Along with Sam Reid’s Freddie Mercury and David Bowie-influenced costumes in The Vampire Lestat, the original songs by Daniel Hart are loaded with ’80s and ’90s musical touchstones — many of which will make you nod and smile with a big, “oh, yeahhh.” Just like I did when I talked to him for the story below. (Should Whatever Nevermind just pivot into a throwback sea hag and vampire fan account? Kidding. Mostly.)
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Warning: Mild spoilers for The Vampire Lestat episodes one through four below.
Watching The Vampire Lestat is a feast for the eyes and ears — if not just for the titular frontman’s (Sam Reid) disdainful pronunciation of “Chipotle” and unpopular opinions on replacement guitarists (again, sorry, Richie Sambora). But composer Daniel Hart‘s original earworms do more than soundtrack Lestat’s deeply emotional — and often gory — reckoning with his 200-year-old past. They also recall the bangers of our youth, from sweeping early-’90s power ballads to electrifying ’80s cheerleader chants.
“I made a playlist with 100 songs on it — just three hours worth of music,” says Hart, about early discussions with Reid and creator Rolin Jones on crafting the sound of The Vampire Lestat, the indie rock band the 265-year-old vamp named after himself.
Hart — a genre-hopping composer, who wrote the songs in Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary and the score of Dev Patel’s The Green Knight — lists off the eclectic range of inspirations: Bjork’s 1997 orchestral electronic ballad, “Bachelorette,” Chappell Roan’s, “HOT TO GO!” (a Jones request), Led Zeppelin, Arctic Monkeys, and “Need You Tonight,” by INXS, whose frontman Michael Hutchence shares a similarly seductive baritone with Reid. (The Australian actor also cites Hutchence as an influence for his Lestat portrayal.)
“‘Long Face’ feels very much to me like a nod to glam-rock David Bowie and T. Rex from the early ’70s,” says Hart, about the garage-rock anthem that’s a point of discussion (and mockery) throughout the season.
“Does Lestat listen to Beyoncé?” Hart recalls asking Jones, who responded, “Yes, of course, Lestat listens to Beyoncé.” The trio threw themselves into Lestat’s mindset and what his influences would be — from his 18th-century classical violinist training to his gothic-cabaret headlining performances at the Théâtre des Vampires to Jazz Age New Orleans to whatever he’s asking his Siri to play today.
“Lestat’s going on a different musical journey based on being around for 265 years and seeing a lot of classical music in the first 100 years of his life,” says Hart, a classically trained musician beginning with violin lessons at the tender age of three. (He’s a Suzuki kid — which some Gen X readers, myself included, may find familiar, if not mildly triggering.)
But for the ballad “Your Biggest Fan,” the influences are much more contemporary, while still representing Lestat’s increasingly fraught and spiraling psyche. Lestat recounts his captivity and torture by his obsessed maker, Magnus (Damien Atkins) to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and now-documentarian Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). Despite the setting being 1791 Paris, Lestat's memory unfolds in the soapy visual language of an early-'90s hair-metal power-ballad video, à la Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love.”
“I did not know that they were going to film it that way,” says Hart. “I wrote the song first, and then the scene was built around it.”
In the sequence, amid luminous lighting and Lestat suggestively sniffing a bouquet of ’90s hair-metal–requisite red roses, Magnus’s dangerous stalker obsession emerges through the lyrics: “I got a bottle of wine, and yeah… that’s me at your windowpane.” The montage cuts to a heated argument in a candlelit room as the song pleads, “I want to be your crescendo, babe, don’t let me catch you crying, don’t tell me the spell is breaking, you’re so perfect in that raging light.” Teenage me would have grabbed my Swatch phone to call Dial MTV to request this video, right alongside Warrant’s “I Saw Red” or Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses.”
“I was trying to make a straight-ahead power ballad,” says Hart. “There was a run of films in the late-’80s/early-’90s, each with a romantic power ballad in it — and many of them seemed to be written by Bryan Adams.”
Hart mentions “Everything I Do, I Do It For You,” from Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman,” from Don Juan de Marco, plus Seal‘s “Kiss from a Rose” from Batman Forever as references to pen a power banger that Lestat would have written to satirically send up his turn into vampirism.
“The first time I played [‘Your Biggest Fan’] for Sam Reid, his jaw dropped, and he said something like, ‘Oh my god,’ and then he just started laughing,” says Hart. “Because the idea itself is absurd on its face, it deserved an equally absurd treatment in keeping with the song’s concept.”
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In last Sunday’s episode, Lestat confronts Armand (Assad Zaman), a thorn in his side from his Théâtre des Vampires-era, by openly humiliating the turncoat with the debut of the impossibly catchy, and relentlessly savage anthem, “Big Boss.”
“Hey big boss on the Champs-Élysées, oh no, are you having a bad hair day?” sneers a vengeful, infuriated Lestat, in a sexily subversive glam-grunge rock-god twist on his 18th-century breeches and harlequin makeup. His band echoes the hook, amplifying the vicious taunts.
“I was thinking about Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’ and Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl,’” says Hart, as I silently congratulate myself for catching those references earlier. “I was also thinking about the songs from Grease.”
The infectious refrains also recall cheerleading chants from junior high and high school — the cruelest years, which somehow always feel fresh no matter how much time has passed, even for a vampire. No wonder this devastating, below-the-belt line lands the hardest:
“I know that life is cruel, but you should get your face did. You got a lotta rules for a theater kid,” sings a gleeful Lestat.
“That’s one of my favorite lines that I wrote,” says Hart. “And I’m a theater kid, so it’s absolutely about me as much as anybody else.”
He was also more than game to lean into the show’s wink-wink critique of Lestat’s reflections and reckoning through his songwriting — especially “Long Face,” which the regional vampires think “sucks.” A caustic Molloy also repeatedly mocks its reductive lyrics: “ooh-ooh-ooh-wah-ah.”
“I wrote the first draft of Molloy picking apart ‘Long Face,’ and dissing it. I also wrote the Pitchfork review, which totally trashes Lestat’s album,” says Hart. “That was so much fun for me. I guess I’m at a point in my life where I don’t take myself so seriously anymore.”
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