They gathered in a 100-year-old Gothic church-turned-recording studio a number of blocks from Nashville's Vanderbilt campus. Eighty-five musicians, with their brass, wind and percussion instruments, cycled through the sanctuary to contribute to a singular task: recording a song that matched the grandeur of the return of a faculty football video game.
Outside, a spring storm roared and a horde of cicadas chirped incessantly. Inside, the orchestra played “Campus Clash,” the theme song for EA Sports College Football 25, arguably essentially the most eagerly anticipated sports video game of the past decade.
Steve Schnur, Electronic Arts' worldwide general manager and president of music, felt the sport's revival deserved a song that was unique yet true to the game's traditional sound. He commissioned Emmy-winning composer Kris Bowers to create an arrangement and assembled the orchestra to provide an original song that may stand out from the sport's extensive library of fight songs and riot songs.
A video game soundtrack can quickly turn out to be catchy as players sink hours into the sport. It must be not only bearable, but additionally enjoyable on repeat. That could be especially the case with College Football 25, which was released this week after an 11-year hiatus because the last NCAA football game.
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“Campus Clash” includes a strong horn melody and a cool drumline beat with loads of oomph. It wouldn’t be misplaced as a hype-boosting theme for a prime-time game broadcast, but Schnur is adamant that nostalgia isn’t the one ingredient.
“It's not going to sound like the band you heard on the field of a marching band in 1985 or 2005,” he said.
More than 2,000 miles from Nashville, Bowers listened to the recording while working in his Los Angeles studio. Best known for composing scores for Green Book and The Color Purple, in addition to the hit Netflix series Bridgerton, Bowers can also be a video game veteran. He composed for 2 previous Madden versions and likewise wrote the principal themes for the upcoming Madden 25 and NHL 25 games.
Bowers, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees in jazz performance from the Juilliard School, didn't get much exposure to the sounds of school sports as an undergraduate, since the distinguished performing arts school doesn't have sports teams. To write something that fit the game-day atmosphere, he studied the sound of school marching bands. Schnur sent him the sport's fight songs to “get a feel for little drumline phrases that might be interesting to adopt for the original composition,” Bowers said.
“It's definitely a mix of sounds, but the most important thing for us was that it has that balance between a classic football theme that we've heard before, but also a modern twist that's a little different from the things you've heard on TV for decades,” Bowers said.
To achieve this, Bowers drew on contemporary brass band pieces and focused on hip-hop songs with brass melodies. Beyoncé's 2018 Coachella performance, which paid homage to HBCUs, and Mystikal's “Bouncin' Back (Bumpin' Me Against The Wall)” were two big sources of inspiration.
Bowers begins his composition process by drawing out the emotion of the scene (or on this case, the sport). He wants the piece to present him that very same feeling. Composing for video games will be difficult, as there aren’t any narrative beats to guide a changing sound or accentuating note like there are in shows and flicks. For this release, it was all about creating something that may excite players.
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The goal is for the problem to transcend the sport and turn out to be embedded in college football culture.
“Hopefully in the future we can record other bands playing their versions of it,” Bowers said. “Now that we have this version of it, while we want the melody and the main melodic aspect of the theme to remain, we want it to have a life of its own in terms of the way it's played and performed from now on. If people really embrace that, ideally we can celebrate other schools playing their versions.”
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