Rick and Morty is one of the most beloved shows on television for many reasons, but one aspect in particular that makes the animated series stand out as noteworthy is its music. Creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon take great care in telling fascinating, incredibly smart sci-fi stories with each episode and layering that with lofty themes about humanity and family and depression, but on top of all of that, Rick and Morty boasts a bounty of exciting original music and songs. Whether it’s an epic full-length number like “Goodbye Moonmen” or a short diddy like, “I’ve Got a Doo Doo in My Butt,” each and every Rick and Morty song stands on its own as a compelling (and yes, hilarious) piece of music.

The man behind the piano, so to speak, is Ryan Elder, who’s the composer on Rick and Morty. In anticipation of the first-ever soundtrack release for the show, which includes extended and all-new versions of songs from the series, and the live show at the upcoming Adult Swim Music Festival, I recently got the chance to speak with Elder about his work on the series. During our extended conversation, Elder talked about how he first became involved with Rick and Morty, his collaboration process with Roiland (who writes the lyrics to most of the songs), and the challenges involved in creating the music for a show like this. Edler also got specific when detailing the creation of songs like “Get Scwhifty”, “Human Music”, and “Fathers and Daughters”, and talked about the exciting new avenues he got to explore in the episodes “Pickle Rick” and “The Ricklantis Mixup.”

Elder also discussed what fans can look forward to hearing on the soundtrack album, and how excited he is to play some of this music live at the Adult Swim Music Festival on October 7th. It was a delight to get to pick Elder’s brain for a bit, and he gave a lot of insight into how the wonderful and sometimes delightfully silly music of Rick and Morty gets made.

rick-and-morty-ryan-elder
Photo by Temma Hankin for Adult Swim and Subpop

Check out the full interview below. The Rick and Morty soundtrack will be released by Sub Pop on September 28th.

I'm sure you've answered this question a lot, but how did you first get involved with the show?

RYAN ELDER: Justin and Dan and I go way back to this monthly film festival in LA called Channel 101. It's like a mini TV show network where the audience votes for their favorite shows. So I met them there. Dan started Channel 101 and when I first started, Justin was the hot new show maker. He had this show House of Cosbys that just brought the roof down on the place. I knew I wanted to get in with these guys. I was working on commercial music at the time, a lot of advertising, and I just said, "Hey, if anyone needs any music, I'm free and I'd love to work with you," and Justin and Dan, over many years, took me up on that offer and we made a lot of shorts and little things, and I helped Justin with a lot of pitches to various networks and stuff, until when it came time for them to make a pilot for Rick and Morty, I think I was fairly high up on their list of composers, certainly ones they have worked with before. That's how I got the opportunity.

So, once that pilot gets worded to series and once you guys start digging in together, what were your initial discussions about what the score for the show should be?

ELDER: Justin's vision in the beginning was that it be as filmic as possible, and that the music always take itself seriously, to play against the comedy. He wanted it to feel like a classic sci-fi movie score, and he had a couple of TV shows that he had in mind. He really loved Farscape, so that was one of the reference points, and I sort of brought in for the main title certainly the Doctor Who vibe, and I'm also very heavily influenced by Jerry Goldsmith, the Alien score, the Planet of the Apes score. I think they're genius, and if I ever need inspiration I listen to those and I'm good to go.

That's awesome. I can definitely feel the Jerry Goldsmith influence in there.

ELDER: Cool, thank you. That's a huge compliment.

It's an interesting thing, because it's such a silly show, but the music does have to do the work, especially in the action sequences and the thriller sequences. You’ve got to feel the stakes of what's going on.

ELDER: Yeah, and there's a lot of jokes in the action sequences that if I pointed them out in a way that was jokey, it would just ruin everything. There has to be this throughline of tension, drama, action, that really helps elevate the comedy in my opinion. All credit to Justin for having that vision of having the music be very classic sci-fi.

