Interview: "Seinfeld" and "Will & Grace" Composer Jonathan Wolff on the Business of Film and TV Music in and Outside of Hollywood Marketing

What do you think of when you imagine the word "Hollywood?" Is it glamourous actresses preparing themselves for the Oscars red carpet? Or is it all about business? Every day, people in the film and music portions of what we call "Hollywood," which is now located everywhere as a global industry ranging from Southern California to Britain to the edge of Middle Earth in New Zealand, hold business talks like you might hear on Wall Street, or at your office.

Jonathan Wolff is one of the only living composers whose work is recognisable and popular with people who don't follow the film and television scoring industry. Composing TV music themes for "Seinfeld" and "Will & Grace" and working on many handfuls of other shows you watched growing up at times, sometimes appearing on camera as an actor, Mr. Wolff learned in his illustrious career about creating your own opportunities.

You might be a current or future film score composer. You could an entrepreneur, or a business student. Maybe you are an actor working on your new headshots, seeking a better talent agency. What Mr. Wolff discusses in this interview is relatable to every professional goal, and I hope you are as happy as I am having him as a guest to discuss the business of Hollywood.

NOTE: This interview has been transcribed from the original CinematNIC podcast episode.

Regarding when you were younger, you told Vice, “No matter how cool that studio was, if it was in your home, they’re not bringing their clients there. So I bought a commercial building in Burbank, California, right in the heart of studio town on Burbank Boulevard. I could ride my bike to Warner Brothers or Disney, ABC, Burbank Studios.” Now that things are about people working from home offices with film and television music, what would you recommend as a wise business investment for one’s career?

Hi, Nicole, thank you for sending me those questions and for giving me an opportunity to answer them! Your first question, now that things are about people working from home offices with film and television music, what would you recommend as a wise business investment for one's career? Yes, things have changed a lot since I was a working composer. I retired in 2005, and now a lot of people work from home, and I think that's awesome. Here's my best advice to someone I've never met.

Take an inventory of your people skills. Make sure that you are well rounded, emotionally stable and likeable in each professional setting. In addition to your talents and excellent work standards, you should place great value on the human connections to everyone around you. In media or music production, assignments will come and go, but if the relationships are strong, your career will also be strong. Maybe your website and your YouTube and SoundCloud examples are great, and having a good demo reel or a cool video project is nice. However, people don't hire videos or websites. People hire people.

To establish your music for media business, just like any small business, you'll need those solid relationships. In person relationships guarantee repeat business, customer loyalty, brand recognition, referrals. If you want to compete with a younger version of me, you'll have to have those relationships in person, which means if you don't live in LA, you might want to consider that. Once your loyal client list and your reputation for excellence is established, you can go back to wherever you want to live and continue to work for those loyal clients.

That's my experience. Here's some more advice, since you asked, Make sure that your technical skills, production, sound design, recording arts are as strong as your music skills. Spend as much time as possible now in the studio creating an eclectic selection of music recordings, because you'll need that experience. Have a thorough, intimate knowledge of different microphones. Be fluent on plugins, signal processors, mix tools, synthesis modules. Speed and efficiency will matter when you're fighting deadlines or trying to land a gig.

When I started as a studio musician in LA, my most beneficial assets were things like much studio experience as a player, an engineer, when I was younger, the ability to play authentically in a wide range of music types and styles, sight reading, sight transposing was a necessary skill for me it as an accompanist. You’ll need a wide range of music skills, arranging, orchestration, sound design, synth programming, music, editing, conducting. In a word training. Get yourself as much training as possible. That investment will pay you back many times over.

Other things for your to do list! Read the trades every day. I used to read The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety.

Join organisations. There are a bunch of them. You can start with the SEL, the Society of Composers and Lyricists. And if you're not in LA or New York, plan a trip to one of those places to coincide with an SEL event. Volunteer to help at the event. Meet some folks. The SCL has a mentoring program. It's important that you stand and be counted among your peers as a music composer, a creator, and joining these organisations gives you that opportunity and gives you voice. I hope this helps.

I loved the second half of the quote: “No one was hiring me for such a job. Such a job didn’t exist. So I created it for myself.” Nowadays, you would be one of many fish in a full ocean saying you are a composer. You see as many people on social media saying they’re audio engineers, producers, and/or film/TV composers like you do the many thousands of actors online. It’s no longer only about having talent. How would you be marketing yourself to stand out if you started now?

