How Leaving Neverland and Surviving R. Kelly composers approached scoring sexual misconduct documentaries

Variety

“The scoring approach to Leaving Neverland was to imagine a walk through a beautiful and magical forest,” says composer Chad Hobson, who scored the HBO documentary. “But as you travel deeper into the forest it becomes darker, more distorted, the limbs of the trees becoming more twisted and sinister. … It needed to sound rich and filmic, fairy-tale like.” Surviving R. Kelly composer Nathan Matthew David, meanwhile, says he opted to focus his music on the women accusers, “something that could be melancholic and dark, for the tragedy they went through, but also could be uplifting and sometimes triumphant.”