I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson about their work on the recently concluded Cobra Kai, as well as their work on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Born in Kentucky and raised in Chicago, Leo Birenberg studied composition at NYU and USC. While there, he started composing his first scores in collaboration with his roommate, filmmaker Jeremy Reitz. Zach Robinson is a Primetime Emmy Winning and Grammy nominated composer for film and TV. Zach is most known for co-composing the score (alongside friend and collaborator, Leo Birenberg) to the mega-hit Netflix series Cobra Kai and Roku’s film Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
First of all, how long have the two of you been collaborating together?
Oh gosh, for 10 [or] 12 years? I think 12 years, we both were apprenticing for another composer, Christophe Beck, which is where we met, working in his studio. So we were working on music together there, and now we’re working on music together every day.
What does that look like when the two of you collaborate together? What’s that process look like?
We share a lot of files, but we work in separate studios, so we’re constantly knowing what we’re doing. There’s a lot of FaceTiming. There’s a lot of calling and saying, “Hey, I’ve got this idea. Should I do it?” And then I say, “No, you’re crazy, man, don’t do that.” And then he proves me wrong and it’s awesome.
I learn a lot from that, which has happened many times, but it’s where we have a really fruitful collaboration process, and we’re at this point, like a hive mind, we always are thinking around the same, if it’s not the same thing, it’s kind of the same concept. And you would never know who started what, or who was working on which piece of music, because we really are just kind one [and] the same right now.
I wanted to talk a bit about Cobra Kai. When you were brought on to work on Cobra Kai, what did you think of the concept of continuing that story?
We didn’t really know at first. We were called to have a meeting on it, and we just knew that it was based in the same universe. We had no idea that any of the characters would be returning, or that [it] was the central plot of the show, until the show runners sent us the scripts for the first two episodes the night before our meeting. We read them, and it was at that moment that we just immediately knew the show was going to be good. The scripts just came alive while you were reading them. It was so clear that the property was being [treated] with a lot of love and care by people who just really cared about it and had a story to tell. We were excited about it from the second we started working on it.
Once you realized what this was all about, what inspirations did you look to when creating the music for the show?
Well, we definitely looked at the original movies. But we said in our very first meeting that we wanted to have something different. This wasn’t The Karate Kid, it was something different and new. So we pitched that part of this should be the music that Johnny hears in his head when he’s beating up teenagers in episode one. So how do we channel that it’s the scores from the 80s movies that he loves, like Iron Eagle and Bloodsport or Kickboxer, or it’s the hair metal that he listens to, like Judas Priest or whatever.
So we took that, and then we got to blend it with the orchestral sound that everyone is in love with from the original, so blending those two was really special. And then, of course, we have our modern synth waves [and] electro stuff that we tried to incorporate from season one. And then as the seasons went on and the story exploded, the music needed to scale in size. So we are constantly bringing in new influences. Every season, we needed to start up and be like, “What are we going to do different this season? How are we going to top ourselves? Can we top ourselves?” And I think every year, we were pretty satisfied with how it all came out, and we definitely feel fulfilled about it.
How did the music get bigger to fit the growing story? Because it ended up revisiting most of the major plots of the films. Didn’t it?
Well, it brings back almost every character from the original films in smaller ways and surprising ways. The story that is being told in Cobra Kai gets bigger, it goes global, as we like to say. The show ends up in Spain in the final season for this international karate tournament with all of these new dojos from all around the world.
But it’s more about that side of the story and exploring those emotions. And we see a lot of flashbacks to John Kreese’s time in Vietnam, which is a totally different style of show and movie. And so all of these things, they force us to write in different ways and come up with new thematic ideas. Then they all get put into the Cobra Kai stew. So when we get into our final season, and we’re like working on the landing places for all of these characters and stories, we have so many influences to draw upon that we had written before. It’s really just this big thematic tapestry when it’s all said and done with a hundred themes that play in this palette that is totally unique to the show and involves a huge number of instruments.
Are we talking a full symphony orchestra?
Oh, yeah. We’re using an eighty piece orchestra on every episode of the show. There’s a whole percussion battery of taiko drums, Japanese percussion, all throughout. We’ve got our hair metal rock influences. And there’s drums, guitar, bass, lots of guitars all over the show. Every episode, 80s style keyboards and synths, tons of electronic programming. In addition to that, lots of fun special guest instruments like Japanese shamisen. Any time we had the opportunity to bring new colors into the palette we did.
Did you record the music all at once, or did you do one episode at a time?
The way that it worked with streaming that’s kind of different than more linear network TV is we don’t really touch anything until they’re done with principal photography. So they’ve shot everything, and then they start editing, and then we come on.
But what we ended up doing is we had a system of recording multiple episodes at the same time in blocks. So we would do episodes of the new season, like one, two, and then maybe three and four, and then occasionally we could only do one episode in one of these blocks, because there was so much music, and then this episode is 50 minutes long. We encountered a lot of that, but we had to record an unbelievable amount of music on this show, which I don’t think people realize. It’s wall to wall music on the show that is very bespoke, and you can’t use previous music that we wrote because the scenes are so intricate and the fights are so intricate, we can’t reuse fight music.
So it took us a long time to figure out the system to [make it] an exact science, even though it’s never an exact science. It was challenging because it’s not the biggest budget show, and we were doing the best we can with the budget.
Was there any music at all from the original Karate Kid films?
There are some spots where there’s music from the original Karate Kid films, but they use the original recordings because, it often had to do with flashbacks to footage from those movies. And you need to hear the quality of the original recording to make the nostalgia hit properly. It’s just not the same if we were to re-record it.
So with the 80s sound to the music, was that your it sounds like that was your idea more than something the studio asked for?
It was definitely us. I feel like it was us. That’s why we got hired. We brought this up, and they were like, “That’s what we were thinking too.” And the rest is history.
I also wanted to ask about ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’, what influenced the overall sound for this series?
I think what was important for us was there is a wonderful canon of music for Spider-Man that we are very well aware of. And similarly to The Karate Kid, a lot of it is very beloved, and people feel very attached to different generations of Spider-Man music. You know, for one, Leo and I are very good friends with Daniel Pemberton, who scored Into the Spider-verse. We’re thinking, how are we going to differentiate [from] his amazing score. How are we going to do our own spider thing?
So I think we just wanted to approach it with, we knew we needed to have a big theme, a big heroic theme. But what makes this show really special is the slice of life aspect to it, you’re at home with Peter, you’re at school with Peter, you’re in the streets with him. There’s not always aliens coming from the sky, but sometimes there are. And it’s really fun for us to live in that world with him.
We incorporate a lot of Lo Fi music, which represents the intimacy of his life, just being with him. I actually almost think about it the same way that people go on Twitch, like you’re just spending time with people that they’re watching. And there’s something special about just watching Peter do simple Peter things, not Spider Man things, Peter things.
And then for our action palette, we incorporate a lot of orchestra. This is a Marvel show. We needed to feel big and have that same type of scope. We were very inspired by the music of anime, which is incredibly melodic, very high energy, great combo of orchestra with electronics and synths and guitars and bass and drums. We’re very inspired by video game music too.
……………………………………………….
I would like to thank Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson for taking the time to speak with me about their recent works. Both Cobra Kai and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man are available to be viewed online via Netflix and Disney+ respectively.