You mentioned the main title. I really love the main title theme, and it kind of sets the stage and really digs into the sci-fi of the series. This isn't Family Guy or Bob's Burgers. It's a show that takes the sci-fi very, very seriously. As seriously as the comedy. How did that main title theme come about, and what was the evolution of that?

rick-and-morty-soundtrack-cover
Image via Sub Pop Records

ELDER: Yeah, interestingly that main title, I really wrote that for a different show that Justin was pitching. It was called Dog World. Elevator pitch would be, a planet where dogs evolved from men, kind of. It was also very sci-fi. It was more kid oriented, I think. I don't think it was an adult show, but that pitch ultimately never went anywhere and we still had that song, which he loved, from that pitch and when we were doing Rick and Morty he was like, "We need something for the opening credits. Just for the pitch," and I was like, "Why don't we use the Dog World music, because I know you love that and I also love it," and we put it in there. It worked really well, and we could never beat the champ. It was just always the best thing we had available. That’s how it stayed.

That's really funny. This is also a show that has a lot of really great songs. Do you remember what the first original song was that you wrote for the series and how that evolved? Because it's now become such a vital part of the DNA of the show.

ELDER: Yeah, the first original song I wrote for the show was probably in the episode Anatomy Park. There's a Small World parody, “Small Intestine.” That was one of the first ones we stared working on, so that's just what I worked on first but I also, very early on. “Human Music” was one that I did very early on, and I'm trying to think. There's a lot of songs in Season One. They're smaller, they're not as big as “Goodbye Moonmen” and “Get Schwifty,” but there’s “The Rick Dance” in the final episode. I love doing the songs. Whenever I see Justin and Dan in review I'm like, "Write more songs into the scripts," because they're really fun and they let me go loose and make something really fun.

In hindsight, they're such a vital part of the show. Was there much discussion when you were first doing those first songs about what it should be, what it should sound like, how seriously we should take it?

ELDER: Yeah, for sure. Usually the lyrics to the songs are written into the script, so they always have an idea of what they want it to sound like. For example, for “Goodbye Moonmen,” the script said, "Fart sings a David Bowie inspired song," so it was very clearly in the script, and then the lyrics were all there, exactly what I used. For that, it was very clear. Others like “Human Music,” I had to call Justin and say, "What the heck does human music sound like?" Then “African Dream Pop” from Season One as well as an instrumental that Gavin puts on when he's turning into a creature, a Cronenberg. So that was just in the animatic as African Dream Pop, and so I was like, "Oh man, what does African Dream Pop sound like?" And that one I got to just go off on my own and figure out how I wanted to emulate that, but it was all in the title, right? It's gotta be African, it's gotta be Dream Pop.

What does human music sound like? That's one of my favorite songs in the show, and it's such a great gag, but I don't know. Where do you start with that? How do you even begin? What did Justin say?

ELDER: Yeah, that's a good question. Same question I had. I called up Justin, I said, "What are you hearing in your head for the Human Music part?" And he's like, "Oh, it should be just really, really, really simple," because the joke is that they're on low power simulation, so the music has to be as simple and dumb as possible, and he's just saying over the phone, he's like, "It should just be dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun," and I said, "Hold on, let me call you back and record that," and I'd literally just did exactly what he sang to me on the dumbest, cheesiest synthesizer sound I could find.

That’s funny. Does Justin write music on his own, is he a musician? It sounds like he's pretty intimately involved in the creation of all of these songs.

ELDER: Yeah, he's definitely a musician. He was in bands and stuff growing up, and he was a lead singer in a couple bands. He definitely gets songwriting and being in a music-writing situation. He wrote “Terryfold,” that song with Chaos Chaos that was in Season 3. He wrote all the lyrics and everything for that. They had this instrumental and he improvised lyrics and stuff over it, and then they added the background vocals to match him. He definitely has a very good sensibility for music. Which makes him really great and fun to work with from my point of view.

rick-and-morty-soundtrack-package
Image via Sub Pop Records

Yeah, it sounds like it's the perfect collaboration for a composer, for a show like this.

ELDER: Totally, totally.

So you have songs like “Goodbye Moonmen,” which are full fledged songs, but then you hear these tiny snippets of songs, like “I've Got a Doo Doo in My Butt.” Do you know when it's gonna be a full song? Are there a bunch of extended versions of songs that exist somewhere, because there's these little ditties everywhere.

ELDER: Yeah, well so there are several extended versions of songs on this upcoming soundtrack release, which is being put out by Sub Pop, and Doo Doo Butt or “Fathers and Daughters” I believe it's called is one of the songs that's gonna be on there in its full glory.

Awesome.

