Arcane Season 2 Songwriter, Composer & Executive Music Producer Alex Seaver On Going Bigger & Bolder Than Ever

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Screen Rant’s Arcane season 2 Act I review praised the series as a stunning continuation of the first season’s successes. The new season even levels up from its predecessor in some ways, however, especially when it comes to music. Alex Seaver, also known as the musical artist Mako, was a co-composer and songwriter on Arcane season 1, and his role expanded to that of Executive Music Producer in the second season. Seaver was tasked with incorporating even more custom-made songs into the show and further integrating them into the story.

Arcane Season 2 Act 1 Ending Explained

Arcane season 2, act 1 takes the show's heroes on another emotional rollercoaster - while the true power of the Arcane threatens to destroy Piltover.

Screen Rant spoke with Alex Seaver about his work crafting the Arcane season 2 soundtrack. Seaver detailed the way in which songs were written to picture (a rare choice, as typically only musical scores are composed that way), discussed how artists were chosen to participate on the soundtrack, and more. Seaver also spoke to how he created a brand new Mako song for a special musical season 2 moment.

Alex Seaver Talks Going Bigger & Bolder As The Executive Music Producer Of Arcane Season 2

Arcane Season 2 Utilized Music In New, Deeper Ways

Jinx and Vi looking angry and ready to come to blows in Arcane Season 2

Screen Rant: You have a bigger role this season, as Executive Music Producer. How did that change your day-to-day after everything you did on season 1?

Alex Seaver: For season one, I was just involved in the songs that I was specifically working on. We only had 11 in total, and I probably did half of them. On season two, the difference was [that] I was probably still writing, I don't know, half of the songs or something, but even [for] the ones that I had nothing to do with, I was with the artists from day one—briefing them, getting them through the process, [and] giving them feedback. I'm usually laying in their songs to picture as well, so I'm editing them in, and just overall being a cheerleader for those people so that they could get a piece of music over the line that they were proud of that also works for Arcane, which is kind of a very specific machine.

How did you want to go bigger than the first season for this?

Alex Seaver: The first thing is just volume. Fortiche and Christian (Linke), our showrunner, asked for double the amount of songs. They wanted two song beats per episode rather than one in season one.

Then, in [terms of] the depth of how the songs integrate to picture, we wanted to push it even further. In season one we sort of invented this thing, which is we're film scoring our songs to picture rather than licensing songs and just editing them in. We're actually writing the lyrics to what's happening on screen as it's happening on screen. I don't know a ton of other examples of shows and movies that do that, other than maybe animated musicals and stuff. It was really hard and it took a lot of growing pains to figure out how to get it right and do it in the right order.

So, by the time we got to season two, we're like, “Okay, cool. Now we have a sense of how to do this. Let's start messing around with convention and really weave songs in.” One of my favorites that we just released is called “Sucker” from episode two. It's at the very beginning of the episode and it’s this fantastical medley thing. It starts as a music video, but starts getting interrupted by things on screen—Jinx fake shoots herself in the head with a little poof of smoke, so the song stops right then, and then it [comes] back in. We were just messing around with how we could make this thing disappear into the fabric of the scene even more.

Story-wise, was there anything that gave you an opportunity to do something different with the songs or the score?

Alex Seaver: Big time, yeah. We did a couple brand new things. I don't want to spoil one of them, but there's a moment in episode seven where we do something brand new with a song that we'd never done before. Another example is in episode three—there's a song called “To Ashes and Blood” that I did with Woodkid. That one was so crazy because Christian wanted us to write from the perspective of an ancient people in the world of League of Legends. These people are called Shuriman, and he wanted us to invent a new language that doesn't exist—Shuriman—to be chanted along. He wanted a very exotic, unsettling, ancient song. I worked with the lore team at Riot [and] this really talented guy who invented a language for me. Then, I set it to song, and then we had a children's choir chanting it. [There were things] like that where you're like, “Man, I have never done these five things before.” We certainly didn't aim that high in season one.

