Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge on the Ever-Switching Musical Gears Required to Create the Score of Apple TV+’s ‘Sugar’

Ali Shaheed Muhammad (of the recently inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest) and Adrian Younge first worked together on Younge’s album with The Souls of Mischief (“There is Only Now”). The two became fast friends and later collaborated on the Kendrick Lamar track “Untitled 06.” With both holding the shared skills of DJ, producer, and multi-instrumentalists (as well as similar tastes), their working relationship grew into scoring for film and TV, Some of their credits previous to Apple TV+’s Sugar include Luke Cage (their first score together), Run This Town, Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, The Equalizer (TV version), and Reasonable Doubt.

Their journey together has now led them to what, as composers, was the most challenging experience of their still young careers–scoring for Sugar. With the responsibility of producing a musical homage to film noirs of the past, while keeping a modern sound so as not to merely copy that which has come before, and then to have to adjust gears when the secret of Colin Farrell’s lead character “John Sugar” is revealed was no simple task. But it’s one that Ali and Adrian were up to, and they have succeeded with aplomb.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen Sugar yet but intend to, a major plot point is revealed in this interview.

You’ve been warned.

Awards Daily: You’ve worked in hip hop, you have an affinity for jazz, and you’re both bass players and multi-instrumentalists. How did you connect, to begin scoring for television and film?

Adrian Younge: To make a long story short, I’ve always been a fan of Ali. Even outside of A Tribe Called Quest, I was always a fan of Ali. I was in New York on tour for my Delfonics album, and he had tweeted something regarding the fact that he liked my music and I was tripping because I’m like wait, you like my music? And then we just started talking and I was like yo man, I’m out here in New York if you got time to meet up for lunch, and we did. From that day we’ve just been inseparable, basically. At the same time, he was trying to figure out what he was going to be doing in the near future. I asked him to be part of my Souls of Mischief album and we started working together, and I just really enjoyed working with him because we’re both multi-instrumentalists, we’re both producers, and we’re both bosses.

The thing is, when you find another boss that you really like to work with, like you really like to work with, it’s the best thing in the world, because he could say something creatively that I would never say but I would love just as much as the stuff I do. So it was that one situation where I found another boss I could work with and build something. In a short time, we both got offered by Cheo Coker, the creator and showrunner of Luke Cage for Marvel to score the show separately. We started working on that, and from that together, point to now, we’ve scored a million things, and we got our first Emmy together last year, and that’s just scoring stuff. We have a label called Jazz is Dead, and we do a bunch of music, so this is just kind of like some past life shit, or it’s just actually meant to be on this second half of our life. I don’t know what it is, but we connect. 

Awards Daily: Years ago I talked to Trent Reznor about going between making records and scoring for film or TV, when he was working on the Watchmen project. I remember him saying that he found that one fed the other, because when you’re doing a score, you’re often in service of the material, but when you’re doing your own thing, it’s totally your own thing. He found going back and forth to be healthy. Would you say the same?

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: I definitely can agree with that. First of all, just listening to Nine Inch Nails music, especially the album The Fragile. It’s so cinematic. What he’s saying makes perfect sense in the sense of thinking about what they did with The Fragile and then The Social Network. You can really see the thread that ties them together. What I had to learn was approaching music from an emotion, an idea that was already formulated and placed on the picture, versus making music as an artist, as a producer from my own emotions. But one definitely feeds the other. It’s like a journey that continues to just evolve and evolve. You may start out working on something for a score based on what the director or the executive producer is wanting from you to enhance the story. And sometimes, and I’m pretty sure Adrian has found the same thing, it’s like you’re playing something and you’re putting this great piece together and you hit that one chord and you’re like oh my God, that could be another song outside of the frame of scoring. Because it exercises a different side of the artist’s creative mind, it brings out a completely different side of your musicianship that you can then bring back into working on artistic music, commercial music and then vice versa. So I definitely agree with him.

