I don’t believe I’ve tackled a season of television as richly rewarding as Outlander’s Season Three. Separated by centuries in Season Two’s heart-wrenching finale, Jamie and Claire spend the first five episodes isolated in their own timelines, a narrative journey that spans two decades. This season allowed me to further develop familiar themes, and introduce new melodies, instrumentation, and nuance to the score.

A new season of Outlander would not be complete without a distinct variation of “The Skye Boat Song” for its main title. I introduced the tune in Season One, combining Scottish folk instrumentation, orchestra and the voice of Raya Yarbrough. At the start of Season Two, I rearranged it for baroque instrumentation, while Raya performed certain passages in French. That was followed up by a patriotic rendition, emphasizing Scottish snare drums and bagpipes, underscoring the build up to the Battle of Culloden.

In the second half of Season Two, Outlander took a major geographical and tonal leap, returning Jamie and Claire to Scotland at the dawn of the Jacobite rising. These episodes focused on their efforts to prevent inevitable deaths at Culloden. My score needed to shift back to the haunting Scottish sounds of season one, with an added emphasis on military percussion and pipes.

This change is evident immediately with the new Main Title Theme in Episode 208, “The Fox’s Lair.” The track begins with Raya Yarbrough’s haunting vocal once more, but I removed the viola da gamba and chamber orchestra that implied Paris. Instead, the bodhrán frame drum returns. At first, it feels like we are simply reusing the season one theme, but the track quickly evolves from there. Iconic Scottish snare drums sneak in behind her voice, providing a distinctly militaristic feeling. For the final chorus, I replaced the moving bassline with a steady drone in the low strings and bagpipes. This gives the final chorus a distinctly Scottish feeling, evoking the pedal-tone drones of military bagpipe bands. The instrumentation is predominantly the same, but the emotional impact of this harmonic change is intense. This main title sequence prepares us for war.

With Jamie and Claire spending half of Outlander’s second season in Paris, I knew I would have to make dramatic changes to the score. The Scottish instrumentation that defined season one was pushed into the background, to make room for an entirely new palette of instruments, themes and performance techniques derived from French baroque music. Adapting my writing style to this approach proved to be one of the most daunting creative challenges I’ve faced.

The first season of Outlander gave me the chance to fulfill a life-long dream of incorporating Scottish folk music and instrumentation into an original score. The second season, debuting this weekend on Starz, presented an immensely challenging shift in tone. Our protagonists move from the rolling hills of the Scottish highlands, to the gilded halls of Parisian courts during the opulent reign of King Louis XV. I enthusiastically embraced this dramatic journey by reinventing the sound of my score.

We now find ourselves in the middle of #Droughtlander, the epic nine-month stretch between Outlander‘s first season finale and the premiere of Season Two. To help fill the gap, I’m happy to announce that my second Outlander soundtrack is available today, from iTunes, Amazon and most other retailers.

The Outlander Volume I soundtrack compiled some of my favorite cues from the first eight episodes of Outlander. The new record, Volume II, includes music from throughout the entire season, weighted heavily towards the last eight episodes.

Is it possible that nobody likes bagpipes? The true history of my Outlander score is finally revealed in my newest video blog:

“Nobody Likes Bagpipes” is a short little mockumentary about my passion for Scottish folk music, leading to my work on Outlander. Like my now-infamous “A Day in the Life” video, “Nobody Likes Bagpipes” is deep truth veiled beneath a thin sheen of hyperbole. Read on for exclusive behind-the-scenes photos:

One of the most exciting aspects of scoring Outlander is that each episode has its own tone, arc, and character, all fitting within the larger narrative structure. Despite rolling with the dramatic punches on some very dark subject matter throughout the season, I was still shocked by the graphic tone of the final two episodes when I first saw them. These two hours of television are among the darkest I have ever scored (and at this point, that’s really saying something!). Nevertheless, these are not stories of needless sadism and horror. The series earned this darkness, and the material was treated with restraint and respect at every turn. If you ever found yourself shielding your eyes in horror in these last two episodes, your response was aiding your experience of the story. I deeply respected the showrunners’ approach to the material, and wanted to match it with a measured and dramatic musical score, one that would heighten the drama and horror in equal measure.

Within Outlander’s first season, “Lallybroch,” “The Watch,” and “The Search” form a trilogy. The stories are tonally similar, returning us to the highland life we glimpsed in the first few episodes. Dramatically, these episodes allow us a brief relief after the overwhelming darkness in “The Devil’s Mark,” and before the final two episodes to come. I savored this opportunity to lighten my musical approach for a few weeks.

Scottish folk music has always been an integral component of my score. However, from “The Wedding” until now, the stories were entirely about Claire or Jamie and their relationships to other characters. There were very few opportunities to use music to comment on the world around them. That changed substantially for this trio of episodes.

“By the Pricking of My Thumbs” and “The Devil’s Mark” truly feel like a unified two-part story. The first episode is generally lighter in tone, but it’s events set up the relentless emotional rollercoaster of the second.

THE DULCIMER OF SANDRINGHAM

“By the Pricking of My Thumbs” introduces the Duke of Sandringham, a charmingly effete, backstabbing politician who will do anything to maintain his status in society. He’s funny, but ruthless. I did not write him a theme, because there really was no need. His role is primarily as a solution to Jamie’s problem. The actor, Simon Callow, brilliantly provided the character with memorable mannerisms, so I felt no need to clutter his scenes with melody.