ELDER: That song is so funny. The story behind that. So, they knew they wanted a touching father-daughter Cat Stevens-y Harry Nelson kind of a folky vibe there, right? But they didn't have any lyrics for me yet because this was very last minute. I think I wrote this the week before we mixed it. It was really close to being done. So close to being done that when I sent it to Dan to do vocals for it, it was like the night before we were gonna be done, and he was supposed to be doing something else I think and he just powered through those lyrics as quickly as possible, and I had put a scratch track of vocals on there for him to be inspired by, and I just sang, "Doo Doo Doo, Doo Doo Doo," just as a whole placeholder. I could have sang any syllable, but he took the doo doo doo and ran with it, and so that's why that song has a lot of doo doo in it.

That's definitely one of my favorite songs, and the whole scene opens with Rick singing doo doo on the guitar. It's kind of layered in there. I have to ask about “Get Schwifty,” which is the most iconic song from the show. What's the origin for that song, and what was the collaboration process like for that whole episode? Because, it's so music heavy. You also have to craft music for these other alien worlds.

ELDER: Yeah, yeah. That episode was really fun, really inspiring. “Get Schwifty” and “Raised Up”, actually the episode was written around those songs. They already existed from a Flash game that Adult Swim put out called Rick and Morty's Rushed Licensed Adventure. It was during Season One, and there was this whole Easter egg where you're controlling Morty and you go—it was like a point and click adventure game, and you go into Summer's closet and you find her iPod, and there are three songs on her iPod, all of which make an appearance in Season 3, but two are “Get Schwifty” and “Raised Up.” I didn't work on that game, so those songs were stock music with Justin rapping and singing over them and everyone loved those songs so much. They were so funny. They were like, "Let's write a whole episode around it," and then when it came time to make the episode, it just was stupid to try to change the music since everyone loved it so much. The team's like, "Let's just keep what everyone loved," so I actually didn’t do too much on those original “Get Schwifty” and “Raised Up” from the episode. However, for the soundtrack I've remixed them and fluffed them up, for the soundtrack release.

Oh, awesome.

ELDER: The ones on the soundtrack are different dimension versions of the songs.

That's funny. How did you go about composing the music for the other contending planets in that episode?

rick-and-morty-get-schwifty
Image via Adult Swim

ELDER: I drew a lot of inspiration from world music, actually. There's a lot of cool instruments all over the world that I would have to guess, I don't know for sure, but that a lot of Rick and Morty viewers are unfamiliar with. Sounds that to our Western ears sound almost alien, and so I have a bunch of recordings of instruments like that and I just dug in and was like, "What sounds cool, what sounds weird?" For the alien band that was playing, they immediately get disqualified because they're bad, so the music also can't be that good. The joke is funny if they're like, "This is the best they had to offer? They're in the finals of this competition." So, I wanted it to be cheesy and corny also, so I started with a bed of cool, ethnic and world instruments, and then I added some weird synthesizer sounds to give it a sci-fi kind of, "Oh, this could be from an alien planet," vibe.

That sounds really fun.

ELDER: That one was really fun.

You kind of have a composer’s dream job, getting to work within so many different genres and avenues with this one show.

ELDER: Yeah, I mean definitely. I got really lucky with this show. As television composers, we never get to actually pick the shows that we work on, usually. We try to work on as much as we can, so to get a show that is not only fun to work on, but also that I would just simply love to watch. Even if I didn't work on it, I would be a huge fan of the show, is really, really, really lucky. Really inspiring and really lucky.

One of the interesting things about Rick and Morty is that it's not a show that's filled with wall-to-wall music. There are a lot of scenes that play out without any music at all. What's the process like of deciding which scenes need score and which scenes can play out on their own?

ELDER: Dan is a big fan of leaving a lot of space for the comedy, and I am too. He and I are on the same page there. In fact, one of the common notes I get on my scores is, "There doesn't need to be music here," which is fine by me. I love to leave space for the comedy. I think, especially when just people are talking to each other. I don't need to help that. It's there. It works. So my goal is to tell the story with my music, and that is when things are happening or the tone needs to be tense, but when it's just Beth and Jerry talking in Jerry's study, I don't need music for that unless it's an emotional moment or something, then maybe it could use a little bit of help. I definitely think of myself as a supporting character and not someone who's trying to take center stage all the time.

