Award-winning composer Amelia Warner discusses the pros and cons of torturing kids with piano lessons, her storytelling appetite for the classic, otherworldly, mysterious, strange, and the beautiful, the brilliance of Randy Newman and Rachel Portman, how to properly capture the sound of love, mischief and a busy mind, her minimalist, anthemic, subtractive approach to melody, how to be a composer if you’re not classically trained, the pitfalls of performance anxiety, the devastating simplicity of greats such as Johann Johannson and Max Richter, how to tap into the sonic DNA of a film, composing for comedy and conceptualizing dialogue as rhythm, music as a means to articulate that which can’t be spoken and so much more.

Amelia Warner’s stunning scores for Mr. Malcolm’s List and Wild Mountain Thyme are out now worldwide via Lakeshore Records.