Actor switches roles, now scoring series
Dev Hynes went from being in “We Are Who We Are” to writing the music
There is a moment at the beginning of Luca Guadagnino’s new HBO series, “We Are Who We Are,” when one of the main characters, Caitlin, stands poised atop a tower on an American army base in Italy, deciding whether to jump. Her friends have commandeered the training zip line attached to the tower, and, trussed like turkeys, they’ve already made the leap.
As Caitlin approaches the ledge, the surrounding sounds fade away, and a scintillating piano progression emerges from the quiet. There’s something hovering beneath the surface in that moment — a buildup of potential energy, like a rubber band pulled taut.
The melody magnifies this tension, and suddenly, the music intensifies. A heavier synth sound rises and crests: Caitlin steps forward and disappears into the darkness.
The musician behind Guadagnino’s evocative score is the composer Devonté Hynes, perhaps best known by his most recent alias, Blood Orange, a genre- defying solo musical project that fuses R& B beats with gauzy synth overlays.
But Hynes is also a classically trained musician who has performed alongside Philip Glass at Carnegie Hall. As a composer, he has already scored a couple of films — “Palo Alto,” from 2014, and “Queen & Slim” from last year — but “We Are Who We Are” is his first time doing it for television.
When Guadagnino first contacted Hynes, however, it wasn’t about the score: He had decided he wanted to write a Blood Orange concert into the show. Hynes was already a fan of the Italian director’s work ( he had seen “I Am Love,” from 2010, twice in one week, and he was similarly smitten by “Call Me by Your Name”), so he quickly agreed and traveled to Bologna, where he and Guadagnino spent a week filming and discussing music.
By that point, Guadagnino had already planned out an entire soundtrack. But after watching the show in its entirety, Guadagnino realized that there were some scenes without music — like the one at the tower — that needed more, he said in a Zoom interview last month. He asked Hynes if he would create “a sort of organic addendum” to the soundtrack.
“Dev was the only composer I wanted to create music for the show,” Guadagnino said. “I liked the ‘ eclec- ticity’ of Dev. I feel seen by him. It’s not normal or immediate that people are eager to see the other, but I feel that he has that quality.”
On a sweltering day last month in Washington Square Park, in Manhattan, Hynes told me that he was inspired by artists who could “freeze moments and explore all of the corners of a situation.” Hynes excels at composing songs that hold the listener suspended in time, a quality
Musician and composer Dev Hynes, widely known as Blood Orange, at Tompkins Square Park in New York in June 2016.
that makes his music a fitting companion to a show exploring youth in all its bittersweet transience.
When we met, I told Hynes that “We Are Who We Are” had made me feel nostalgic for the period of adolescence when you burn so hot and so bright. “Emotions are hyper realized when you’re younger; it’s like life or death,” he remarked. “You’re devastated and then you’re exhilarated. Heightening those emotions is something I wanted to play with.”
Over the course of several hours, Hynes spoke about his collaboration with Guadagnino, his unusual scoring process, and his cameo on the show. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
A: With this show, that’s definitely what I was doing. It was a rare treat. Though honestly, nearly everything I make is selfishly for my own enjoyment. I’m always trying to put a feeling across without naming the feeling. I’m always trying to evoke something a bit more complex.
I think the moments when we’re feeling purely one emotion are extremely rare; there are usually a lot of things happening, which is something I try to convey in my work.