Danny Elfman

It was announced that Elfman would be taking part in Coachella 2020 with a set titled "Past, Present and Future! From Boingo to Batman and Beyond!" Elfman clarified on his Instagram page that this would not be an Oingo Boingo reunion, writing "I’m creating a live mix of my last 40 years— both film music and songs... that includes my Boingo years, my composer years and a few things I’ve been working on for the last year or so, which will be world premieres."

In 2019 it was announced Elfman had been commissioned to write a piece for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain set to premiere in 2020, and a percussion concerto for Colin Currie and the London Philharmonic Orchestra for spring 2021. Other works in the planning phase are a cello concerto and a project that involves chamber orchestra and Elfman's own voice.

On October 31, 2019, the MasterClass online educational series released "Making Music out of Chaos," presenting 21 compositional and career lessons from Elfman's four decades of experience primarily in the film industry.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Danny Elfman among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

In 2019, selections from Elfman's Midnight Run score were used in the third season of Netflix's Stranger Things, including "Stairway Chase" in episodes 5 and 6, and "Wild Ride" and "Package Deal" in episode 6.

Including commercial recordings of his film scores and the Oingo Boingo discography, Elfman has produced over 100 albums as of 2019.

Elfman was featured in the 2016 documentary Score, in which he appeared among over 50 film composers to discuss the craft of movie music and influential figures in the business.

In October 2016, Elfman produced a video clip for Funny or Die with original "horror" music composed to footage of Donald Trump pacing around Hillary Clinton at the second United States presidential election debates, 2016.

Citing permanent hearing damage from performing live and conflicts with his film-scoring career, Elfman retired Oingo Boingo in 1995 with a series of five sold-out final concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre ending on Halloween night. On October 31, 2015, Elfman and Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek performed the song "Dead Man's Party" with an orchestra as an encore to a live-to-film concert of The Nightmare Before Christmas score at the Hollywood Bowl. Elfman told the audience the performance was "20 years to the day" of Oingo Boingo's retirement.

In October 2013, Elfman returned to the stage for the first time since his band Oingo Boingo disbanded to sing his vocal parts to a handful of The Nightmare Before Christmas songs as part of a concert titled Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton, featuring suites of music from 15 Tim Burton films newly arranged by Elfman. The concert has since toured internationally and has played in Japan, Australia, Mexico and throughout Europe and the United States. Since 2015, Elfman has appeared near annually in a Hollywood Bowl Halloween concert featuring full orchestra performing the Nightmare Before Christmas score live to the film projection.

In 2013 he composed the music and provided the English-language vocals for the Hong Kong Disneyland attraction Mystic Manor.

For several high-profile sequel and reboot projects in the 2010s, Elfman incorporated established musical themes with his own original thematic material, including the DC Extended Universe's Justice League, The Grinch, Dumbo and Men in Black International.

Episode five of the 14th season of South Park in 2010 criticized Tim Burton for using the "same" music in all his films, referring to Elfman's scores.

In 2008, Elfman accepted his first commission for the stage, composing the music for Twyla Tharp's Rabbit and Rogue ballet, co-commissioned by American Ballet Theatre and Orange County Performing Arts Center and premiering on June 3, 2008, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. Other works for stage include the music for Cirque Du Soleil's Iris in 2011, and incidental music for the Broadway production of Taylor Mac's Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus in 2019.

In the 2007 sixth season Star Wars parody "Blue Harvest", Family Guy lampooned Elfman's orchestral style. A scene shows Elfman replacing an incinerated John Williams to conduct a full orchestra playing the score, only to be decapitated by a lightsaber after conducting a few bars of oom-pah music.

In the liner notes for the 2006 CD recording of his first concert work Serenada Schizophrana, Elfman wrote: "I began composing several dozen short improvisational compositions, maybe a minute each. Slowly, some of them began to develop themselves until finally I had six separate movements that, in some abstract, absurd way, felt connected."

Elfman's first piece of original concert music, Serenada Schizophrana, was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, who premiered the piece on February 23, 2005, at Carnegie Hall. Subsequent concert works include his first Violin Concerto "Eleven Eleven", co-commissioned by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Live at Stanford University, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, which premiered at Smetana Hall in Prague on June 21, 2017, with Sandy Cameron on violin and John Mauceri conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra; the Piano Quartet, co-commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts University of Nebraska and the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet, which premiered February 6, 2018, in Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Percussion Quartet, commissioned by Third Coast Percussion and premiered at the Philip Glass Days And Nights Festival in Big Sur on October 10, 2019.

