Arranging the Music for “It’s Over, Isn’t It?”
I had the great pleasure of arranging and performing “It’s Over, Isn’t It?” for the episode Mr. Greg. This was my first time being involved at the early stages of a lyrical song! Since the song was focused on Pearl’s emotions–and I compose and perform all of Pearl’s piano parts–Rebecca and I collaborated to create an expressive instrumental track for Deedee Magno Hall to sing over. Rebecca first sent me her ukelele demo, and I drafted a piano accompaniment based on it, creating the main piano riff (measures 18-21 of the sheet music above). We passed my piano recording back and forth to solidify the musicality and tempo changes, so the song would breathe “naturally”.
After I recorded the piano part, we encountered a problem: the song was too long for the episode! To make it fit into our time constraints, we sped the piano recording up and had Deedee record Pearl’s vocals over it. She knocked it out of the park and gave a stunning performance!
But that led to another problem: the sped up piano arrangement now sounded way too aggressive. The song reached me again a few months later, for the composition/scoring phase of Mr. Greg. I decided to draft a new piano arrangement and re-recorded “It’s Over, Isn’t It?” along to Deedee’s vocals, with more restraint and space between chords to heighten Pearl’s loneliness. To give more pain and tension to the music, I gave the chords some darker colors and unresolved notes. I collaborated with Rebecca and storyboard artist Joe Johnston to decide what parts of the first arrangement to keep.
To represent Rose’s lingering presence, I added strings to the arrangement, performed beautifully by Jeff Ball. For those of you keeping score, this is Rose’s motivic instrument! I wrote them in 4-part string quartet style, so that this song could easily be performed by a string quartet, pianist, and vocalist.
Recently, Deedee and I performed “It’s Over, Isn’t It?” at San Diego Comic-Con! These are the sheets that I used on stage. It’s almost exactly what I played in the episode.
In measure 56, I didn’t feel like writing the entire arpeggio that I played (too many notes)–so where it says, “A MAJOR ARP”, you can just squeeze as many A major arpeggios in there as you feel like!
The two “D”s that I wrote are something that Deedee and I worked out for the performance, where I would follow her voice during the opening and ending, and she would follow my tempo throughout the rest. “D” for Deedee!
Hope you enjoyed Mr. Greg and this song! You can listen to the final arrangement in the episode here.
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