Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some of my favorite score tracks from Escaping Wonderland, a just-released VR game that takes place in an Alice-in-Wonderland universe. It’s a delightful game with unexpected story depth (all is not as cute and whimsical as it seems!), and so created great opportunities for music.

This week’s selection is a dreamy vocal melody that plays a recurring role throughout the score. Here it’s presented as a hummed duet, courtesy of Phoebe Engelbert (who also did some voice acting in the game) and Alison Borodzicz.

(Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.)

This week’s music selection is the opening from Emerald, Texas, filmmaker George Adams’ modern-day reinvention of The Wizard of Oz.

In this cue I lay out the instrumental palette of the entire score: acoustic blues guitar, solo strings, drums, and – to use the technical musical term – weird surreal floaty stuff in the background.

As the film plays with the boundaries of the waking world, the music keeps one foot in down-home existence and one in a more dreamlike place.

For some reason I think of this blog as having TV-like seasons, each of which kicks off after summer travels. So welcome to season fifteen or so!

This week I re-run my favorite music from the feature film Emerald, Texas, which envisions The Wizard of Oz in modern day. The protagonists are lazing in a resplendent field of flowers — loosely, the poppy fields from the original book. I took the opportunity to write a pastoral string melody to reflect the expansive prettiness and momentary peace.

I really need to make an album of this score, but (insert standard excuses about not having enough time here).

The finale music from Secrets Beneath the Floorboards returns to a rustic-acoustic flavor that reflects the film’s rural backdrop. After a bluesy guitar intro (courtesy of Tom Strahle), the piano plays the four-note theme that’s popped up throughout the score, serving as a musical farewell to our protagonists who have managed to survive to the finale. (This is probably not a spoiler if you’re familiar with Lifetime movies.)

The nice thing about simple themes is that they’re so versatile. For example, here are those same four notes being mysterious, and here they are transformed into the film’s love theme.

It’s time for that inevitable moment in every suspense/thriller film score: the final confrontation cue! In addition to the requisite hair-raising effects, this cue presents several of the film’s themes in a musical “getting the gang together” moment. (For example, the main theme becomes a creepy call-and-response between two solo violins.)

As usual, you can tell from the music when the bad guy gets his just deserts. (Or does he? See the movie to find out!) We conclude with some of the overprotective grandmother’s piano melody, hinting that maybe she wasn’t so paranoid after all.