You mentioned the emotional moments, this is a show that does get very emotional, and very raw, and a lot of those moments, that's where the score really comes in and I think it helps that there's not a ton of score in the episodes, because you really feel it in those moments. What's it like working on a more dramatic scene? Is there one in particular that was pretty tough to nail down?

rick-and-morty-pilot
Image via Adult Swim

ELDER: You know, I would say it took a while to nail down the iconic “We exist on purpose, come watch TV” speech from Morty, there is music there. It's very subtle. It's definitely emotional, simple, and to find the right tone for that, especially that speech because the camera is pushing in on Morty, it's definitely a moment where, emotionally, we're connecting with Morty, this incredible trauma he's just been through and how he's connecting with his sister who, up until then, we were led to believe they did not care for each other. So, it also needs to be serious. It's not a funny moment, so it definitely took a while to nail down the tone for that, but once I did, that cue actually I've used in other places. I’ve moved it around and changed it and edited it, but that same sort of idea I've used in other places. When the show pauses and gets serious, the part where Bird Person is telling Morty that wubba lubba dub dub means I am in great pain is a good example. Scenes like that, where we do take a step outside and things are getting serious are when I use that music. That scene is what started it all.

Would you say that's the most challenging scene you've worked on overall, or is there another one that kind of stands out?

ELDER: The most challenging scene, believe it or not, the one that had the most revisions and the most back and forth with Justin was in the pilot, and it's the scene where Morty is dreaming about math and Jessica, and touching Jessica's boobs, and that scene was really hard to nail down the tone of because I think Dan's—this is a great case where Dan was like, "It needs to be as simple as possible," and I was trying to get a little too fancy, I think, and the more and more I simplified my approach, the more and more we got close to what he was looking for. Believe it or not, that scene actually took the most revisions, and I think I learned a lot about working with Dan while working on that scene, and I've used that knowledge going forward. I know when I get to a scene where it's like, "Okay, I can't try to say too much here."

How early on in an episode's production do you come in, and what are those initial conversations like for each episode?

ELDER:I get an animatic for the episode, which is just sort of like a really well done, but line drawings. Like a slideshow of line drawings that are timed to the audio, the radio play they call it. So I get the animatic, and it's usually about three to six months before we finish the episode, so I have a lot of time, actually, to look at the animatic, decide where there should be music, maybe I'll have a conversation with Justin and Dan about certain spots where I'm unsure about whether there should be music, but normally I just go for it, and then I send them the full pass of my first pass of music. They send back notes, and I go from there. So, my starting point is when they have an animatic. And then usually it's just a matter of tightening it up for the final animation.

Well, and this is also a show that it traverses a lot of genres from thriller to apocalypse film to monster movie. Is it fun to work within all these different genres from episode to episode?

pickle-rick-rick-and-morty
Image via Adult Swim

ELDER: Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Season Three, I hope this is a sign of things to come at least for me creatively, “Pickle Rick” and “Ricklantis Mix Up” were both episodes where I took a totally different approach, musically, than I normally would. “Pickle Rick” is more modern sci-fi. It's not even really that sci-fi-y, right? It's like Die Hard or something. It's like an action movie. So, for that one I got to do more of a modern action movie approach, and then for “Ricklantis Mix Up,” that one I created a whole new sound of show that was based on entirely different melodies and entirely different instrumentations, so that one was almost like working on the pilot. It was like a whole new thing, musically, and that was really fun. That one I also got to give a lot of space to stuff, which is always fun, too, finding those really choice moments to bring the music in is really fun for me.

That episode is also super dark.

ELDER: It's really dark, yeah. It's really dark. When I saw the animatic for that episode, it's a slide show of line drawings, I said, "They could air this, it's that good," and it doesn't even need that much music. There are a couple really important scenes where music does definitely help, and there's the Joe Walsh “In the City,” which is great for that opening title.

I mean each season of the show is fantastic but it feels like Season Three just hit an entirely new bar in terms of what's possible for the show.

ELDER: I agree, I agree, and I'm so excited to see what they come up with in the new episodes that they're working on.

Have you gotten any idea of what's to come with Season Four yet? Have you started any work on it?

ELDER: I can't say anything because I don't have any idea, actually.

Okay, that's fair.

ELDER: I haven't heard anything. I work in my own space, because I make too much noise to be in an office with people, so I'm not hanging around, seeing what they're doing every day.

