The CW’s The 100 is known for its incredible music and themes written for specific characters, and OMFGTV had the pleasure of chatting with the composer behind it all, the incredible Tree Adams.
Tree joined the show in its third season, saying that one of the many draws for him was that he had “previously worked with many of the people on the show—several of the writers, producers and other crew members.” Because of that, he was already familiar with the show and already loved the sci-fi genre, so he decided to take on the challenge of creating music for it. Another thing that drew Tree to The 100 was just how dark it is. “The dark feel of the world was a big draw,” Adams tells us. “The rich layers of the characters also seemed like a fertile ground for some thematic exploration, a challenge that I was excited to take on.”
Tree has composed music for several other projects, but nothing quite compares to The 100. First of all, he has to keep a spreadsheet just to keep track of all the thematic arcs! Adams was also fairly new to “the whole post-apocalyptic Earth backdrop.” But not only does he have to write Earth music, he also has to write space music since so much of the show has been spent up there!
“The world of The 100 has many other facets. It has a mysterious component. It has outer space, which can feel vast and majestic. It can have a bit of an epic and adventure-y quality to it at times. Of course we get romantic, tragic and emotional as well. This show has more dimensions to it than most other projects that I’ve encountered. It’s an amazing workout for a composer!”
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Tree works very closely with The 100 showrunner Jason Rothenberg and producer Tim Scanlan. He says the process goes like this: Jason gives Tree some direction and Tree composes, Jason gives Tree a round of notes, they adjust things as needed, then Scanlan “runs the mix on the dubstage.” Tree also says that he’s “given free reign to find new sounds and create themes, so there’s a certain amount of trust involved, but at the end of the day, this is Jason’s vision. So if he wants to go left, we go left. There’s no ego in it for the rest of us. We’re all just trying to make the best show that we can and I think it’s working pretty well!”
The 100’s music is known for its very unique sounds, many of which Tree created out of household items such as “a beer cooler, a collection of odd sounding chimes, Middle Eastern hand drums (like a daf), a water jug, some skulls, a coffee can and some wine bottles. Or maybe those are just lying around from one of the late nights here.”
Since Tree joined the show in season 3, it has gotten infinitely darker story-wise, which prompted Adams to create much darker music that he really enjoys composing. There are some scenes that he does find difficult to write for, and that’s because they are so dark and he has to watch them over and over, slowed down sometimes, to capture the right emotion in the music.
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“The emotional stuff is a great challenge. I love to feel the music and so it’s all about getting yourself psyched to emote. We’ve had some very emotional episodes where we had to squeeze a lot of emotion out there and it can be pretty draining. But in the end, these are often my favorite pieces.”
In the current season there is a 6 year time jump where many characters changed and many new faces have joined the cast of characters. The music Tree created had to reflect the changes in some characters and some consistency in others.
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“In some cases, I try to show their old theme transforming into something new as we did for instance with Octavia in the first few episodes this season. You’ll hear that we do this version of her Skairipa motif from season four, and then we introduce the Blodreina motif and the two tangle around for a bit before we kind of shed that Skairipa theme for the most part, like the husk of a chrysalis. Some themes are helpful as a throughline, like for the Emori/Murphy stuff we did a bit of this as things evolved there.”
Now that Skaikru and the Grounders have formed Wonkru, you would think that the music would reflect the sounds from those two groups, but that’s not the case here. “In an interesting new way, the Wonkru thematic material is more about Octavia’s will to lead and less about the group.” Speaking of Octavia, she is probably Tree’s favorite character to compose for. “She just goes completely bonkers and evil sometimes and that’s let’s me push the envelope a bit musically.”
Now Tree couldn’t spoil anything for the rest of the season, but he did let us know that his favorite piece of this season is the very last one, so make sure to keep watching to find out why!
Catch The 100 on The CW Tuesday’s at 9pm and listen carefully to the wonderful music of Tree Adams!