The truth is, if I was starting out now, I have no idea how I would be marketing myself because when I retired, there was no Instagram, Facebook, TikTok marketing. There was very little online marketing at all, so I am not the expert for that question. I know that's kind of a cop out answer. But that is the answer.

You asked me to tell stories about my experience, so here's a story about how I got out of the pile in marketing, I used a lot of tricks. I tried all kinds of stuff to distinguish myself from the rest of the herd of composers, and some were successful and some failed miserably. Here's a story of one way that worked.

People of a certain age will remember when lawyers first started advertising on buses and on billboards, and it was kind of “low class.” It was kinda gauche. People thought it was smarmy. “What kind of a lawyer advertises? Certainly not ‘high class' law firms; respectable lawyers didn't do that.”

Well, I was that composer that started advertising before composers and agencies did that. In my former answer, I said that I read the trades every day, well, I started advertising in them because my target clients I knew were reading those trades, and I needed to establish some brand recognition. People needed to know my company. They needed to know my name, and by seeing it repeatedly in their trades that they read every day, I developed… it was fake, it was shallow, plastic, artificial, but people started to recognise my name from these ads, and some of the ads were a little bit rude.

Pilots were a necessary evil for me. Pilots, which is a test episode of a series before it becomes a series... You don't make money. There's no glory. It's a lot of work for very little return because most pilots fail. But it's an opportunity to meet new people, and maybe this pilot fails, but the next one might succeed, so I did a lot of pilots with a lot of young talented writers. One year at pilot season, I took an ad in The Hollywood Reporter, full page ad, right in that pilots issue, which is a big issue for The Hollywood Reporter, where they list all of the pilots by network, who the producers are, who's starring in it. Because I knew who reads that list, other people with pilots 'cause they wanna know who their competition is. My full page ad had the following words: “We've had a hand in more pilots than an Air Force proctologist.” And it had my phone number. Yeah, maybe it's a little rude and graphic, but my phones went crazy, I had to bring in extra people to handle the phone call volume. Some people were interested, “Who wrote that? Well, who are you? What do you do?” And some people were offended. I did their pilots too.

I even got heat for it from other composers. I remember one phone call in particular from a composer. A veteran, a legend, whom I admire and respect professionally, musically, personally, and he said, “Young man, this is not what we do. We are a respectable lot. Our body of work speaks for itself.” And he, of course, was correct about that, and I said, “Yeah, I know, and this may feel miserably, I'll let you know,” and we had a respectful conversation and a difference of opinion on whether I should be advertising. Like I said, my phones went crazy. We did 40+ pilots that year, ended up with five series in one mid-season replacement all from one silly proctology joke. The point of all this: you gotta try different things and get out of the pile.

The sign of a job well done is when people so closely tie music to a show or film that the average person who doesn’t nerd out over music remembers it long after the pop culture moment has passed. We can say this about the Star Wars theme as an example, and your Seinfeld music. Was this luck for you, or is there a magic formula for getting the perfect modern entertainment theme?

There is no real how to pamphlet for this, Nicole, no secret sauce. Sometimes it's obvious how to get a good theme, and sometimes, I'd have to find the clues. Sometimes, the shows characters, situation or geography would inspire musical thoughts. The time slot and target audience could also influence the musical sensibilities. Often, I'd factor in the personal music taste of the producers.

However, coming up with a hit theme, the right theme, which mostly requires experience, practise, good instincts and listening skills is not the biggest challenge for a competent composer, songwriter. You don't need luck. You need those skills that I just mentioned, but here is where some luck comes into play when multiple layers of the approval process, producers, studio, network disagree on what is the right musical approach. The assignment becomes part composer, part diplomat, and you need a little bit of luck to be working with people who are creative and have courage. Sometimes, a producer would allow me to create a new species of music like Jerry Seinfeld did, but that requires ignoring some rules to break from convention. The producers have to also dare to be musically different from all other shows. The more parties involved in the music approval chain, the less likely that everyone will be open to such risk taking.

