01 · Case study
The score had to feel earned.
The performance had to belong to Ahmad.
Our Song follows Ahmad, a boy finding his way toward his father through music. I composed the score and advised on the piano performance so the emotional arc and the physical act of playing could tell the same story.
02
His father is a jazz musician. Ahmad does not have the words for what he wants from him, and the piano is the only room where the two of them are the same size.
The brief called for a coming-of-age anthem. Sounding inspirational wasn't enough. The music had to feel like it belonged to these characters, not just to this kind of scene.
The instrument isn't accompanying the story. It is the way the two characters reach each other.
03
Ahmad has ectrodactyly, and the performance is animated in his body. If a passage wasn't playable by the character, the emotional moment stopped being honest too.
Ethan Daniel Zucker and Charlie Zucker, the film's disability consultants, reviewed the score through sheet music, calls, and notes. I also filmed real upright pianos so the animators had hand positions, reach, weight, and pedal timing to work from.
It wasn't enough to write a beautiful passage. Ahmad had to be able to own it.
Talking through the score from the studio's grand.
04
I went to Mexico City to heal and to create, and the score started on foot: walking for days, listening for the emotional shape of the story. I found the first melody on one of those walks and tested it on an upright at La Bestia in Condesa.
It didn't survive. It did tell me which emotion I was reaching for too early, and which fragments were worth carrying forward.
Testing the first melody at La Bestia, Mexico City.
05
I was drawing from gospel and jazz, musical languages that already lived under my hands and made sense for Ahmad's father. A-flat is a key you hear often in Black churches; it sits at home under a lot of hands.
The score needed to sound like something this musician might actually play, not shorthand for a movie dad at a piano.
06
At Shock City Studios, the question was whether the performance could carry Ahmad's whole arc by itself. Sam Maul recorded, mixed, and mastered the final solo piano.
The main theme runs two minutes in three movements: uncertainty, trial and error, then triumph. No strings arrive to tell you what to feel. If the emotion didn't live in the performance, it wasn't there.
The mix at Shock City Studios with Sam Maul.
The soundtrack streams on
Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, TIDAL, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Boomplay, TikTok, Instagram, NetEase Cloud Music, JioSaavn, JOOX, Anghami, FLO, Adaptr, Tencent Music.07
Three pieces follow Ahmad's progression: the main theme, the moment he gets past his fear, and the theme again on an upright, the way it might sound coming out of a musician's house.
Listen here, or take any track straight to Apple Music, Spotify, or TIDAL.
Official selections
