‘Locke & Key’ Composer Torin Borrowdale Reveals The Hidden Notes of His Netflix Score

When you first boot up Netflix’s comic book based dark fantasy series Locke & Key, you’re greeted by the whimsical credits, images of woodcut keys and skulls dancing across the screen next to the names of the producers and stars of the series. And in the background, perfectly setting the tone for the show, is Torin Borrowdale’s main theme, a musical riff that pops up constantly throughout the ten episodes of Season 1.

“There’s such a scope to the show that I didn’t want to try to do everything with the main titles,” Borrowdale told Decider over the phone. “I just wanted to capture one feeling and that was, ‘What would it be like to explore this house for the first time?'”

Based on the comics by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key takes place mostly in Keyhouse, a mysterious mansion littered with hidden, magical keys, each with its own power and purpose. Enter the Locke family — kids Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones), and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) and mom Nina (Darby Stanchfield) — who grapple with the keys while battling an evil entity named Dodge (Laysla de Oliveira), who might have a connection the family’s slain patriarch, Rendell (Bill Heck).

Though Netflix hasn’t released numbers yet — or announced a Season 2, though the staff has already started writing scripts — the series is clearly a hit, hanging in the streaming service’s Top 10 for over a month, and dominating binge lists like TV Time. And good news for fans of Borrowdale’s score: as of today, Locke & Key (Music from the Netflix Original Series) is finally available on Spotify, iTunes or wherever you listen to musical scores.

To celebrate this event, we chatted with Borrowdale about his initial inspiration for the score, why some characters have themes (and some don’t), and some of the — sorry — key moments you might want to look out for on a second, or third binge of the series.

Decider: Basic question to start, at what point in the production did you join Locke & Key?

Torin Borrowdale: I got the call right when they started editing the first couple episodes. So once I signed on, they basically put me to work right away… I started writing themes and they put them in the show… It was really helpful because they were doing the first four episodes kind of at the same time, so if there was a scene that was important in episode 4, I could write it and then essentially reference it earlier on so that it would seem that I built to that scene.

What did you start with, then? Was there an initial germ of an idea, a theme that you started with that things grew out of?

With the main theme, actually… That was the demo I submitted with the main titles at the beginning of the show. I wanted it to seem like there was magic just jumping off the walls. There’s such a scope to the show that I didn’t want to try to do everything with the main titles, I just wanted to capture one feeling and that was, “What would it be like to explore this house for the first time?” And if there were all these magical keys, you know infinite possibilities… I just imagined that in my head and came up with this trilly idea on the piano, started small and saw where it could go. Something about that caught the producers ears, and they thought it fit the tone of the show.

The main theme really does a nice job of setting up the series — and differentiating it from the comics, which are a little darker, a little more violent.

When I wrote the theme, I hadn’t read anything about [the seres]. I had two sentences on what the show was about, it was meant to be orchestral and and magical. I was actually pretty ignorant about the comic book, I’ll admit, and one of the reasons I purposefully haven’t read them still is, I wanted to make sure that I was scoring the Netflix version of Locke & Key since there’s been so many adaptations and versions of it… I wanted to make sure that I was scoring the version that we were actually making. So in terms of tone it just came from those couple sentences I got to write the demo from, and then once I saw the show it really felt right… The first five episodes are kind of light-hearted, or at least more light-hearted than the last five, where things get a more serious. Once there’s a murder in episode 5, things change from there and the score gets a bit darker.

So you’ve written this whole theme, it plays in the first episode, sets up the show perfectly… And you get to the second episode and it’s five seconds long, because of the nature of Netflix. How do you tackle that?

Obviously I’d love to have the main theme play its full version every episode, but I’ve also binged watched shows, and you skip the main titles… So I can understand why they would shorten. But what was great about the theme was we were able to put it in certain scenes, so when Bode’s skating around the house, putting bubblegum in the locks and things like that, it was fun to use it actually in the score which happens less frequently, where you can actually use the main theme in the context of the show. So there is a compromise, I suppose.