Seaver Explains How Arcane’s Songs Were Written For The Screen

It’s A Combination Of Very Different Skill Sets

Arcane season 2 teaser image featuring Warwick and Signed

Songwriting to picture seems like the absolute best of both worlds. Can you talk about more about how that process works and not only how that's harder, but just how that benefits you? Like you said, I haven't heard of anybody else doing that.

Alex Seaver: They're two different disciplines, so not a lot of people who write songs know how to deal with picture and not a lot of film composers know how to write a typical pop-formatted song. And it's for a reason—when you're doing a cue for a film score, and they send you a new cut of animation where they've cut out 20 frames, you now need to use your classical background to go, “Okay, if I make this a 6/8 bar and I speed up the tempo for two bars, now I can hit the new picture.” But when you've written a pop song that has a very particular eight-bar chorus that's perfectly symmetrical and catchy, and then they cut 20 frames, it ruins your day. It screws everything up.

We learned that because we did that a lot in season one, and the thing that I made sure to do correctly in season two was not to develop a thing too quickly. I would usually start off with a very rough concept and let it sit for a long time while the animation caught up. When things started to feel like they were getting picture-locked, and we really felt like we had a sense of what the whole episode was, then I would be like, “Okay, cool. Now let me really start filling in the production.” We'd usually then reach out to an artist, actually get them to record the song, and make it high-def, so to speak. That was the only way I could figure it out, because it's too complicated otherwise. Mistakes can be so costly if you've done all this work to get the math, and then something ruins your day.

What are you generally writing to? I imagine you’re not getting finished animation, but then the animation might influence what you’re doing. What is that handoff between you and the animators?

Alex Seaver: That's a great question, and also leads to my newfound rubric of, “Don't develop too much too quickly.” The first thing we get is a layout animatic. It's usually the length of the episode, and it has a lot of the voice actors’ final dialogue in there. There's a lot of pencil sketching going on. There are not a lot of 3D models or fluid movement, but it's kind of like an elevated storyboard. It has temp music and good-sounding dialogue, and that really gets the ball rolling. You really start to feel what you're supposed to be feeling.

Then, there are a ton of details that aren't filled in yet that I learned are really important to know before you start fleshing out the production. Things like, “Is it daytime or nighttime?” or “Who the hell are these five characters? They just look stick figures that are different colors.” I'll usually kick off a demo that’s really rough—either a piano/vocal or [with] a little bit of production if it's meant to be a banger—and I'll set it aside and move on to the next one. Then, every three months or so, we might get an update on that episode, and then I'll go back and be like, “Okay. Now this is making more sense,” and then we'll proceed from there.

When it comes to lyric writing, this is obviously not the world that we live in. Did you have rules for what you were able to say and not say?

Alex Seaver: It was kind of fun. I am usually pretty slow with lyrics, but writing for Arcane is the easiest because you literally just look up on the screen and go, “Alright, what are they going through? What's happening? Let me just write about that.” We didn't have bespoke rules, but I think we started falling into a nice groove [where] we want these songs to be specific, but we don't want them to be so specific that listening to them on Spotify would be confusing because it's about a high fantasy world. But the characters and the character writing are really rich in Arcane—it's incredibly relatable and adult—and so it was quite easy to write these songs from each character's perspective.

Seaver Talks Bringing In New Artist Projects & Reconnecting With His Own

Seaver Releases His First Music As Mako Since 2020 In Arcane Season 2

Maddie reaching out her hand to Vi in Arcane season 2 (2024)

How do you find your artists and your songwriters? You had Sting on the first season and have amazing writers like Ester Dean on the second. How did you get such a stylistically diverse range of people for this?

Alex Seaver: We have such a dope team at Riot that call themselves Riot Games Music. Originally it was just a couple of us making some jams, and now it feels like a professional outfit of A&Rs, lawyers, creatives, and producers. It's a really sick team.

Every time I'd get a brief from Fortiche and Christian, I'd take it over into our weekly meetings with Riot Games Music, and we would just start putting names up on the board. A lot of times it's people introducing us to artists I'd never heard of before, or [it’s] me introducing artists that I have always loved and always wished to work with to the team. We'll whittle it down to kind of a fine point and then start reaching out and gauging if the people are interested.

