An Interview with James Landino

Video game composers James Landino, Funk Fiction, Andy Tunstall, and many other talented artists came together to create a vibrant soundtrack for No Straight Roads. In this article, James Landino and Chris Penwell dive into how music successfully goes hand in hand with the action gameplay of the title, and James gives very useful advice on how to make yourself stand out as a composer in a competitive market. Let’s rock on!

How did your work on No Straight Roads come to be?

JAMES LANDINO: So, my friend and professional colleague, Falk Au Yeong, was the audio director for No Straight Roads when they were starting development, so he got me and my other friends on board: Funk Fiction (Pejman Roozbeh), and Andy Tunstall. The four of us have worked on past projects, such as Spark The Electric Jester, and even previously on Sonic fan games, such as Sonic After the Sequel. We’ve worked together as a group for almost 10 years.

With fan covers and your work on Sonic fan games, how did you grow to become a professional composer in the industry?

JAMES: That’s an interesting way to phrase it. I never considered it that way because I had been working I suppose professionally in the industry since I was 15. The first game I worked on was a game called I Dance, which was based off of Dance Dance Revolution. While I wasn’t a full-time professional at that point, the journey of becoming a professional started way back then in rhythm games when I was working on fanmade versions of Dance Dance Revolution. I worked on a lot of music games, so that’s where the origin story takes place I think.

Some indie games use royalty-free music instead of original tracks. So, I’m wondering, do you think composers like you are within most indie game budgets? How do you scale your rate and make sure it’s manageable for you and the developer?

JAMES: I always try to ask them from a place of understanding what their ideal budgets are. My philosophy is even though I have my rates of what I think I’m worth, I also understand that there’s a balance between being flexible and am I the right fit financially for your game. At the end of the day, I think it’s just being manageable with budgets. If the project’s really cool, and I want to do it, there are a lot of creative ways to make it fair.

For example, when I was 16, I wrote music for a game called Aces Wild, which is an indie beat ‘em up platformer game that came out on Steam about seven, eight years ago. At 16 years old, obviously, I wasn’t thinking about money per se, but the developer was telling me, “Hey, I can't really pay you anything, but I can offer you this percentage of game sales.” Funnily enough, the success of that game has really helped me financially as an adult, because eight years later, those game sales are still persisting. So, there are a lot of creative ways like that to make it work.

How do you pitch yourself to indie developers? Do you cold call or research upcoming indie projects on Kickstarter?

JAMES: I’ve learned over time that I’m a rare case. I don’t really do cold call emails. In fact, most of my work comes from people approaching me. As I’ve learned, this is a very big luxury, and it’s the reason I’ve always tried to identify myself as a unique composer. If you want electronic dance music and video game composer jams, you know I’m the artist for the job, and that’s the way I’ve tried to position myself. So, the people who want me really want me. That’s always been my angle, and I think it’s worked out very well.

So would you suggest that budding composers find a niche?

JAMES: Exactly, yeah. I think it’s much more ideal to specialize in a niche that stems from your passions and interests. For me, that was music games, and I think that really helps long-term for developers to come to you because they know you’re the best at that thing you love.

How important is networking in your field?

JAMES: It’s everything; it really is everything. This whole journey started from rhythm game forums when I was 13 years old. People on those rhythm game forums that I made friends with when I was 13 are people I work with now at age 27. At that time, I had no concept of being a professional in the industry, I was just “Cool! Yay! Music!”, and now it’s, “oh, this person I’ve known for over a decade, who I now work with for this show in Japan, or this project on this album.” Networking is just making friends, and it’s really interesting to see how that journey has unveiled itself.

Is it strange to have your music played in Japan and around the world?

JAMES: I think it’s really cool, and the few times I’ve been to Japan, it really puts things into perspective. Of course, Spotify will show that you have this many listeners from Japan or there’s new listeners from so and so, and I’m like, “that’s cool, I hope I get to meet these people someday.” It’s just a number, but now I have a face. I’m really thankful to be able to meet those fans. Also, I’ve always had a passion for Japanese composers and not just in video game music, but also in jazz music as well as artists like T-Square and Casiopea. So, in that way, it makes sense if Japanese people enjoy my music because some of my favorite artists are also from their country.

Yeah, it seems like you've taken a lot of inspiration from Japanese music which you’ve loved since you were a teenager, right?

JAMES: Yeah, honestly, it’s even earlier than that. I can think back to when I first got a Game Boy and a Nintendo 64. I remember being like six years old and putting on a game like Wave Race 64 which has a predominantly jazz fusion soundtrack that I later learned is directly derivative of T-Squared and Casiopea, these huge jazz fusion bands from the 80s. I would put in the cartridges not even to play, just to listen to the music on my TV. My mom would look at me like, wait, what are you doing? I didn’t even realize that it was from Japanese developers or Japanese composers.

