News Roundups<\/p>\n
By signing up, you agree to our\u00a0Terms of Service<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n I spoke with Elfman, 72, from Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Bridget Fonda. This interview has been edited for clarity.<\/p>\n You were a huge movie buff as a child growing up near L.A. When did you zero in on the soundtracks?<\/p>\n From seven or eight years old on, the local movie theater was my life. I\u2019d go every weekend and spend five hours there. But it wasn\u2019t until I was about 12 that I noticed the music as an entity. The movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still, with a Bernard Herrmann score. Suddenly, I made a note of his name, and over the next couple of years, my favorite films would feature Herrmann and stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen: If I saw both those names, I knew it was going to be my favorite movie of the year.<\/p>\n Oingo Boingo toured from 1979 to 1995. Years later, you told an interviewer \u201cI\u2019m terrified of audiences.\u201d Was that a factor in ending the band?<\/p>\n No. I\u2019ve had stage fright from the first time I went onstage: Stepping out in the spotlight and ad-libbing and talking to an audience was always terrifying. It still is. But I learned to evolve into an alter ego where you\u2019re totally locked in when you\u2019re singing, and you feel fine.<\/p>\n Part of [the reason Oingo Boingo split up] was the frustration of wanting to change gears, but feeling confined. You have to play the same show, more or less, every night. On top of that, I was experiencing hearing damage. Finally, around \u201994, I realized if I didn\u2019t want to be deaf later in life, I had to stop doing what I was doing.<\/p>\n Is there a way to describe how or why you work so well with Tim Burton?<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to define. \u2026 Just like it\u2019s hard to define the chemistry between Spielberg and John Williams, or the Coen Brothers and Carter Burwell, or Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri. Sometimes, a composer and director lock together and they\u2019re able to keep going. When I met Tim, it was very clear to me that our sensibilities were very similar. His worlds didn\u2019t seem that weird to me. They felt normal. We both grew up on the same horror films and fantasy films. When I met him, his idol was Vincent Price and mine was Peter Lorre.<\/p>\n After 18 films in 40 years, I still couldn\u2019t tell you why Tim and I work so well together. I\u2019m just grateful we do.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve said your tombstone will probably read something like \u201cHere lies the guy who wrote the theme to The Simpsons.\u201d Is it true the theme came to you out of the blue while you were driving?<\/p>\n That\u2019s absolutely true. It\u2019s a real process, 95 percent of the time, to find the tone and music for a movie. And 5 percent of the time, it\u2019s just like \u201cBingo!\u201d That was just one of those lucky moments.<\/p>\n I thought, \u201cThis thing\u2019s gonna run three episodes and get canceled.\u201d But I didn\u2019t care. When I met Matt Groening, I liked him. He showed me a pencil sketch of the opening of The Simpsons, and I told him \u201cYou know, this feels so fun and crazy and retro. \u2026 What I\u2019m hearing in my head is an homage to Hanna-Barbera,\u201d because the opening of The Flintstones was Fred Flintstone in his car driving home and the opening of The Simpsons was Homer doing the same thing. And Matt says \u201cYeah! That sounds like a good idea.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time I got home, it was done in my head. I\u2019d written the whole thing. I ran downstairs, trying not to get distracted, and I made a demo tape the same day and sent it to Matt. And that was it.<\/p>\n You have this rare ability to write the most whimsical music and then turn on a dime and write the saddest, most melancholy music, sometimes in the same scene. Do you have a philosophy on juggling those extremes?<\/p>\n No, but I\u2019m happy if it\u2019s \u201cvery\u201d anything \u2014 if it\u2019s very romantic, or very sad, or very dark, or quirky or silly. I can go with any of those. But I learned early on in my career, when I tried to do a romantic comedy, that I don\u2019t know how to do that. I was completely at a loss. I guess I just don\u2019t know how to write music for normal people doing normal stuff.<\/p>\n DETAILS: March 13 and 14 at 7:30 p.m. and March 15 at 2 p.m. at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St., Dallas. $71 and up. dallassymphony.org.<\/p>\n Court agreement requires concert giant to submit to structural reforms targeting control of ticketing, venues and artist promotion.<\/p>\n The musical headliner for the April 18 festival is Whiskey Myers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Danny Elfman pulled off one of the greatest second acts in music. He leapt from vinyl to celluloid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,8158,278,4661],"class_list":["post-197124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-dallas-symphony-orchestra","tag-music","tag-pop-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"FILE](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/MLMIQ43T6BEZJGNOSIDXS3FMVE.jpg\")
<\/a>Live Nation, U.S. Justice Department reach court settlement<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Patriotic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1773086888_592_7TNNPEF6ENDLDGHSUU76MF4KDQ.jpg\")
<\/a>Fort Worth barbecue festival will have \u2018Yellowstone\u2019-famous band and 20+ Texas pitmasters<\/a><\/p>\n