Last fall, I had the pleasure of meeting up and chatting with two successful Hollywood film composers (Charlie Clouser & Lyle Workman), each in their respective home studios. Interestingly, what they both have in common is years of touring and recording with various bands before they ended up in their current careers. Read on to find out more about their different approaches to composing music for films and television. -JB

I met Lyle Workman back when we were both living in Sacramento, California, in the late ‘80s. He had moved there to play in the band Bourgeois Tagg, which had signed to Island Records and were a local success story. I had moved back after college, and was working at a local recording studio. We’d see each other here and there at shows, but for some reason I seem to recall bumping into him at Tower Video more than a few times, which seems slightly prescient now that he’s a well-known film composer. I was younger than most of the guys in the more successful bands, and not really a part of the more established music scene in Sacto at the time, but Lyle was always friendly to me. Bourgeois Tagg broke up, and Lyle went on to play with Todd Rundgren (who had produced the second and final Bourgeois Tagg album, Yoyo), Frank Black, Beck, and Sting before moving to Los Angeles and eventually becoming a successful film composer. I’d bump into Lyle every few years at NAMM, so it was nice to finally find some time to meet him at his home studio in Glendale, and connect the dots on his path between Sacramento and Hollywood.

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