Season one was this funny experience of reaching out to very successful artists and trying to plead to them that we weren't making a stupid cartoon, [and that] we were really making something cool--because it didn't exist, and a lot of people are not that familiar with the League of Legends world. Sting is not playing League of Legends. He's Sting. But the cool thing about season two was everybody had heard about Arcane by that point, and a lot of artists reached out to us on their own, being like, “I don't know who makes the music, but I just want to let you know I want to be involved."

You have an artist project, Mako, and I saw you have one Mako song on this season. How does your world as an artist factor into guiding the music for Arcane while staying true to what people like about Mako?

Alex Seaver: It’s really hard. To be honest, the way I dealt with it is that I put Mako aside. I released an album that I was so proud of in 2020 called Fable, and I haven’t made a single Mako thing since other than this song on Arcane season 2. It’s so hard to reckon with two things you love. The straight of it is that Arcane is my favorite thing I've ever worked on, so it was worth it. I'm really excited to get back to writing original music and getting back in touch with that, and I have a lot of guilt about leaving people hanging for so long for no reason, seemingly.

The scene that I do the Mako song on is so emotional. Before I even heard a lick of music, I watched the scene on a plane, and I was just crying on a plane, like a psychopath. I texted Christian when I landed, and I was like, “Can I do this one as a Mako song? This would mean a lot to me.” And he was really sweet, and said, “Absolutely.” So, from the genesis, that was bookmarked for me to at least have something going on as Mako. It’s a very Mako song, too. It’s my voice.

Really, to answer your question, the thing is [that] Mako is self-expression and Arcane is elevating a story that somebody else has written. If there was a point where the two could converge, I would sort of pitch myself, but otherwise, I'm not really thinking about Mako. I'm just thinking about the characters in the show.

Seaver Pitched Hailee Steinfeld Singing As Vi In Arcane Season 2

Unfortunately, It Doesn’t Sound As If It Will Happen

Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) from Arcane looking unsure with Jinx and Vi fighting in the background

Screen Rant: I have seen some Reddit posts where people said they wanted to hear Hailee Steinfeld singing as Vi. What would you say to that?

Alex Seaver: I was, “Oh, hell yeah,” on it. I pitched that idea a bunch as well. I can't really remember why it didn't come together. I'm like them. I was like, “Oh man, this would've been sick.” I love her. I love her voice, I love her songs. She's a very famous person, so I didn't have access to ask her myself. So, it might've been schedule stuff, but it was definitely something I was interested in as well. But even with her not on the soundtrack, her footprint on the show as Vi is pretty unbelievable. It’s kind of crazy that she's Gwen Stacey and Vi in two very ambitious animated projects and they are totally different things. She's crazy. She's talented.

“I’m Ready To Go:” Seaver Is Ready For The Next Project

Seaver Hypes Up The Collaborative Experience He Had On The Series

Vi and Caitlyn walking with their Task Force with The Gray behind them in Arcane season 2 (2024)

This show is ending in season 2. You said you're excited to get back to Mako, but do you have hopes for the future of whatever happens with all of this and your involvement with it?

Alex Seaver: Yeah, big time. The people that make this thing are so special. The animation studio Fortiche… you don't even really need to say much, because every image that they put out there speaks for itself, but they're beautiful artists and wonderful people. Then, our showrunner, Christian, and writers, Amanda (Overton) and Alex Yee, are oozing with talent and integrity in the sense that they only want things to be as good as they possibly can. There's no energy of selling out on this kind of collaboration, and that goes for the sound team and everybody across the board. As long as those people are telling more stories, everybody's going to be in good hands, and I will drop everything I'm doing the second they need me. I'm ready to go for whatever adventures they have next.

About Arcane

Set in the League of Legends universe, Arcane focuses on sisters Violet and Powder (later Jinx) as they end up on opposite sides of a growing conflict between the wealthy utopia of Piltover and its dark undercity whose citizens wish to break away from their oppressors. Hailee Steinfeld, Ella Purnell, and Kevin Alejandro star in this animated adventure.

Arcane season 2 Act I is out on Netflix now.