You hear a sinister organ chime followed by a wolf howling in the distance. It’s a Tuesday night in 1999, you’ve finished your homework, you’ve just cracked open a bottle of Wild Cherry Clearly Canadian, and the new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is starting. Life is good.
Self-described “geek rock” band Nerf Herder wrote and recorded two similar versions of the Buffy theme song, one for the first two seasons, and another for seasons 3-onward. After its ominous beginning, the fifty-second intro is an upbeat rock song with no lyrics but plenty of personality. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer intro credits are legendary, a riotous throwback to the days when network television shows weren’t afraid to use up a little screentime on such things.
Audible’s new audio series Slayers hails straight from the Hellmouth, but make no mistake, it’s very much its own thing, and it deserves its own take on the theme song. Read my interview with co-writer/co-director/castmember Amber Benson (Tara Maclay) here, and then put on some headphones and listen to musician Mike Sawitzke’s brand-new updated theme for Slayers.
Sawitzke plays the guitar, bass, trumpet, drums, piano, mandolin and banjo, and he’s a member of the indie bands Eels and Dispatch. He’s also a composer and record producer and happens to be Benson’s boyfriend. So he was the perfect fit for Slayers’ need for an updated intro, and we chatted a little bit about his version of the Buffy theme.
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What was your relationship to the original theme song, if not the original show itself?
Well, I'm probably the one person in this whole thing who never really watched Buffy and doesn’t know much about it. It's probably why I'm able to have a relationship with someone who was on the show. I mean, I was aware of it, but it was not really on my radar very much. So I've learned a lot about it in the time that I've been going to conventions with Amber and meeting fans, and have gotten to know a lot of the cast.
And Buffy is just such a part of the zeitgeist. It's funny, I never remembered the show when it was airing, but I remember it being on Saturdays on UPN all the time. So I was familiar with it from a long time ago, just because it was a thing that was on in repetition.
When you decided that you were going to redo Nerf Herder's theme for Slayers, what was important to you? Did you have any conversations with [co-writer/director] Christopher [Golden] and Amber about tone, or did they let you just take a stab at it and then they came back with notes?
I had this idea – and then Amber and I and Chris talked about it a little bit – that because there was this idea of another universe [existing in the narrative of the show], I wanted to trick the audience into thinking it was the original, at the beginning. So I did the organ and the guitar pick slides – and I'm doing the howl, just so everybody knows.
Are you serious? You nailed it.
We tried to have Amber do it, but she's just too pretty to be a werewolf.
Yeah, she can't be both a witch and a werewolf.
So the idea was to have it sound like it's the original, but then I did this sort of slowed down fake-out, and then it goes into a more modern, sexier, contemporary sounding thing. Initially I was thinking it'd be like, ‘Oh, what if Billie Eilish was doing the theme,’ which I veered away from, but that was the initial feel of it.
And then I needed to use the melody, because I couldn’t not use the melody. And fortunately we were able to get the rights to do it. Then I superimposed my own little melody on top of it and tried to make it cinematic, all in however long it is. It's very quick, so those things can be challenging, to get all these ideas crammed into a short space.
I love the idea that you brought elements of this other reality into it. Were there any instruments you use that aren't in the original? Any techniques that are unique to this version?
Well, the original is basically a rock band. So the only thing really, at the beginning, is the big guitar pick slide sound – that's just guitars. You just take a pick and slide it on the strings, which I stole from the original idea, because I wanted you to think we were going there. But the rest of it's like moody electronic drums, and then I did more of almost a surf guitar, like low on the melody. The original, it's fast, and it's high up on the guitar.
I did this low, almost cowboy guitar, a low sound for the melody, and then put slide guitar on top of it, which none of that's in the original. So sonically, it was very, very different, because I thought, ‘This is a whole new thing, we're taking this into a new direction.’ I just wanted to tip my hat to it more than try to make it sound like the original.
And there was some talk of, ‘Oh, we just need to do the original thing.’ And I thought, 'Well, we could do that, but that's not very much fun.’ And I knew it was going to go one or two ways: people are going to think it's cool, or they're going to be horrified that it's not the thing that they've been listening to for their whole lives.
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This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Listen to Sawitzke's theme in all its glory and gory context on Audible's Slayers!