Yeah, that's fair. This soundtrack is really cool. How did this come together, and what can you tease people about what's on it and what fans can find on the soundtrack?

ELDER: Yeah, yeah. Adult Swim and I have been talking about working on a soundtrack after Season Three, because we wanted to do something in between the seasons, and when they brought Sub Pop on board it was a really good fit. The people who are at Sub Pop are big fans of the show, and there's a lot of support from them to put this together, and at that point it was just like, "Okay, let's figure out what we want to make longer and more interesting.” Like, "Goodbye Moonmen, the full song, that can go on there great." So, I get a lot of people emailing me and asking me for a couple of beats that are some of the more emotional ones. In particular, there's music in Season One when Jerry is saying goodbye to Doofus Rick that's emotional, that people always ask me about, and so I turned that into a full song.

rick-and-morty-auto-erotic-assimilation
Image via Adult Swim

The music when Rick is reading Unity's letter in the episode where he's with Unity is another emotional track that I get a lot of questions about. Someone asked me once if they could get a copy of it to use to propose to their fiancé, so I've made a full version of that song as well, and then there's the scene from “Ricklantis Mix Up,” the Tales from the Citadel scene that I expanded out into a full song as well. African Dream Pop is now a full song. There's a lot of cool music cues that people seem to react positively to that I turned into a full song. And then because we did it with Sub Pop, there's a couple Sub Pop artists that did songs inspired by the show. clipping. did a song on there that's great, and Chad Vangaalen has a song on there. They're both really cool songs that are totally new, unreleased, inspired by Rick and Morty, which is very cool.

So, it sounds like there's a lot of new music on here.

ELDER: There is, yeah. There is. I would say run ime wise it's probably half stuff people haven't heard yet. I’m pretty excited about it.

Is there one track in particular that's particularly different than what people may remember hearing on the show that you're excited for them to check out?

ELDER: Well, yeah. So the “Get Schwifty” and “Raised Up,” like I said, they're alternate universe versions of the songs. It still sounds like “Get Schwifty” and “Raised Up,” but it's a different beat and a different vibe to them, which I hope people like, but tough to beat those original songs. We'll see what people think, but I'm excited for those two.

I also really enjoy the fact that the final song on the track list is Human Music. It just goes out with Human Music, at least from what it looks like.

ELDER: Yeah, I was saying to Tony at Sub Pop, I said, "You know, if this was the 90s, this would be like an unlisted track on the CD."

Yeah, it would.

ELDER: Or it'd be like in the negative time. Remember how they used to have songs you could scan backwards from song one and find a song?

Yeah, yeah.

ELDER: It would be one of those things but digital releases and all, they all have to be labeled.

Yeah, I don't know if people still do that anymore, but yeah. A track that has a run time of 21 minutes and it's like, "What?" And it's just a lot of dead space until you get to the actual track again.

rick-and-morty-the-rickchurian-mortydate
Image via Adult Swim

ELDER: Right, oh yeah, that would've been great, too. Something like that, yeah. Totally. That's what it would've been.

You're also performing at the Adult Swim Music Festival. Are you excited to get to play some of these ridiculous songs live?

ELDER: So excited. As I was saying earlier, my job oftentimes is just to be behind what's going on, stand back from what's going on, and in this case I get to be up front and we're gonna do this whole 370piece orchestra. We're gonna have a bunch of guest artists come out and do some of the songs that people love, and the orchestras play on everything and they're gonna play to an episode of the show live, which is very, very exciting. We've been working hard on that and it's gonna sound amazing. I think people are gonna be blown away, and in this festival which is full of really great artists, Neko Case, Run the Jewels and stuff, so we're towards the end of the roster and it's gonna be something completely different than any of the other acts because all of a sudden there's gonna be this orchestra on stage. It'll be fun.

That's awesome. Outside of Rick and Morty, is there anything else you're working on that you want to tease people about, or stuff you're excited about?

ELDER: Yeah, I co-compose the series Boss Baby: Back in Business on Netflix with my co-composer Ben Bromfield. I believe the second season drop date is soon. I always say adults actually would really like the show. I know it's definitely a kids show, but the sense of humor is very early Simpsons, really fun, really irreverent and fast. Very quick jokes. I think it’s really funny.

ryan-elder-image-rick-and-morty
Photo by Temma Hankin for Adult Swim and Subpop