The real challenge is to create music that is unique but will still somehow meet with approval from everyone involved. For me, the ability to successfully shepherd an extraordinary theme through that process was a skill I acquired painfully after many failures, so that's where luck comes in. Again, you asked me to tell stories, so yes, there was a lot of luck in my story and my journey that led to me being a full time composer.

For starters, even though I was born into a normal middle class working family in Kentucky with no artists of any kind in my family, my family was supportive. I was lucky like that. We didn't even know any artists. But I got excellent training. Wonderful teachers. Again, that was luck. Here's one bit of luck in that department. My adolescents in teen music training happened in the basement at the time, local music teacher, his name Aebersold, Jamie is now a world renowned jazz educator, but at the time, he was just a guy who trained kids in his basement. There were four of us in that basement. I know that sounds creepy, but it was not. It was awesome and amazing. We were Jamie's lab rats. So yes, that was lucky.

Here's something else where luck played a role because my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky, was at the time a rather small pond. As an adolescent and teen, I was able to acquire valuable professional experience. I joined the union at 13 because I was already working in restaurants, jazz clubs. I was doing chamber concerts. Eventually musical director jobs for opera and theatre and producing local recording artists. It was a way cool way to spend my youth, and that was lucky, because when I got to LA, sure, there were better musicians than me, and when I became a composer, I was certainly not the best composer in LA, but I had a lot of experience, and that was lucky.

And if you want an even longer answer, Nicole, here's a story about luck in the studios. Before I had earned the title of full time composer, I worked as a studio musician, an orchestrator, conductor for other composers. There were a couple of times when I was working as a conductor where bad luck fell into play. Once, I was on a scoring stage, 30, 40 players on the floor conducting for another composer, and the carnage truck carrying all the percussion gear got stuck in something bad on the freeway. No, percussion. We still had to do the date. You have all these players there, and the studio is expensive, so I conducted the date and we had to book more time later to add the percussion. Fortunately, this was a very busy LA composer, and he had sessions every few days, so we were able to piggy back onto one of those next sessions. It didn't cost a lot of extra money. It just caused a delay in the post production schedule.

There was another time. It was even worse. I was conducting a date for another composer at Evergreen Studios, which like my office later, was at the edge of Burbank’s power grid kind of near North Hollywood. And so when there was instability in the power grid, we were the first to experience it in those neighbourhoods, and the power went out. Again, you got a whole orchestra sitting there, no power, and that's just bad luck. So yes, luck does play a role in the life of a composer, so what you gotta try and do maybe is to limit the variables if you can, so that you can rely more on your skill, your experience, your expertise, your talent, and not so much on luck.

You recreated the Seinfeld opening theme every week. How did you have something original for every single one of those and never get bored?

Thanks for asking about that Seinfeld opening. It was a unique challenge. A unique situation for me, in that Jerry described to me the opening credits for his new show to be Jerry Seinfeld standing in front of a group of people, he tells jokes, they laugh, and he wanted signature music to go with it. My pitch was to make his human voice like the melody of the Seinfeld theme. Each different monologue would be like a variation on the theme, and my job would be to accompany him in a fun musical, quirky way. As far as I knew, nobody had ever designed music to be modularly manipulatable to fit the timings, the lines, the jokes, the punch lines of a comedian’s routine. So I was not sure of my footing here, but I knew that I was gonna have to recreate for each monologue a new recording of the Seinfeld theme.

The musical elements remain consistent from show to show, but the way they were put together, I had to adapt to those timings. Sometimes, like a vaudeville drummer would hit rim shots to punctuate a joke, I used the slap bass to accomplish that, and that slap bass was Frankenstein engineered from multiple sampled-based guitars.  lot of sound editing, compression, EQ, phase manipulations went into making that sonic brand. It was fun for me to have that kind of assignment every week.

Remember, when I first started doing it, there was no digital audio. There were not even timing computers to help me figure out how to fit into his comedy, so yes, at first, it took me a long time to do each monologue and it could take me three or four hours at first. After I got better at it, more efficient, speedier at it, then I could sometime within season two or so, I was down to about an hour to create the music for a monologue. At some point, maybe season 7 or 8, we no longer did opening monologues for the last couple of seasons, so that took that particular chore off my plate, but by that time we had digital audio, so it wasn't that hard to do. I could move pieces of music around by seeing Jerry's voice, which took a lot of guess work out of it, a lot of trial and error, so it was a wonderful, fun assignment.