Adrian Younge: The basic perspective is, as artists outside of film and television scoring, you don’t have a boss. You are the boss, and you say when it’s done, you say what color to choose. That’s all you. And it allows you to be totally free. By continuously practicing that, your dream is to find teams in the film and scoring world that allow you to bring your artistry to scoring. Those are the dream matchups because you already put in so many years of being your own boss, now they’re kind of hiring you in a way as the expert that the team is going to look at to make that part of the project perfect, to make that part of the project something where you’re exceeding expectations. There’s like this symbiotic relationship where Ali and I are hired as artists that compose and we have a good history. We’ve done a lot of things. When they hire us for us, it’s dope because we don’t have to do cookie cutter shit. We can go in and they can say, we want this to feel emotional and intense but not dark, so we can interpret that from an artist perspective versus just a boilerplate perspective. But we really develop that artist side outside the composing so when we find teams that allow us to be who we are for the team, that’s very specific. So we all understand the unilateral vision and those limitations kind of allow us to do more because it’s more of a sagacious, perfect perspective of the emotion that they want, but then we can come in as artists and bring our flavor to it. I’ll just bring this to Sugar. It was really cool because in our spotting sessions, they would say, we don’t want as much music here. We just want percussion or we want this to feel a bit more musical. And we had to learn in the first episode what that really meant, like what that really meant for them, because we’re musicians.

When we articulate something, especially if Ali and I talked to each other about something, it’s a language. We know exactly what we’re talking about, but usually when you’re talking with non-musician producers or directors, you just hope that they can speak the language. In this case, we were lucky and they were speaking that language. One of the main things that they wanted was space, right? So how do we as artists, how do we as composers, interpret space when we as artists, as composers, always want to make the music a statement. Music is powerful. So we tried things and they worked. When you’ve hit that point, where everyone’s like, yes, then that’s when we start running and just going, because we understand the direction that works for the team. Now the organism works together to make things better and better. If you watch the first episode of Sugar, you’ll hear a lot of that sparseness. Then as it goes on, you’ll see how we evolved the notion of being sparse because Ali and I, more than anything, more than melody, we love chords. So we’d establish some cool chords and then we’d establish some cool melodies. You guys like that? Yes. Then we go further. You guys like that too? Oh shit, let’s go further. And it was like this relationship where they kept encouraging us and pushing us, pushing us to go forward. To go back to your initial question about being an artist, to being a composer, we love to be in those situations where they ask us as artists to become composers for their projects so that we can bring our flavor to it. We’re lucky to be in this position. 

Awards Daily: And Sugar is a show with a lot of flavor. It’s not what you think it is, and it exists on a couple of levels. There’s a meta level where it’s referencing old film noirs. And there’s a homage to that. It’s both in your music and in the show itself. And then without giving anything away, there’s a sizable genre switch that happens late in the series. You’re right, there are three levels that I hear in the music and in the show. Sometimes the music will come out in front. Sometimes it’s more baseline with the scene, and then sometimes it plays underneath like with the light percussion. Then you have a character in John Sugar who is a mystery kind of unto himself. How did these elements inspire you to create the score that you did? 

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Just in the way that you explained that. Like, let’s just talk about the film noir aspect and the clips of them going back. These clips were giving John Sugar information, without saying too much to those who haven’t seen it. But for us, his process of doing that is like us digging in the crates for old records, because it gives us information. Adrian and I started off as DJs. I think it gives us an edge because we know records and we know musical history. We’re like musical archaeologists. From that aspect of the show, it resonates with who we are already. And he’s a sophisticated person. We’re sophisticated gentlemen, so there are a lot of similarities to it: the Corvette that he drives, Adrian has a classic, vintage Mercedes Benz. There are just so many aspects of John Sugar that are real to us. Like Adrian was saying, when you have the entire team saying guys, we want you to be you. You guys are music heads, music nerds. Dig in the crate guys. You know jazz, you know really sophisticated things, you know edgy, you know gritty.

It allowed for us to be ourselves as Adrian was saying before, to tie in a scene where you have Rosalia, her vocals come in and we’re still scoring and in between her source song. Things like that excited us, that they would allow for us to even do that. Most people wouldn’t. It’s just the source music, don’t touch it. But her voice in that scene, the way it comes up, it was like a godsend for us to be able to play with that and to go darker and deeper and add to the mystery of what is going on with this show. There are a whole lot of layers. The other thing was, I don’t think they told us immediately what the big secret was. I think we were one or two episodes in before they told us. We were playing with a couple of sounds like crystal bowls and this other really just dark sounds. They were like you guys are onto something with this particular sound, but we can’t tell you just yet. We’re going to tell you in a minute why we like what you guys are doing. So all of that was comfortable. It allowed us to really continue to pursue what we innately felt about what should be happening here, in addition to the support of the entire team. 