On November 29, 2003, Elfman married actress Bridget Fonda. They have a son, Oliver. In 1998, Elfman scored A Simple Plan, starring Fonda.

Among his honors are four Oscar nominations, two Emmy Awards, a Grammy, six Saturn Awards for Best Music, the 2002 Richard Kirk Award, the 2015 Disney Legend Award, and the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award in 2017.

Elfman provided background music for Luigi Serafini's solo exhibition il Teatro della Pittura at the Fondazione Mudima di Milano in Milan, Italy in 1998 and for the Tim Burton exhibition at MoMA in 2009.

Among his franchise work, Elfman composed the scores for all four Men in Black films (1997–2019) and all three Fifty Shades of Grey films (2015–2018). Elfman scored Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002 and Spider-Man 2 in 2004, themes and selections from which were used for Raimi's Spider-Man 3, though Elfman did not compose the score. In 1996, he also provided the score for the first film in the Mission: Impossible series, adapting themes for the original television series by Lalo Schifrin as well as composing his own.

Since The Simpsons' second annual Treehouse of Horror episode aired in 1991, launching "scary names" tradition in the opening and closing titles, Elfman has been alternately credited for the theme music as "Red Wolf Elfman," "Danny Skellingelfman," "Li'l Leakin Brain Elfman," "Boris Elfmonivich," "Danny Elfblood," "Danny 'Hell'fman," "The Bloody Elf," "Danny Elfbones," "Elfmunster" and "Daniel Beilzebelsman."

With Batman, Elfman firmly established a career-spanning relationship with Burton, scoring all but three of the director's major studio releases. Highlights include Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Big Fish (2003) and Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 2005 he wrote the score and songs for Burton's Corpse Bride and provided the voice of the character of Bonejangles, as well as providing the score, songs and Oompa-Loompa vocals for Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that same year. In addition to writing the score and ten songs for the Burton-produced stop motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, Elfman also provided the singing voice for main character Jack Skellington, as well as the voices for side characters Barrel and the Clown with the Tear-Away Face.

Since the mid 1990s, Elfman has expanded his craft to a range of genres, including thrillers (Dolores Claiborne, A Simple Plan, The Kingdom), dramas (Sommersby, A Civil Action, Hitchcock), indies (Freeway, Silver Linings Playbook, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot), family (Flubber, Charlotte's Web, Frankenweenie, Goosebumps), documentary (Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known), and straight horror (Red Dragon, The Wolfman), as well as notable entries in his well-established areas of horror comedy (The Frighteners, Mars Attacks!, Dark Shadows) and comic book-inspired action films (Hulk, Wanted, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Avengers: Age of Ultron).

In the 1990s, Elfman composed music for advertising campaigns for Nike, Nissan and Lincoln-Mercury, and in 2002 wrote the music for Honda's "Power of Dreams" advertising campaign, which was the first cinema commercial to be shot in the IMAX format.

Early in his career, he wrote out his scores using pencil, but has composed largely digitally since the mid-1990s.

On the occasion that there are compressed deadlines or in the event he is not available to rescore or adapt his music if there are major edits to the film after the score's completion, Elfman will hire additional composers to work on small cues or sections of cues, adapting his existing material or themes. Examples include Jonathan Sheffer on Darkman, David Buckley on the Fifty Shades of Grey films, and Pinar Toprak on Justice League. Since the 1990s, Elfman has occasionally co-composed music or shared music writing credit (e.g.When We Rise, Spy Kids, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Men in Black International), or written themes that are then used or adapted by other composers, including Jonathan Sheffer (Pure Luck), Steve Bartek (Novacaine), John Debney (Heartbreakers), Deborah Lurie (9), and The Newton Brothers (Before I Wake).

In 1989, Elfman's influential, Grammy-winning score for Burton's Batman marked a major stylistic shift to dark, densely orchestrated music in the romantic idiom, which would carry over to his scores for Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Sam Raimi's Darkman and Clive Barker's Nightbreed, all released in 1990.

As fans of Oingo Boingo and The Mystic Knights respectively, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985. Elfman was initially apprehensive because of his lack of formal training and having never scored a studio feature, but after Burton accepted his initial demo of the title music and with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek, he completed his score to great effect, while paying homage to his love of early film music and influential film composers Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann. Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life.

