EDITORIAL
INTERVIEW
Joseph William Morgan on soundtracking TV’s most emotional moments
Words by Katie Hawthorne
Joseph William Morgan is the alias of composing duo Matthew Morgan and Jose Villanueva. Their emotional original music and orchestral covers have underscored TV’s biggest moments and reached 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The prize-winning pair tell us about their most important milestones, their DIY attitude, and the perks of being a duo.
From the Super Bowl to America’s Got Talent, Netflix’s Bridgerton to Call of Duty, and film trailers including A Wrinkle In Time, Fast & Furious 9, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and the re-release of Rocky IV, Joseph William Morgan specialise in thrilling, magical, maximalist compositions. “Very emotional, dramatic, lots of strings, big brass, big drums. Just… big!” laughs Morgan, describing their sound. “We’re always looking for opportunities to turn it all the way.”
The pair met in middle school, when they were 13, and bonded over a love for all kinds of music, including pop, hip-hop, metal, and film scores by Hans Zimmer and John Williams. Inevitably they formed their own band, the pop-rock group Divided By Friday, and later dropped out of college to sign a record deal with Hopeless Records. In 2014, after ten years with the band, they moved to LA together to work as songwriters. They credit their DIY, “never quit” attitude for making it work in a brand new musical world.
“We spent ten years doing everything ourselves, and that attitude has been super helpful for us,” Villanueva says, emphasising their self-taught status. “We’d get a new piece of gear and just turn all the knobs, push all the buttons. It felt like our early-days experimentation again, honing our instincts and figuring out our tastes.”
Soon they needed a new “band name” for their composing work, and Joseph William Morgan was born (the alias riffs on their own names, with a nod to John Williams, too). It feels right that it makes the pair sound like just one person: their deep friendship enriches their creative partnership, allowing them to work fast and trust each other while taking creative risks.
“We often tell people that we can finish each other’s musical sentences,” says Morgan, while they describe their duplicate home-studio set ups. “We work on a project from both ends, and can deliver a lot faster because of that. Jose might start doing guitar, bass and drums, while I do strings and piano.”
“When you start with sounds that are so good, it makes 48-hour deadlines possible.”
In the earlier days of their career, sample libraries helped them to pitch big ideas before they got access to orchestras. Today, they use libraries to deliver on tight deadlines for major clients, such as Disney and NBC, across diverse sounds ranging from spaghetti western to hip-hop to cinematic orchestrations – but always with a flair for the dramatic. “When we know the genre we’re looking for, we can immediately pull sounds that fit that style,” says Villanueva. “When you start with sounds that are so good, it makes 48-hour deadlines possible.”
Morgan nods. “It means that when people ask us what we sound like, we say: ‘Everything!’”
“You Get What You Give” | Official Audio
03:17
The pair have a bucket-list of songs they want to work on, ones that they can imagine soundtracking a huge media moment. You Get What You Give was one such song – but they never imagined it would end up opening the Super Bowl.
Joseph William Morgan have a long relationship with American broadcasters NBC; they’ve contributed to ten seasons of America’s Got Talent with music which underscores the contestants’ emotional journeys and biggest successes. Given the lyrics (“you’ve got the music in you”), they thought a new version of the New Radicals 1998 hit, with a slow-burn, string-heavy build, would be a perfect fit for the talent competition.
Instead, Villanueva and Morgan were hanging out with their families one afternoon, with the Super Bowl on in the background, when they got a text from the track’s vocalist (and another friend from their band days), Kerry Courtney. “Kerry said, ‘Are you kidding me?! Our song opened the Super Bowl!’” laughs Morgan. “We were like… Wait, what? We had to rewind! It just blew us away.”
The cover’s success opened the door to an exciting new relationship with NBC Sports. It turns out that Joseph William Morgan’s high drama, high energy musical sensibilities chime perfectly with high drama, high energy athletics. “We love that they use our music in a narrative way,” Villanueva says. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Kentucky Derby or America’s Got Talent: a great story is a great story.”
Bridgerton “Enchanted” (Taylor Swift) | Orchestral Cover
03:57
If Joseph William Morgan spot an interesting musical trend, they double down on it. After noticing the online popularity of string quartet covers, they said: “Let’s just blow it out!” Morgan laughs. “Instead of a quartet, what if we do the most over-the-top, full orchestra version?”
They chose their favourite Swift song, which is already sweeping and cinematic, and dialled up those qualities, leading with their melody-first approach to transforming iconic pop songs. “First of all, we have to love the song,” says Villanueva, “but when you’re thinking of making a string arrangement, having a great melody is of the utmost importance. Then you can think about what the chords under that melody can do to change the feeling – and that’s where we get to have so much fun.”
“Enchanted is a great example, because those chord changes are already so romantic. When you amp it up, and fill in the space sonically with the rest of the orchestra, it’s just like: Oh my God!”
After pitching the finished track to Netflix’s Bridgerton unsuccessfully, the duo made a TikTok account and shared the full performance online. 1.8 million views later, listeners were tagging the show’s music supervisors and begging them to put it in the next season. “Then we got an email,” grins Morgan. “It worked! It’s like, if you make it, they will come.”
“Pine Suite and Finale” | Official Video
03:34
“The dream has always been to score a full TV show or movie,” Morgan says. The pair say working in a narrative format, longer than a 3 minute pop song or 2 minute film trailer, felt like getting to “stretch their legs” creatively – and the film’s bittersweet premise, about two exes who cross paths by chance, provided rich ground for inspiration.
“So often we’re creating music for a client and the parameters are pretty strict. With this, it was fun to rediscover that sometimes you just come up with something because you have a feeling, and that feeling comes out in a weird idea for a melody or a texture. We used completely different muscles,” says Villanueva.
“Initially we wrote a suite, very emotional and very devastating. But then we started getting the dailies, and we realised we were totally wrong, just tonally off,” says Morgan. “We changed the palette, and I added Spitfire Audio’s Impressionism library – harp and celeste – and it was the perfect colour we’d been missing. Then it was like: this is it, this is the theme.”
“We actually kept a lot of the same melodies,” adds Villanueva. “But again, it’s all about what you put under the melodies. Those packs brought an airy quality that shifted it from serious and sombre to a little more playful.”
The pair worked on the Pine soundtrack under their own names, rather than as Joseph William Morgan, to separate it from their more commercial work – and they plan to continue adding new strings to their (shared) bow.
“It would just be impossible for us to say, we’re only going to make one type of music going forward,” grins Villanueva. “We’ve always loved making music, full stop.”
Joseph William Morgan’s favourite Spitfire Audio packs
Originals Cinematic Soft Piano: “So many composers use it as a staple, it’s a monster, just unmatched,” says Morgan.
Orchestral Swarm and Originals Emotional Cello: “I use them a lot to establish a vibe,” says Villanueva. “Just those two elements will make you feel like something’s happening.”
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