So take us through the process of creating a song for a video game. What kind of feedback do you get from the developer and how do you create that product?

JAMES: So Falk Au Yeong puts it really well. When you write music for yourself, you are thinking about your experience, your vision. With a video game, it’s not about your vision as much—it’s more about what the developer’s vision is. Me and the other composers on No Straight Roads are in an interesting position because we can kind of do both since developers seek us out because of our sound. Their vision is kind of our vision, which is a rare position to be in.

They trust you, right?

JAMES: They gave us a very long leash, and I’m very grateful, especially for games like No Straight Roads, where they allowed us to take a lot of liberties with the soundtrack, and I think it paid off. I enjoy listening to the soundtrack, because I think it’s really true to ourselves.

The music that I wrote for that game is true to me as a person, and the music Funk Fiction created is true to himself as well. It’s true for all the artists who worked on it, and I think that’s a really cool thing to say because on most projects from when I talk to other composers, there is some form of compromise or some understanding that they have to write for the director. The developer says, “We want this, here’s a reference, go make that thing again.” And so, you know, the feedback loop is fairly minimal for us for that reason. Sometimes there are certain things we have to address naturally, but overall, we were given a long leash for most of these projects. What I really enjoy is that a lot of the music that we’re writing for these games are, in my opinion, not what most people would expect to be video game music.

So what kind of liberties and risks did you have with No Straight Roads?

JAMES: I think a big part of it is just the diversity of the soundtrack. I don’t mean to say this in a negative way, but I think a lot of video game music is homogenous. What I love about working with my friends, Funk Fiction and Andy, is that we all have similar inspirations. We all love Sonic music, we all love rhythm game music, and we all love Japanese composers’ music, but we have distinct sounds and distinct flavors that really give it a lot of character. So, when I listen to the soundtracks of our games, I’m like, wow, we go from rock to dance music to rap, to rock again to jazz...it’s all over the place. It’s really cool.

So, how much research went into that? Did you have to look into different genres like Vocaloid or rock?

JAMES: No, not really. All the music that we write through these projects, like I said, it’s true to us. We’re just writing music that we would write if we were putting out our own music, and that’s what makes it really great.

That’s why it feels kind of joyful to us with the No Straight Roads soundtrack in particular.

JAMES: Yeah, I often write a lot of energetic, uplifting music because that’s what motivates me, and I find a lot of, as you say, joy in that. I’m glad that you mentioned that because that really reflects the kind of the mood or energy I’m in when I write.

Was it difficult to create both a rock version and an EDM version of the same song?

JAMES: I would say no. The way I like to describe that project or any music game project that has dynamic audio like that is that it’s like problem solving. It’s like a puzzle, almost. So in the case of, say, “DJ Subatomic Supernova”, Funk Fiction made the original version of that track, which is an amazing track, by the way, and I had to do the EDM version. Then, Andy did the rock version. So, the problem solving becomes how do I take compositional changes or different liberties and make sure my version can still fit with their version versus the others’ version?

It wasn’t difficult, big picture, because Andy is predominantly a rock composer, and I’m predominantly an electronic music composer. So, we naturally play to our strengths when we’re put in this kind of position. Sometimes, we go out of our comfort zone, but Andy would typically do the rock versions, and I would typically do the electronic versions.

Do you think it’s important to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while as a composer?

JAMES: Absolutely. I try to do it as much as I can. If anything, I also try to put my listeners in that position as well. I try to be tactful about it, but I sometimes think to myself, is it possible for a listener who otherwise hates this sound or genre to like it anyway, and how can I set it up for them to like it if it’s possible?

How do you manage the different tracks at the same time? Are they all one track on the same file? Or are they separated in subsections?

JAMES: So, we had a dynamic audio system, I believe, built in Wwise, which is our audio middleware. The way that we structured it is that every version of the song has three stems—there’s a bass and drum stem, there’s a harmony stem, and then there’s a melody stem. So, with those three stems as our structure for changing the sound, that means that when someone does the original version, I have to then create the remix version that follows that same structure. I want to make sure that the original version’s bass and drums can fit with my version of electronic sounds, and vice versa. When you have the rock version, you have three versions of the same song, knowing that every combination possibly can work. So, that’s how we puzzled this together.

We had a little bit of research and development to figure out what works best. Originally, I think we had four stems—one bass, one drums, one harmony, and one melody—but we realized we could do more compositional changes by having the bass and the drums together. So, there’s a lot of problem solving. There’s no real wrong answer in game development. It’s more of what is the most ideal or efficient solution? I think it’s fun.

Would you say that musicians are more involved with game development than people expect?