Awards Daily: At the same time, the way your music rolls into some sequences, it feels very avant garde to me.

Adrian Younge: Something that’s cool with this is that they let us use cool electronic instruments, but we use a live rhythm section. We used a full orchestra, so it allowed us to get into some deep pockets, and it allowed us to get into some deep emotion, some different kind of emotion. It’s interesting because when we score, the main questions that Ali and I always ask the director or the showrunner is, what is the point of view? It’s always about the point of view. What are we trying to say as a team? And what do we want the viewer to understand? Because one thing that we do not like to do is lead. We hate leading. We hate that. So, it’s not necessarily about tricking people either. It’s just that we like to respect the intelligence of the audience. Because Sugar isn’t human, he’s observing our world. He doesn’t want to come in and necessarily hurt us, just to observe. There’s a scene when an intruder came in and he came to save Melanie, but he’s just pounding and pounding and pounding him. And that moment, what that’s supposed to represent, is that he’s losing it. He’s going crazy. But this is a very profound moment for him because it’s hurting him to hurt other people. Even if they’re evil, he doesn’t want to hurt people. So we score that way. It’s understanding the temperament, understanding what the point of view is supposed to be.

We score that way also when his fellow alien betrayed him, because at first you don’t know if that’s a love story, you don’t know what’s going on. We tried to make something where you could feel his solitude in a new world being betrayed by his own. But that’s the point of view. Musically, these are things that we’re asked to do. We thoroughly ask questions. Like, what kind of sadness is he supposed to be feeling right now? Or this person just died, does that really bother him? Or does it really bother him more that this happened? Understanding point of view is what really helped to create the score for Sugar because there are moments that had to be a bit more heavy. I think a through line with this is just the notion of humanity. I say humanity as if he’s a human, but it’s the notion of humanity and what matters and what doesn’t matter and trying to find that through line, because he has those emotions. He has that depth. It is a little different for us: a non-human having human emotions. To go back to what Ali was talking about, in the first episodes when we’re trying to find the sound for that. We’re giving him non-human emotions. That’s the point of view. That’s why things might seem a little off. This is the point of view that’s given to us by the team and we’re running with it. It kind of shows how we all came together to make something new. 

Awards Daily: And it’s hinting at what’s coming next, I think, too. Would it be fair to say that you guys were building a lot of your score around the Colin Farrell performance itself? Because he’s kind of inscrutable at first. You can’t quite figure out where he’s coming from. So you have to layer this mystery and then you start to feel like you’re getting comfortable, into this film noir world. And then, like I said, there’s this major reveal. Did Farrell himself, what he was doing on screen, really affect how you guys approached the score? 

Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Absolutely. His way with Jon Siegel, and before Jon Siegel, the kid, just his nature of being so witty, so smart and five-ten steps ahead of someone else, but also with compassion. How do you convey that in a very subtle way? Like Adrian was saying before, being sparse was a note on the piano. There are so many different moments. Him being an investigator, with him being devoted to his sister, and her absence and really being affected by that and giving him his human purpose, if we can say that, at least on earth. There are just all these different dynamics that he’s dealing with, as Adrian mentioned, his fellow alien, Ruby (Played by the terrific actress Kirby).

Who is Ruby? She’s a mystery, and she was holding in a lot. So not only was it John Sugar, it was just all these elements that were unfolding and there were little bits and pieces that ultimately came together, but we had to navigate. In fact, one of the things that we talked about when we were first hired was to reverse engineer the entire score, going from the last episode to the first episode to give us more space to really play with; not play with people’s minds, but really to fortify the storyline, because usually when we’re working on episodic shows, you get the first episode, you get the second, you’re going in this order. For Sugar, we didn’t want to go in order. Once we were told who Sugar was, we wanted to go backwards to fill in all the spaces.