Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael A. Levine.
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
As a kid, I was a geek who wrote stories and songs and played the violin. When I was 16 and a college freshman at McGill, a friend covered a song I wrote for a record she was making. Around then, I joined a rock band and wrote my first rock opera. Nonetheless, although I felt most like “me” playing and writing music, it didn’t seem like a practical life course.
I changed schools and became a computer science major. Which I enjoyed, too. But music kept calling. I tried to change majors. No luck. (“Young man, the University of Wisconsin is no place for a ‘pop’ musician.”) So, I changed schools again, this time Berklee.
Berklee was ideal for me. Even things that should have been a disaster worked in my favor. i.e., they had no string department then. So, instead of violin lessons, I got improv lessons. With Pat Metheny. While there I wrote a rock opera called “Worlds” that won the school composition award and was premiered at the brand new Berklee Performance Center.
After school, I went to NYC. And struggled. I did every kind of gig you can imagine, playing music on the street, accompanying dance classes, writing music for dancers, playing fiddle in a country western band, and then an Irish band. All while trying to get my original rock band off the ground.
The band dissolved, and I had to borrow money from my dad to pay the rent. I told him I was thinking of going back to school to get my degree in computer science. This is the moment when a parent is supposed to say, “Thank God, you’ve come to your senses!” Instead, he asked, “But don’t you love music?” I said, of course, but I was obviously terrible at the business part. He replied, “I think you’re being short-sighted. You work hard, you’re good at what you do, people enjoy it. Just be patient – it will all work out.” That conversation changed my life.
Within three years, I had become a regular session player – as a keyboardist, which is rather amusing – and started to write jingles. I got hired by the head of music at an ad agency who asked if I was the same Michael Levine who wrote “Worlds.” Stunned, I asked how he knew of it. He told me he was the manager of the Berklee Performance Center when it premiered. He really wanted to hire me, but all he had at the moment was a “throwaway” job. The agency had a campaign already prepped for the client with famous pop stars singing it, but you can’t give the client just one choice. So, they needed me to write an alternative with a minuscule demo budget. There are many more amusing chapters to that story, but the end result was that, having been given lyrics from a young agency copywriter, in the elevator on the way from the 3rd to the 1st floor, I composed the KitKat Gimme A Break jingle, still used to this day.
After a dozen years or so of writing music for commercials, I decided I wanted a bigger canvas. So, I moved to L.A. to score films and TV. And got nowhere. Then, one day, a young woman named Louise, who had heard me play, offered to introduce me to film composer Harry-Gregson Williams, for whom she babysat. It being L.A., of course, that didn’t happen. But a few weeks later, when I was at a show of a singer-songwriter, I stood next to a skinny Englishman. It was Harry. He said, “Louise told me about you.” In passing, I mentioned I had played in an Irish band in my youth. A few days later, he called and asked me to put together an Irish band for some pre-records for a film he was scoring called Veronica Guerin.
We recorded at a place called Media Ventures, owned by composer Hans Zimmer. At one point, Hans walked in, and I gave him a CD of my music that included weird concert pieces, excerpts from my rock operas, and pretty much anything that didn’t sound like film music. (And, in particular, didn’t sound like Hans, who everybody was copying.) Two days later, he called me and hired me to do additional music on his projects. Meanwhile, Harry was being tortured by Jerry Bruckheimer about the climactic murder scene in the film he was scoring, Veronica Guerin. It had a place-keeper track from Hans’ score for Gladiator featuring the duduk, a wholly inappropriate Middle Eastern instrument. I said to Harry, “You know the uillean pipes are the Irish duduk.” In, perhaps, desperation, he said, “Why don’t you write it?”
So, I did, Jerry liked it, but the film release was delayed. Meanwhile, I had a shot at scoring a new TV show. The creator of the show liked me, but when I met with the head of television at Bruckheimer, he said, “What this show needs is music from one of Jerry’s films that hasn’t been released yet.” I asked what film. He said I wouldn’t know it as it hadn’t been released yet. I asked again, what film? He said, “Veronica Guerin.” I asked what scene, and he said, “The murder scene.” I told him I thought I could do something like that.
The show was called Cold Case and ran 7 seasons.
I just realized I was asked to give a “brief” walk through my career. Whoops. OK, I since have scored a bunch of TV, including Siren and Star Wars Detours, and worked on many films helping Hans, including Dark Knight, The Simpsons Movie (I did the Spider Pig choir arrangement), and Dunkirk. Became a Governor of the Television Academy and wrote and/or produced songs for Roberta Flack, The Monkees, and Lorde. Plus performed at Wembley Arena with Dame Evelyn Glennie and a bunch of other stuff.
The point, if there is one, is that nothing is wasted. Playing music on the street required assessing my audience, playing what they wanted to hear, and getting their money in about 30 seconds – advertising music was the same job. Accompanying dance classes and scoring ballets taught me to integrate music and storytelling. And Irish fiddle was my entrée to film scoring. Later, I went back to writing words and wrote and produced a short that won festival awards worldwide and got praise from some famous filmmakers. And now I’m trying to get a feature off the ground.
If it happens it will, no doubt, be for a reason I couldn’t have possibly predicted – but will seem obvious in retrospect.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I think I’ve already touched on some of the obstacles and challenges: failure and rejection are kind of par for the course for those of us in the arts. To paraphrase My Way: “Regrets…I’ve had a few thousand…but all in all…too many to count…” And if this were a proper California New Age piece, I would say, “But I always believed in myself.” Yeah, that actually sounds pretty ridiculous to me. There were lots of moments of frustration and despair. But what choice do you have? You just keep going. The good – and bad – news is that the only constant is that things always change.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
On my business card, where it should say “composer” or “songwriter” or even “screenwriter,” it, instead, says, “pathological eclecticist.” I am interested in entirely too many things, not even including my non-professional fascination with science, math, and history. But, in a way, I feel that every disparate tendril of that scattered approach feeds the others. I have composed:
• Songs
• Musicals
• Operas
• Ballets
• Concert Music
* Film Scores
• Television Scores
* Game themes
* And a lot of music for commercials
I’ve also written or contributed to screenplays that have won a number of awards and been optioned by three television networks.
It all feels like one thing to me. What am I proudest of? Whatever I’m doing RIGHT NOW. Although, in retrospect, writing the world’s first concerto for pedal steel guitar (premiered at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville) and Divination By Mirrors, a piece for musical saw and strings (premiered at Lincoln Center in NYC) satisfy my “I’m weirder than you” side more than most of my better-known undertakings like the KitKat Gimme A Break jingle, Scrat’s theme to the Ice Age shorts, or my arrangement of Everybody Wants to Rule the World sung by a then 16-year-old kid named Lorde.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you, or support you?
It’s very simple for directors and producers to work with me: call my agent! (Natalia Gonzalez at IAG (310) 228-5867).
What is hottest on my Desire/To Do list right now, though, is I am trying to get a feature I wrote launched. Called Bo, it is an inspirational story about a 17-year-old autistic girl who trains an “untamable” horse for the sport of Show Jumping and, in doing so, finds her purpose and meaning. It means a great deal to me because I am autistic. This is not something I tended to tell people in the past (why give them another reason not to hire me?) but writing Bo has forced me to “come out”.
I am currently looking for an executive producer with a track record to help it get past the myriad of gatekeepers. This person might be interested in autism, horses, or just think the idea is cool. If you have anyone you’d like to introduce me to, write to me at [email protected]
Contact Info:
- Website: MichaelLevineMusic.com
- Instagram: michael_a_levine
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MichaelALevineMusic
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-a-levine-a3848910/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@michaelAlevinemusic