It never got boring. It was always exciting to be able to work with his tempos. His presentation had a lyric and rhythmic quality to it, which I would use to give me meter, and I would design little musical bits around his physical comedy when he did little dance moves, or I could put those moves to music and make them look like dance. So it was always kind of exciting. I was never bored with it, and he inspired a lot of variations simply through his brilliant comedy routines.

You taught Arnold Schwarzenegger how to act as a violinist in “Stay Hungry,” and you have acted on camera as musicians! It’s funny how all people ask you about is how you met Jerry Seinfeld. Who are some great people you worked with or have positive stories about that have never been shared?

As the composer on a bunch of TV series. I got to pick and choose which assignments I kept for myself and which assignments I would bring in other musicians for. For example, sometimes the on set piano accompanist position was just too tempting for me to pass up, for example, on Will & Grace. When Patti LuPone was our guest star, I went down to the set and accompanied her live, and on Seinfeld in the episode, “The Jimmy,” I accompanied Mel Tormé live for when he's singing to Kramer. Those were really fun assignments that are not necessarily within the composer's job description, but I took them anyway.

And you asked about great people I worked with. While working toward my goal of being a ful time TV composer, I did TV music odd jobs in the 70’s and 80’s. For example, the Aaron Spelling, ABC TV series, Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. For those shows, my assignments were to create the musical arrangements and rehearse with our guests and record with those weekly musical guest artists. It was formulaic and routine work, but it served as essential on the job training and paid the bills until my composing career began.

There were hundreds of Love Boat and Fantasy Island recording sessions. That's not hyperbole. I've long forgotten most of them, but I remember a few of them. I remember recording just piano and voice with Jennifer Holiday. I think she sang “Good Morning Heartache." And Andy Griffith, Bobby Short, George Burns, The Temptations, Paul Williams, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, Florence Henderson. There were a bunch of them. Every season, they would have these four wonderful guests together, Ethel Merman, Ann Miller, Carol Channing, Della Reese, and it was always an honour and a privilege to rehearse with them and write their arrangements and record with them every year, and I just came to respect and admire them even more every year.

Some of these assignments were musical war crimes, like recording with Charo the song, “Let's Get Physical." Fortunately, I think those statute of limitations have expired, but it was a really great way for me to use my eclectic training in a practical way. So thanks for asking.

Oh! Here's another story. When Debbie Reynolds and I met again many years later on the set of Will & Grace, we reminisced about working together on her musical Love Boat performance with the amazing impressionist Marilyn Michaels. Sure, it was corny. But as Debbie told me, corny was an essential element in the success formula for the Love Boat.

You are from Kentucky and I want to say so because as a young person, I always loved admiring people with entertainment careers who didn’t grow up spending weekends at Aaron Spelling’s estate. Someone out there now might find you inspirational. What happened between you wanting to have a music career in Kentucky and your story about financing your office to make it real?

As I said before, I was very lucky as a teenager in Kentucky to have a lot of practical experience as a professional musician in a wide range of musical applications, so when I arrived in LA in 1976, I had excellent training and good experience. So for the next 10 years between ’76 and 1986, my career was a seemingly scattered patchwork of overlapping assignments. The studios were happy to have a utility guy like me to treat as a Swiss Army multi-purpose utility tool for their musical chores. I worked as a studio musician, and those years included the synth revolution. I was an accompanist, an arranger, recording engineer, orchestrator, a music producer, and by the way, those years also included the home recording tech explosion. I worked sometimes as a composer and songwriter for hire. I was a music copyist, a conductor for hire, a sketch pianist. Mostly for choreographers. I had the donor of working with the great Dee Dee Wood and Jaime Rogers, Walter Painter, Sylvia Lewis, a bunch of other great choreographers. I was a music editor, and remember, when I started music editing, there was no digital audio. I learned to cut mag with sprockets. I was an electronic sound designer. I worked at night and weekends as a party pianist. I had some regular clients who had really nice pianos, Zubin Mehta, Mayor Bradley, Burt Bacharach, each hired me for their house parties on a regular basis. I was a touring musician during strikes, which happened fairly regularly. Every few years, there'd be some industry strike, because Hollywood is very much a union town, and if any combination of powerful unions has a contract expiring at the same time. it made for a perfect storm for a strike. When I say powerful unions, I mean the actors or teamsters, writers.