You’ve composed for movies before, and some shorts, but scoring 10 episodes of a TV show must be a different level of difficulty…

Yeah, I mean it was a challenge. I tallied the number of minutes we wrote and recorded for it, and it’s four and a half hours of music; which, looking back on it, I can’t believe we did it in, I’m not sure the exact timeframe, but a number of months. The challenge was meeting these deadlines and writing just the enormous amount of music. But it was really a good experience because I’ve never been given the opportunity to write this much music or this breadth of music before, and it was a nice surprise that I was able to do it, and was given the opportunity by Netflix to do so.

Once you laid down that title theme, did you tackle individual themes for each member of the Locke family? Did you have a theme for Dodge? Or was it more scoring the plot as it came, versus the individual characters?

I had themes for the characters that needed them dramatically. So just because they’re an important character doesn’t mean I wrote a theme for everyone. For instance Dodge, she does have a theme you hear at the end of episode 1 when she meets Sam, and you hear the full version of it again in episode 7; and 8, you hear a bit of it as well. As a villain, she needed this theme… She’s really mean and angry, but she’s also beautiful and seductive, and behind both of those things she’s actually really manipulative. So I used the theme to characterize all that when she’s at her peak. The theme I wrote for her used a solo cello in a low register, on the cello’s lowest string, and it’s just so gritty and dark and also really beautiful down there. The theme is played impossibly fast, and the crescendo is just really beautiful, it’s percussion and large cinematic chords. I tried to capture all those elements into one theme for Dodge, since she’s such an important character.

Other characters like Kinsey and Tyler. who are equally important as they are the protagonists, they actually don’t have their own themes because generally the scenes they were in didn’t have as much underscoring. So Kinsey, for example, since she’s stricken by fear in the first three episodes, we basically didn’t have music for her; and once she eradicates her fear, that’s when her relationship with Scot really starts to blossom. So episode 4 is when you hear Scot and Kinsey’s theme fully realized; and really it was their relationship that played more of a dramatic role in the music than just Kinsey herself. I had to go through each character and figure out who was important, and who wasn’t.

I wanted to talk about two times the score stood out… You have this adventure, soaring music that happens when Bode first uses the Ghost Key; and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have the Savinis escaping from the Drowning Caves, which obviously is very tense anway but the score only makes it tenser.

Okay, yeah the ghost Bode sequence was probably the most fun I had writing on the whole series. I mean flying music for a composer like that, that’s my dream… [You] just tap into what would it be like to fly for the first time and have fun with it, really lean into the magical aspect of it, the fun-ness of it. That features Bode’s theme, which you hear plenty of times previously in earlier episodes. And that was the most soaring version of it, so it was really fun to have one theme for the character and then use it in different ways.

For the cave sequence, I really tapped back into what I was feeling when I was reading the script, because… Once you’ve sat down to score some scenes, the emotional impact isn’t there. So for a sequence like that I went back to how I first read the story; you really don’t know what’s gonna happen or if everyone’s gonna survive. So you know there is a possibility someone could die and, and you really feel that. Watching the sequence back for the first time, visual effects are completed, the sound — because they filmed in an actual cave — it didn’t sound good, it just didn’t feel right, so I tapped back into how I felt when I read it… That sense of urgency and the rising tide.

Keeping with the caves, was there a specific theme you crafted for the Black Door?

Yes, there was a Black Door theme. It’s tied with the Omega Key… It does look very ominous, and I wanted to give it this larger-than-life adventure theme that captured that. That’s one where you do just hear it every time, every time it’s being mentioned or on screen. You get the full effect of it when they finally open the door, and that’s the largest that theme can be. That’s just fun music to write, big orchestral music with lots of notes.

Any other Easter eggs, or literal notes that people should keep their ears out for on a potential second watch?

The five notes of the main theme, I hid that pretty much anywhere I could in the score where they’re talking about a key, Keyhouse, or something like that. Even in the very first scene of the show, right after the main titles… And then when you see Keyhouse for the first time there’s this soaring cello line that plays the theme.  When Duncan’s giving the tour of the house, the bass line of that cue is actually the main theme, so the audience is hearing it over and over again, they just don’t quite realize it. The Lockes that are touring this house for the first time, they don’t realize that the magic is literally all around them… They just don’t know to look for it. So hopefully people can listen for that sort of thing the second time around.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix