40 Facts About Daniel Elfman

Daniel Elfman came to prominence as the singer-songwriter for the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s.

Since the 1990s, Daniel Elfman has garnered international recognition for composing over 100 feature film scores, as well as compositions for television, stage productions, and the concert hall.

Daniel Elfman has frequently worked with directors Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, and Gus Van Sant, with achievements including the scores of 17 Burton films such as Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, and Dumbo; Raimi's Darkman, A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness; and Van Sant's Academy Award-winning films Good Will Hunting and Milk.

Daniel Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish family of Polish-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent.

Daniel Elfman is a son of Blossom Elfman, a writer and teacher, and Milton Elfman, a teacher, and the brother of actor, musician, and journalist Richard Elfman.

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Daniel 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.

Daniel Elfman has admitted to fabricating stories about his past out of boredom, including a false birthplace of Amarillo, Texas, and parents in the United States Air Force.

Daniel Elfman then embarked on a ten-month, self-guided tour through Africa, busking and collecting a range of West African percussion instruments until a series of illnesses forced him to return home.

Daniel 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 playing upwards of 30 instruments.

Daniel Elfman 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.

Daniel 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.

Daniel Elfman shifted the band to a more guitar-oriented rock sound in the late 1980s, which continued through their last album Boingo in 1994.

Daniel Elfman told the audience the performance was "20 years to the day" of Oingo Boingo's retirement.

Daniel 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.

Daniel Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life.

In 1993, in addition to writing the score and ten songs for the Burton-produced stop motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, Daniel Elfman 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, Daniel Elfman has expanded his craft to a range of genres, including thrillers, dramas, indies, family, documentary, and straight horror, as well as entries in his well-established areas of horror comedy and comic book-inspired action films .

Daniel 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 Daniel Elfman did not compose the score.

Several high-profile sequel and reboot projects in the 2010s, Daniel 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.

Daniel 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.

Since 2015, Daniel 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.

Daniel Elfman adapted his original themes for the animated versions of Batman and Beetlejuice.

Daniel Elfman has composed music for animated shorts, including Sally Cruikshank's Face Like A Frog and Tim Burton's "Stainboy" internet series.

Daniel 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.

Daniel Elfman scored the 10-minute video "Joe Biden, " which introduced Joe Biden's acceptance of the presidential candidacy nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

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In October 2020, Daniel Elfman released a surprise single, "Happy, " on Anti- Records and Epitaph Records.

Daniel Elfman has said his major influences are composers from Hollywood's Golden Age, such as Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Max Steiner, David Tamkin, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Carl Stalling; 20th century classical composers Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Carl Orff; and jazz, experimental and minimalist composers Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington, Harry Partch, Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.

Daniel Elfman counts Herrmann as his biggest influence, and has said hearing Herrmann's score to The Day the Earth Stood Still when he was a child was the first time he recognized film music as a cinematic art form and realized the powerful contribution a composer makes to the movies.

Daniel Elfman then spends a few weeks of free composition and experimentation to begin working out thematic material and to develop sounds and the harmonic pallette.

When he has received approval on initial material from the filmmakers, Daniel Elfman begins to compose anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes of music cue-by-cue.

Daniel Elfman says two of the most important things to capture at this point are the tone of each scene and editorial rhythm.

Daniel Elfman oversees the recording from the control booth so that he can troubleshoot with the film's director and recording engineers.

Daniel Elfman adds his own vocals into compositions in much the same way he mixes his percussion and guitar performances into orchestral arrangements.

Daniel Elfman provided the singing voice for characters in The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride in addition to composing the scores and songs, and can be heard singing the "Day-O" call in the style of Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song" in the first bars of the Beetlejuice main title.

Rare among film composers, Daniel Elfman typically writes the lyrics to songs he has composed for movies.

Daniel Elfman employs song structures from Tin Pan Alley and early musical theatre composers, and pop and rock of the 1950s and 1960s .

Daniel Elfman has two daughters, Lola and Mali, from his marriage to Geri Eisenmenger.

Daniel Elfman is the uncle of actor Bodhi Elfman, who is married to actress Jenna Elfman.

In October 2016, Daniel 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.

Christina Aguilera revealed that Daniel Elfman's music inspired her Las Vegas concert residency The Xperience.