So when that happened, I would take my thimble full of talent and my bag full of skills and go on the road playing with rock bands, or eventually, I figured out I could write and conduct Vegas acts. For three years, I kept a place at Caesar's Palace and my home in Burbank, and I flew back and forth every day. I worked all day in the studios and got on that 6 pm flight to McCarran from Burbank Airport. I would do the early show, and right in between do the late show, maybe take a nap, and then first thing in the morning fly back to Burbank. I kept a car at both airports, and that was my life. I didn't sleep at all. But when you're young and hungry, who needs sleep? Two of my Vegas acts, Tom Jones and Diana Ross, shared the same opening act: brilliant comic George Wallace. I wrote little songs for George for his act, and he and I became friends. Years later, it turns out that Jerry Seinfeld in real life has a best friend named George. It’s George Wallace!

George introduced me to Jerry Seinfeld, and that's how I got that particular assignment. I also did on set chores for the studios. I was a production music consultant. An actor’s coach for musician and singer roles. I was even a screen actor myself, and may I say, an awful screen actor. That may be my biggest distinction is that I was perhaps Hollywood's worst actor. I had a recurring role, a speaking role as an actor on the TV series Knott’s Landing, where I basically played myself. I was the piano player named John, accompanying the main character, who was played by Lisa Hartman, who's now Lisa Hartman Black, who was an excellent singer, I’d write little songs and we'd record them live on camera. I once got a phone call at home from a friend who was a director, whom I worked with on Square Pegs. I was the composer for Square Pegs. Kim Freeman called, and I thought she was calling to talk about Square Pegs, but she wasn’t. She was starting in the rotation of directors for Knott’s Landing, and she's going through the Bible with the execs, and they're talking about the arcing story lines and the characters, and they got to one character, and they told her, "Kim, don't try to direct him. He just gets worse.”

And she thought it would be funny to call and tell me what they tell their visiting directors about me. By the way, none taken. I knew I was a terrible actor, but these were the kind of jobs I did while earning the title of full-time composer.

How do you feel when artists or their fans sample or remix the Seinfeld theme? It’s gotten pretty popular. You now indirectly have hip hop street cred for the Kendrick Lamar mashup. You’re cooler than your children.

First, I gotta say this, I love that video of Vampire Weekend playing my Seinfeld theme at Lollapalooza, and it was cool to hear it in an episode of The Simpsons and in movies like Contact, but the most fun are those Seinfeld theme YouTube mashups, Kendrick Lamar, Notorious BIG, Limp Bizkit, or some of the coolest ones, Kanye West. There’s several of those. Disturbed, Radiohead, Evanescence, ODB, Vanilla Ice. So weird and yet, so wonderful. The talented folks are still having fun in creative ways with a simple, basic, sophomore music piece I created more than 30 years ago.

Now, there are thousands of these Seinfeld YouTube vids and mashups that use my music, and they are all unauthorised and unlicensed, most of which are amateur performances, which served to highlight the useful value of my theme. So I feel good about that. Even separate from the show, the Seinfeld music is an ambassador and advertisement for the show, recruiting new viewers for the show Seinfeld. Often at my college lectures, students will tell me that they only started watching Seinfeld after getting hooked on my theme by watching these YouTube vids. The only element from Seinfeld included in most of these mashups is the music. No Seinfeld actors, producers or scripts, just the music, but the entire show and its broadcasters and other distributors like Hulu or Netflix benefit from this free, viral, crowdsourced marketing. So I consider these projects just another helpful boost to Seinfeld. They are cheering for the show and celebrating that they are fans of the show, and these videos are confetti at the parade. Thanks for asking.

You are with SESAC, an invitation only PRO, which for those not in the music industry stands for a performing rights organisation. Some like Taylor Swift stick with the old fashioned BMI or ASCAP. Is there any benefit to choosing one performing rights organisation over another as a musician?

