I recently released a long-delayed soundtrack album to one of my early film scores, Home Room. The drama, starring Erika Christensen and Busy Philipps, explores the emotional aftermath of a school shooting.

This week’s music selection is the score’s melancholy main theme, an intimate chamber piece for piano, cello, and alto flute. It evokes the fragile feelings of two girls trying to reconstruct their lives in the wake of a tragedy.

This week’s music selection is a dramatic (in a family-friendly sort of way) orchestral cue from a project early in my career. The Penguin Who Wouldn’t Swim was an interactive story about… well, you can probably tell from the title. At this moment in the story, an aquaphobic penguin finds himself caught on an iceberg and menaced by a killer whale. The music takes a melodic approach towards capturing the conflict of the scene.

This week’s music selection concludes the score for the VR game Escaping Wonderland. Much of the score centers around a central melody, which represents significant memories for protagonist Molly. (Forgive my vagueness; I’m avoiding spoiler territory.) The theme recurs throughout the score, sometimes overtly and sometimes sneakily.

Once we reach the end credits we hear the melody in fullest form. I wrote a vocal song for the occasion, performed by the tremendously talented Phoebe Engelbert, who also voice acted for the game.

(If you like the tune, you can listen to the entire score at any of the usual streaming services.)

This week’s music from Escaping Wonderland accompanies a surreal landscape of images and echoing memories where Molly (a.k.a. the player) navigates her own psyche, literally building a bridge to recovery.

Since the biome presents familiar things in a dreamlike context, I took a parallel approach with the score. The main theme plays in disconnected fragments, jumping between instruments in different registers. Surreal dissonant passages fade in and out, representing the crumbling barrier between Molly’s current world and where she’s headed next.

Play in your browser (click below), or on Spotify or Apple Music.

This week’s music selection from the soundtrack of Escaping Wonderland accompanies another well-known character from Lewis Carroll’s lore. In this game he’s imagined on the sinister side of the madness emotional continuum. I musically characterized him appropriately, with raucous violin answered by a chorus of dissonant woodwinds, perhaps suggesting mocking voices in his head.

Play in your browser (click below), or on Spotify or Apple Music.