The Final of Us has three most important characters: Ellie, Joel and Gustavo Santaolalla’s music

The Final of Us is a narrative about stress – the strain between love and loss, violence and intimacy, defending and destroying, life and dying. It’s a examine of how impossibly delicate life is, but additionally the terrifying stubbornness of our will to outlive. As its composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and soundtrack that stress, a mediator between the sport’s warring themes. His mission was to attain music for a online game that was doing one thing totally different, and actually had one thing to say.

Santaolalla tells me that when he was a baby in rural Argentina, one in every of his tutors stop on him after just some classes, telling his mother and father “there may be nothing I can train him”. His profession correct started in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialised in fusing Latin-American folks with rock. Later, after main a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he started putting out on his personal, releasing solo albums and composing for TV exhibits, adverts and, finally, movies (most notably Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorbike Diaries).

In 2006 and 2007, he received Oscars for his work on Brokeback Mountain and Babel respectively. Now an enormous identify in Hollywood, he was headhunted by loads of TV and movie administrators and producers within the years afterwards – and a few sport builders, too.

“After profitable the Oscar, I used to be approached by a number of firms to make music for video video games,” Santaolalla remembers. “One firm in Europe needed me to work on a western online game that might have been an enormous venture – each financially and by way of visibility and what it may signify. But it surely was extra of the identical, you recognize? I needed to do one thing that linked what you do within the video games with the guts – extra than simply the gymnastics, the taking pictures, the preventing, the surviving.”

Santaolalla was approached by Naughty Canine to work on The Final of Us originally of the sport’s growth, round 2009. It’s a few younger, orphaned lady named Ellie and a person referred to as Joel who continues to be mourning the lack of his daughter. Towards the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, the 2 of them slowly open up to one another and present their vulnerabilities, a sophisticated hedgehog’s dilemma of a relationship wherein the 2 protagonists harm one another extra the nearer they get.

It was excellent for Santaolalla. Right here, he may lend his soulful Argentinian-inspired music to one thing that wasn’t a western, infusing the city wastes of Boston, Massachusetts, with a flavour of Americana that sounds dreamily acquainted, but nonetheless distinct from its US counterparts. Even the way in which he performs guitar, the pads of his fingers audibly scuffing and scratching on the strings, is nicely suited to the understated humanity of the sport.

The most important victory within the soundtrack is the hypnotic interaction between the Bolivian guitar – the ronroco, a signature instrument for Santaolalla – and a Fender VI, a six-string bass guitar from the 60s that’s one octave decrease than a guitar, barely totally different from most trendy basses. Hearken to any music on the soundtrack and you’ll hear a delicate dialog between these two devices: a quiet however incessant backwards and forwards, typically in settlement, and typically dissenting.

This explicit bass, well-known for its presence on Beatles and Cream data, is Joel’s voice. And the ronroco – extra delicate, however no much less insistent – is Ellie’s. “That six-string bass, completely, is the masculine facet of the story,” Santaolalla tells me. “And the ronroco, the delicate facet of the music, is Ellie’s facet of the story. It was not one thing I knew I used to be doing once I wrote the music, however listening to it again, I may see so clearly.

“After which the banjo and the electrical guitar, they play the position within the centre, between these two extremes. Because the story opened in Half II, and extra characters and complexities began to look, the music wanted extra timbre – I couldn’t stick with this pairing I had within the first sport.”

All the pieces Santaolalla does, he tells me, “is instinctual”. He spontaneously launched a banjo for Abby’s theme in The Final of Us Half II, and it was an ideal match. He’s not a pure banjo participant, so the usage of the instrument in his rating feels unfamiliar to the ear – looking, reflective, pensive. “I obtained away from bed sooner or later, I picked up the banjo and it got here out of me,” he laughs. “A number of the character themes are nearly magical in the way in which they occur. They arrive once I’m probably not considering in any respect. I seize the instrument, and it’s like someone else is enjoying.”

The 72-year-old feels his method round his scores along with his instinct, understanding that the emotional response we get as listeners comes each “from what you do hear and what you don’t hear”. That’s one motive The Final of Us rating stands out: in video games music, there’s plenty of maximalism – hovering bombast, orchestral highs, depth. The Final of Us is a world away from that, extra introspective and quiet, making as a lot of an announcement with the absence of music than with its melodies. The HBO TV sequence, which he additionally scored, follows the identical precept.

“I really like the usage of silence,” enthuses Santaolalla. “I like it. I really like the house that silence provides, as a result of that’s what provides resonance to the notes that you simply mess around it.” Out of nowhere, he begins speaking about parkour – a current new curiosity of his, piqued by a bunch of British athletes referred to as Storror.

“I’ve linked the jumps in parkour with the silence in my music. I discover it so essential,” he says. “The runners measure how they’re going to leap, they usually run, after which they measure once more earlier than they leap, proper? They measure that leap they usually determine what number of steps they’re going to take earlier than they put their ft down and leap. That’s like selecting the word you play earlier than you let it go silent. Earlier than you leap. Then you definitely select the word you’re going to play if you land. And that word makes the silence a triumph. You’re not going to fall. You’re going to be in that second of house, of silence, and if you land, every part is related.”

Between this interview, a masterclass he taught and a efficiency as a part of the Recreation Music competition live performance in London’s Southbank Centre, I spent a good period of time with Santaolalla. The best way his mind works, and the way in which he connects ideas with observe, is inspiring. When he performed Ando Rodando – a observe from his 1982 album Santaolalla, which these days he dedicates to Joel for its “tough, rock-y” character – the room was surprised into silence. That Santaolalla can discover traces of The Final of Us’s characters within the depths of his again catalogue, and the way in which he has carried them forwards with him into his performances, exhibits his deep understanding and affection for Naughty Canine’s opus.