Excellent question, but before I answer it, I want to point out that for any musician or any creator, it's important to understand the business side, in this case, of music, intellectual properties, copyright, publishing, licensing and, yes, royalties, baby. The working knowledge and understanding that you acquire from learning about this stuff will help you make decisions based on those understandings towards your goals, whatever your goals are, and which PRO to join is one of those choices. So now let's get to your question.

ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. All good organisations. All do excellent work. Important work. One of those categories of business topics that I should add to my list is consent decrees. ASCAP and BMI function under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. They are obligated to the terms of a consent decree, which was imposed many years ago on them, because of misdeeds of a few individuals who are all dead by now, so this is from a long time ago. SESAC was around during that time. But no misdeeds and no consent decrease imposed. Me personally, I think it's time for that inequity to be lifted. It’s time for a willing buyer, willing seller, free open marketplace among PROs. That's just my opinion.

Yes, I'm a member of SESAC because for my situation, SESAC offers certain benefits because my catalog includes some particularly compelling copyrights. What I mean by compelling is some of my themes are must play material in markets all around the world, which means that SESAC has the opportunity to collect from these distributors, broadcasters and streamers on my behalf, and I'm able to enjoy a higher royalty rate because of it. In general, I believe that the monetary value of the music royalties in a television show should be tied into the success enjoyed by the TV show and its broadcasters. Sure, the wardrobe, set furnishings, building exteriors, props, they are each important and necessary, but a good TV theme for a hit show is a bespoke, non-fungible production element. We’ll take the Seinfeld theme, for example. It's an essential creative component of the show. It is a key branding element that elevates the recognition value of the show. It’s a unique, memorable, unmistakable signature for Seinfeld, with Pavlovian powers of your “here's that familiar theme.” Sometimes from another room with their head in a refrigerator, and there's an automatic response, “Ooh, let's watch Seinfeld. You cannot divorce the Seinfeld music from its association with the show, and if you removed my music from a Seinfeld episode and replaced it with a different music, it would have a negative effect on the value of the show and its broadcasters.

In an interview with Howard Stern, when Stern joked and accrued a negative way on air about how lucky Jonathan Wolff is to get so much money in royalties, Jerry Seinfeld corrected Howard Stern without hesitation. Jerry said, “Why shouldn't he get paid for contributing?” Jerry understands that the music creator should share proportionally in the monetary success. It’s important that we as a copyright community recognise the increased monetary value that music brings to a successful TV show, and for me, SESAC was able to pay me at a higher rate because of the what they call compelling nature of my theme song. Whereas before at ASCAP, I was paid a standard rate for a TV theme, I got paid the same amount for a hit show as I did for one of my many flops, and it bugged me. And that is the reason why I chose SESAC, but like I said, everybody should do their own research. The information is out there, there's really good books and articles, so you can educate yourself and make informed decisions for yourself. For a lot of people, ASCAP or BMI is a better choice for you.

“You don't land 75 steady TV composing gigs by just being good at music” is another amazing quote of yours I found on a deep Google search. An interesting thing happening to me and a few others I meet now and then chatting openly: sometimes when we go through life doing whatever we’re supposed to be doing, nothing works out. Our successes, small or big, arrive when we do whatever is unpopular. Yes, you did take a risk with the Seinfeld theme. What else have you done that isn’t supposed to be how it goes in entertainment or business and have it work out well for you?

That very question was the basis for an in-residence I did at Yale University, a series of lectures about that. So to answer it here, I'll try and be really brief. I can already hear your [podcast] listeners yawning. When I first declared myself a composer, you already know that my marketing strategy was simple: get out of the pile. This was pre-Internet. The way that TV composers got their jobs was through their agent. The most powerful agents in Hollywood represented the top Hollywood composers. To an entry level composer like me, the names on the agency rosters were really intimidating, and they looked like a pile. No agent for me. I knew that this might exclude me from some jobs, but it also gave me a sales weapon that I used often to separate me from the pile.

Another choice I made, that was not the way it's supposed to go has to do with spec demos. Sometimes, producers as composers to create a theme on spec, which means for free, and because they're free, there's no limit to the number of spec themes they can collect. There's always a box of them at every job I showed up for as the composer. There’d be desks and telephones and writers and sets, and a box of spec demos, another pile. Songwriters and composers would spend time, energy, love, talent, creating a spec theme for free hoping that maybe their theme would be chosen as the theme for this new show.