JAMES: That varies widely. In my case, especially because of music games, I am much more involved to the point where sometimes I’m even involved in the game design process (which I love). I’ve had a few chances to do level design for rhythm games, and I really enjoy that. Before I was pursuing a career in music, one of my passions was game design, so it’s kind of like my little way of cheating and lying to myself that I’m a game designer if I work on music games because they really go hand in hand. Most of the time, for better or worse, a game will be almost completed, and then they’ll prioritize composition at the last leg of development. I understand why, but that’s usually how it goes.

How is it different working for a company like Square Enix than an indie?

JAMES: With a company like Square Enix, and I’m speaking generally here, there’s just a lot more red tape, especially with Japanese companies, that you have to follow. So, if I want to do something that ends with a corporation, I have to get so many layers of approval that nine times out of 10, it’s not worth it. Whereas with indie developers like Metronomik (the developer of No Straight Roads), the founders of the company came from Japanese developers or corporations like Capcom and Square Enix. They understand the frustration of bureaucracy, and that’s probably one reason why they wanted to start their own studio. They give us a long leash to kind of go off, and it’s as simple as texting the director of the game, “Hey, can I do this?” And they’re like, “Yeah, go for it.” That's great.

The gameplay and music seem to be hand in hand with No Straight Roads, so how did you sync everything up to the platforming? How much communication was needed between you and the developer?

JAMES: Normally in a game, you would create the level design, and then the music would reflect in that, but in our case, we did the opposite. We wrote the music, and then the level designers tried to design a level based on what we wrote. From a compositional standpoint, I’m thinking to myself, okay, what musical motifs, what kind of rhythms would enable really fun or appropriate gameplay for this level?

How do you fit lyrics into beats? How do you get the syllables to match with the music?

JAMES: Nikki Simmons (on SAYU) also had a long leash of what she was allowed to write. I know that the directors had some input, but by and large, I told her, “Hey, this is what we’re doing right now. Here are our themes, write lyrics to the themes, and just go off.” Because this is an interactive musical experience, she actually wrote a lot of lyrics that are in the final game. The reason being is that we wanted to do a music loop that would continue looping over several minutes of the same section, and she would sing different lyrics. I think that’s still true to an extent in the game if you play it, but the concept was that she’s kind of writing two songs with the lyrics, and then if you go back and play the game again, and you’re stuck in a certain section for long enough, the lyrics will keep changing. So, you won’t hear the same actual thing over and over again.

That's fascinating! By the way, will you be working on any new projects sometime soon?

JAMES: Yes. I’m working on a couple of projects right now with my friends that I’m very excited about. I can’t talk about it, unfortunately, but nonetheless, we are working on some new projects as a team together, and I’m really excited to show what we have in the future.

Is there a misconception from the general public about composing that you'd like to correct?

JAMES: The one that really comes to my mind is that some people think that there’s a lot of money doing music for video games, and it’s just not true. It’s not that the money’s bad, but there are certainly a lot of people who say, “Oh, well, you’re working with Sega or you’re working with this company. Man, you must be making a lot of money.” And I’m like, “No, it couldn’t be further from the truth.” This really is an industry of people who are doing it because we love it, and when I think about how much time I have put in, how much time other composers and producers have put into working in this industry, it’s kind of insane, because we genuinely love what we do. So that’s the misconception I think of immediately.

Do you think people take advantage of that passion in a way?

JAMES: I don’t feel that way, personally. It might be true for others, but I don’t feel a sense of, “Hey, you should pay for my meal.” I don't really game like that.

Is there anything else you'd like to mention?

JAMES: No Straight Roads was a three-year process for the music team. I wrote “SAYU” in 2017, which is crazy to think about. We actually wrote a lot of music almost two or three years ago, and to see the response in 2020, it’s been really amazing. None of us expected the success, even from a cult following status, of people resonating with the game and the music so much, so I’m very grateful. That’s the life of a game composer, though, and even a film composer. You write something, you kind of don’t think about it anymore, and then two or three three years later, it comes out, and you’re like, “Oh, wait, I did this. Oh, WOAH!”

Your music got a lot of views on YouTube, SAYU especially.

JAMES: Absolutely, it did. I think I got lucky because I think the YouTube algorithm picked up on it. So, a lot of comments, and a lot of people told me, “James, I’ve never heard of this game, but I found the song on YouTube, and now I bought the game.” It’s kind of crazy to me.

Follow James Landino: https://linktr.ee/jameslandino

Thank you James Landino for taking time out of your day for this interview. I enjoyed talking with you about your career and No Straight Roads!

InterviewsChris PenwellOctober 28, 2020Chris Penwell, James Landino, No Straight Roads, Falk Au Yeong, Funk Fiction, Andy Tunstall, Aces WildComment