Following Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Elfman scored mainly quirky comedies in the late 1980s, including Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield, Burton's Beetlejuice and the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged. Notable exceptions were the all-synth score to Emilio Estevez's crime drama Wisdom and the big band, blues-infused music for Martin Brest's buddy cop action film Midnight Run.

Describing his politics during the 1980s, Elfman said, "I'm not a doomist. My attitude is always to be critical of what's around you, but not ever to forget how lucky we are. I've traveled around the world. I left thinking I was a revolutionary. I came back real right-wing patriotic. Since then, I've kind of mellowed in between." In 2008, he expressed support for Barack Obama and said that Sarah Palin was his "worst nightmare".

The Mystic Knights performed on the street and in nightclubs throughout Los Angeles until Richard left in 1979 to pursue filmmaking. As a send-off to the group's original concept, Richard created the film Forbidden Zone based on The Mystic Knights' stage performances. Elfman composed the songs and his first score for the film, and appeared as the character Satan, who performs a reworked version of Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" with ensemble members playing backup as henchmen.

Before the release of Forbidden Zone, Elfman had taken over The Mystic Knights as lead singer-songwriter in 1979, paring the group down to eight players, shortening the name to Oingo Boingo, and recording and touring as a ska-influenced new wave band. Their biggest success among eight studio albums penned by Elfman was 1985's Dead Man's Party, featuring the hit song "Weird Science" from the movie of the same name. The band also appeared performing their single "Dead Man's Party" in the 1986 movie Back to School, for which Elfman also composed the score. Elfman shifted the band to a more guitar-oriented rock sound in the late 1980s, which continued through their last album Boingo in 1994.

Elfman wrote the lyrics to all of Oingo Boingo's original songs 1979–1994, provided lyrics for Mike Oldfield's album Islands in 1987, and has made residuals on the titular two-word opening phrase sung in his The Simpsons theme since the series first aired in 1989.

He has two daughters, Lola (*1979) and Mali (*1984), from his marriage to Geri Eisenmenger. Mali is a film producer and actress. Elfman and his daughter collaborated on her 2011 film Do Not Disturb.

After returning to Los Angeles from Africa in the early 1970s, Elfman was asked by his brother Richard to serve as musical director of his street theatre performance art troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

When working on films with established musical identifiers, Elfman will often incorporate original themes in addition to his own thematic material. Examples include Lalo Schifrin's main theme and "The Plot" from the original Mission Impossible TV Series for Mission: Impossible; John Williams' theme for Superman, the Hans Zimmer/Junkie XL theme for Wonder Woman and his own original Batman theme for Justice League; the "Welcome Christmas" song from the 1966 How the Grinch Stole Christmas! for The Grinch; and "Casey Junior," "Pink Elephants on Parade," and "When I See an Elephant Fly" from Disney's original 1941 animated film for Dumbo.

In his early school days, Elfman exhibited an aptitude for science with almost no interest in music, and was even rejected from elementary school orchestra "for having no propensity for music." This would change when he switched high schools in the late 1960s and fell in with a musical crowd, who introduced him to early jazz and the work of Stravinsky and his 20th century contemporaries.

Daniel Robert Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American composer, singer, songwriter, record producer, actor, and voice actor. He first became well known as the singer-songwriter for the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, and has since garnered international recognition for writing over 100 feature film scores, as well as compositions for television, stage productions, and the concert hall.

Elfman was born on May 29, 1953, in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish family with Polish and Russian roots. He is the son of Blossom Elfman (née Bernstein), a writer and teacher, and Milton Elfman, a teacher who was in the Air Force. Elfman was raised in a racially mixed affluent community in Baldwin Hills, California, where he spent much of his time at the local movie theater discovering classic sci-fi, fantasy and horror films and first noticed the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.

Unique among film composers, Elfman typically writes the lyrics to songs he has composed for movies. He employs song structures from Tin Pan Alley and early musical theatre composers (32-bar form), and pop and rock of the 1950s and 1960s (verse-chorus). As his songs serve to advance the plot and develop characters, lyrics reflect storylines and imagery specific to the film and express the inner life of characters.

Elfman was tasked with adapting and arranging 1920s and 1930s jazz and big band music by artists such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker for the ensemble, which consisted of up to 15 performers swapping 30 instruments. He also composed original pieces and helped build instruments unique for the group, including an aluminum gamelan, the 'Schlitz celeste' made from tuned beer cans, and a "junkyard orchestra" built from car parts and trash cans.