MAIN THEME: THE POWER OF POWER

7/17/08

This track will probably play during the intro movie. It weaves together Ty's theme, the love theme and the leitmotif for Mia, along with a couple of other tracks. Later I'll work in Agent Kim's theme.

On a side note (No pun intended... or was it?), the marimba is surprisingly tricky to play. Mad props to Maurice White.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

6/30/08

This is the music for the Rio Vista area in Episode 2... so far. I goofed at one point on the harpsichord track and I'll have to do a new take later.

Rio Vista is a town in Northern California, along the Sacramento River Delta. In Energy Crisis, both the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers flooded in the Spring of '65 (2065, that is), effectively submerging the nearby city of Sacramento. The area is now largely deserted and pastoral, the two rivers highly toxic.

Keeping in that theme, this track is pretty low-key. I got the idea for the harpsichord/english horn combo from Final Fantasy VII.

STUDYING

9/15/09

Here's another one from Study Date. This plays while Dax is at Gabrielle's host family's house.

It's not really a song as much as a collection of songs strung together. There are distinct musical phrases throughout, which represent the player's situation under different circumstances and intensities. For example, the first phrase is the default track, and as Dax tries more gimmicks with Gabrielle, the more intense things get. Likewise, slow things down, music gets less intense.

PORT ANGELES

7/12/08

This plays during the cutscene when Ty, Sterling and Mia arrive in Port Angeles, Washington, towards the end of Episode 3.

The Pacific Northwest is speculated to only become rainier as the Earth's temperature rises. I tried to get the feeling in this piece of looking out the window on a cold, rainy, hopelessly miserable day. But not too miserable -- the sun shines a little at the end. And likewise, Port Angeles means the gang is just a stone's throw away from the glamourous and glitzy Vancouver -- the New Hollywood.

THAT STOLEN CAR

7/5/08

This is the theme for whenever the LAPD catch up to Ty and company throughout the course of the game.

I'm of the belief that any game worth its salt needs a badass theme for the villians. This track could best be described as a combination of mid-70s funk and the boss theme "Raid" from Final Fantasy X. I cheated with the brass -- they're canned loops from GarageBand. I try not to use them as a rule, but it's tough to get a brass software instrument to sound like the real thing. I played a little with sound design on this one too. I tried to capture the feeling of a powerful force on the march.

POWER STATION

7/5/08

A nice little bit of ambience for the Mid-Wilshire power plant in Episode One. This is Ty's first destination in Energy Crisis, and where we learn about the switchgrass embargo up north.

SHOWDOWN AT BATTERY POINT

7/10/08

This hyper little number plays during the tense confrontation with the police at Battery Point Lighthouse, in the climax of Episode 2. Battery Point is located in Crescent City, California -- a town half underwater in 2138, thanks to an onslaught of tsunami.

This is essentially a remix of That Stolen Car. I looked to Motoi Sakuraba's soundtrack work in Star Ocean: The Second Story for inspiration.

SLEEPING ON THE COUCH

7/1/08

**SPOILER ALERT**

This is the music for the end of Episode 4. Ty is having a hard time sleeping -- probably because Shannon and Leah are making out in her bedroom. Not fun.

I had the "sad" music tracks from Chrono Cross in mind while I was composing this.

TIME PASSES

8/17/09

This is for a different game I'm working on, temporarily titled Study Date. I was listening to my great aunt's grandfather clock one evening while on vacation recently, unable to sleep. Suddenly, this melody popped into my head. I sat right down on Logic the moment I came home and tossed this off in two days. Not bad.

In the context of the game, this obvously plays during a temporal transition. This is towards the end, as we see Dax and Gabrielle enlisting the help of the Lands of Lore guild for trigonometry tutoring.