I’m here to tell you that does not work. The system is broken, and how I know that? I used to be in that box. I did hundreds of spec demos. I was on the list of people they'd call asking for spec demos until finally, I said, “No.  I'll tell you what. Do your spec demos, and if you find exactly what you're looking for, great, hire that person, but if you don't strike lightning, remember this conversation. My name is Wolff. Can you call me back, and I will do a demo for you. And the next day, another. The next day, another. And every day I will meet with the deciders, so that just as your script gets revised every day to get closer to the one you shoot, your theme song will be a collaborative effort in the same way, and we'll get closer and closer to what you want as opposed to all those spec demos, which are each a first draft. But before I do all that, you have to hire me.” And eventually, people started hiring me. If you put out there that the value of your services is well, free, zero, it's not the fault of the employers who are predisposed to agree with you about your value. It wasn't until I stopped doing the spec demos that people started hiring me over and over again. That spec demo pile, I removed myself from an actual pile.

When you say you are now retired, are you retired from everything in life or only creating music? Are you working on anything now at all? What are you up to these days in general?

I was the composer for 75 primetime network TV series. I was flavour of the month for about 10 years, and it was good for business, but the long hours were not good for my home life. My wife and I decided that my family needed me more than Hollywood needed more of my music. And so in 2005, I retired, went into a self imposed Hollywood witness protection relocation program in Kentucky, and yes, it was sad to leave a couple of my shows while they were still popular and in production like Reba. Yeah,.How fun was it to be Reba’s resident songwriter and composer? But Reba understood and wished me well. Same with Will and Grace. That was still on the air when I left. They threw me a lovely retirement party, and my family and I moved to Kentucky.

I became a full-time stay at home dad, PTA room parent, a sports coach volunteer, a field trip chaperone. As for creating music, I am happily, fully retired. Had a nice long turn at that. Hit the ball hard. Now, it's somebody else's turn. There are plenty of young, hot, energetic, eager, talented composers like yourself, Nicole. It's your turn. Hit it hard. I'm cheering for you. I love hearing what's coming out among young composers these days. Makes me happy.

So what do I do? If you're listening and you're good at math, you know that those kids that I retired to raise, they're all grown now, and when they went off to college, instead of volunteering at their elementary schools and handing out cupcakes and glue sticks, I started lecturing at their colleges, and it became a thing. I became a very busy university lecturer. Here’s a useless factoid. I have guest lectured at every Ivy League school, mostly I lecture at law schools, and music conservatories. It's a wonderful way for me to give back and travel, so thanks for asking. That's what I do. Oh, by the way, after all those series, there was only one show for which I ever really wanted to release a soundtrack album, and that was Seinfeld, and Seinfeld soundtrack album was recently released July 2021. So I've been busy doing interviews about that also. If you're listening [to this podcast] and you're interested, it is for now available only digitally, wherever you get music, Spotify or Apple, Amazon, all of them. So, thanks for asking about what I'm doing now. That’s what I'm doing now.

A question I pose to many because I want everyone to see people as human beings. What are your hobbies? Fav foods? Things you love? Since you have children, are you someone who tells ridiculous dad jokes?

I've taken up speed reading, I can read War and Peace in 20 seconds. It's only three words, but it's a start. Did that answer your dad joke question?

My hobbies, I do a lot of design and build projects. I’m good with my hands, skilled with tools and anything mechanical. So I've been doing that a lot. We live in a big, historic, wooden house, which constantly needs to be rebuilt. So that's fun for me.

We're at the edge of a great forested park. I run every day in the park. I’m into fitness. My retirement gift to myself was a beautiful gym upstairs in the tree canopy with big windows. It’s a CrossFit box, so I'm in there every day and every night. My wife and I binge watch TV shows in the gym. So I'm trying to stay healthy.

You asked about my favourite foods. I’m a vegetarian, I try to eat healthy, except when travelling. This interview is taking place in 2021, so if you're listening in the future, COVID still makes the world unsafe for travel right now. When the world is safer, we will resume our travel. We do adventure travels all over the world. Thanks for asking.

And Nicole, thank you for this interview. It's been a blast. If anybody wants to reach out to me, my social media handle is @seinfeldmusicguy. Love to hear from you.