – lots of little things – but this will be the first album which is mostly my stuff. I’m really pumped. It’s not a copy-and-paste from the show; it’s all new versions re-recorded. In the show, we often don’t have enough time to do everything how we really want to do it, because we’ve got to write, record and mix everything. Often people’s favourite tracks – like the end of Pool – only go for 30 seconds, so we took all the material that we recorded but didn’t use in the show, and extended it into a three-minute track. I’m really happy with it. I never listen to my stuff – but I listen to this.
How has your relationship with the Bluey theme song changed since you wrote it?
I don’t hate it yet, which is amazing. I do feel for some of the parents who have to listen to it, like, 200 times a day [laughs]. I do really like it, and on the album, we’ll be doing some fun stuff with it. But it’s Bluey; that’s the sound. I don’t think it could be anything else. I don’t have a particularly complex relationship with it. It’s weird, because I’ve never had a piece like this become so iconic, or part of the Zeitgeist. It’s almost like it’s not a piece of music anymore. It’s like a brand or something. Or a state of mind.
I’m pleased to hear that you are still fond of it, because it’s a sound that brings so much joy to so many people, children and adults alike, every day.
Oh, that’s good to hear. Yeah, I do love it. I think it’s unique and fun, and one of the things I never thought about was that kids would dance to it, because there’s no drums or anything in the original track. I would dance to it in the studio, just to get into it, feel the groove and play on with it. But I totally did not conceptualise that. The other thing I didn’t think about was that in the gaps between each round, there’s some pretty odd timing; there’s a 5/4 bar, or a 7/8 bar. We designed that to make it feel like there’s a bigger gap, a smaller gap – and then the last one’s a 4/4 gap so it feels like you’re really ramping up to the end. We designed that really consciously, but it’s almost impossible to dance to. Every kid starts dancing and then they fall over and get up. It always feels like a shock; we were just recording it today for a little “making of” thing, and none of us got it right!
Bluey: The Album will be released on Friday, January 22.
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