Ramin Djawadi talks about Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience and Season 8

Game of Thrones is such a successful show because of a variety of reasons, and one of the reasons is how good the music on the show is. The credit goes to the music composer, Ramin Djawadi, who now runs the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience. In a recent interview with Watchers on the Wall, he discussed working on the concert, and the Season 8 music. Read on!

Speaking of his process of working on music for the show, Ramin said:

“I generally like to see as much story as possible, so I can really get a good idea. Sometimes, in the past, I’ve started writing based on a conversation with [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]. But overall, I really like to see things in front of me and have a clear understanding of the full storyline. In this particular case, people keep asking me ‘How would you…?’ ‘Musically, what are you planning to do…?’ And it’s hard for me to say anything, especially, with Game of Thrones, it’s a show that’s known for its surprises and for things that happen, and for me musically, I just literally have to sit and wait and see what comes my way.”

He then spoke about how he decides whether to introduce a new theme for a character or just improvise the old one:

“[W]e kind of take it season by season, and see where the character develops…[S]o, with Daenerys for example, I take her theme and combine it with the dragons theme as the dragons get more powerful. I get to expand that thematically, and then sometimes we get to a point where we go, you know what? We need a new theme, so for example last year, for Jon and Daenerys, we have that big ‘love’ scene, and then we establish a new theme…It’s continuing existing themes and then adding new things on top. Same with the White Walkers last year. It was such a big part of it, so we actually created a new theme. For the Night King, with the whole Wall coming down, we just felt like there needed to be more there than the preexisting White Walker music.”

Speaking of what has changed in this edition of the concert and how much of it is because of audience reaction:

“There are certain pieces that we definitely kept in the show, like ‘Light of the Seven,’ ‘Battle of the Bastards,’ these are definitely things that we didn’t wanna touch. Also, because I added season 7, there were definitely some things I had to move around or list, and it wasn’t easy, because if it was up to me, I would probably do a 6 hour concert. I have so much more I want to perform and I want to play and the show has just so many great moments and it’s just tough to condense it down to a 2 ½ hour show. But I guess what’s fun about it is we did one version last year and now automatically with updating the stage, and updating the music, it kind of has become business – there is a lot of familiar stuff from last year but there are a lot of new things in there, and I think it’s good.”

Finally, speaking of working on Season 8, Ramin said:

“To be honest I haven’t even started yet. I don’t know when I will start. I don’t have a schedule for it yet, or anything. I haven’t seen anything yet, I don’t know anything, I’m just as excited and curious as everybody else.

I mean this being the last season, I’m dying to know what’s happening and what it needs from me musically, and what am I gonna write for this final season – I can’t wait.”

Well, we couldn’t be more excited! What about you guys? Talk to us in the comments, down below!