Percy Jackson’s Composer “Spooked Everybody” With Major Season 2 Change To Its Epic Soundtrack

Percy Jackson & the Olympiansseason 2 continues the show’s gold standard of epic instrumentals. Multi-Emmy Award-winning composer Bear McCreary returned to to orchestrate the show’s sophomore installment, penning music that brought Walker Scobell and company through the Sea of Monsters.

McCreary, alongside his Sparks & Shadows composing team, is no stranger to bringing a signature sound to event television, having composed for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powerand Foundation prior to accepting Percy Jackson‘s quest.

To celebrate Percy Jackson & the Olympians season 2’s original series soundtrack’s release, ScreenRant‘s Liam Crowley caught up with McCreary to dissect the re-written main theme, how his composing process evolved for season 2, and the Sauron-esque trick he’s using for Kronos’s evolving theme over the course of a (hopeful) five-season arc.

Bear McCreary “Spooked Everybody” By Re-Writing Percy Jackson’s Main Theme

Percy Jackson & the Olympians returned to Disney+ this month with the same magic that it debuted to in 2023, albeit with some on-screen maturity. As it turns out, composer Bear McCreary also embraced that shift from a scoring standpoint.

Bear McCreary: I definitely wanted to enrich the sound, mature the sound, deepen the sound, and help raise the stakes. I think the best way to demonstrate this is through the main title, and EP Dan Shotz gave me a call early on and said that naturally the main title is changing visually to incorporate visual elements from this season as opposed to last seasons. As he was describing it, I said, Dan, we have to do a new main title. It can’t be the same music that we associate with our much younger cast going on this fun road trip adventure. This season, the Sea of Monsters, the stakes are getting higher, our kids just look older. We have to acknowledge this sort of depth that we are achieving and aiming for now. So I proposed redoing the main title, and it spooked everybody at first because nobody ever wants to change the main title.

It didn’t take long for McCreary to win over his colleagues, as he described the crew getting “really excited” upon hearing his initial sample of the matured main title theme.

The score in season two that Sparks and Shadows and I wrote, I have a recency bias, is just better. It’s just everything you love about season one, all those themes coming back. But it’s more symphonic. It’s more harmonically dense. The drums are bigger, there’s more unusual instruments. I very much wanted to expand the musical palette so that our audience feels like they are on a journey, not just on the Sea of Monsters, but really a big journey that will span with any luck, many more seasons of this show to come. So keeping those core melodic lines, it just means I can change almost everything else, and your brain won’t notice. It’ll feel comfortable. It’s like putting on your favorite sweatshirt.

Once he had the main theme locked down, McCreary sunk his teeth into the new pieces he would be playing with. McCreary singled out “The Chariot Race” and “Sirens” as his two favorite individual tracks from season 2’s soundtrack. Speaking on the latter specifically, McCreary described penning music for the mythical seductresses as “a rite of passage for a composer” which led him to wanting to put his signature stamp on that particular sound by making it “a little more overtly dangerous and weird.”

Percy Jackson’s Big Bad Is Getting The Sauron Score Treatment

Keeping in that theme of expansion, McCreary is playing the long game with that strategy for the big bad of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Kronos. The titan lord was introduced in season 1 through dream sequences. This season, Kronos rests in a sarcophagus, with his dismembered body slowly reassembling.

Crowley alluded to his previous interview with McCreary during Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 1’s press tour, where the composer noted that his theme for Sauron is an inverted version of the show’s main title. When asked if he is using similar tricks for Percy Jackson, McCreary pointed to Kronos, noting that his theme “is in the process of evolving over many seasons.”

In season one, there was just this very ambient texture that stood out from everything else. It was much more horror-inspired and had a lot of synths and modern colors that contrast dynamically, starkly with the symphonic orchestra that you hear in all the other characters’ themes. It’s like this guy comes from another world musically. He’s literally from another genre. In season two, he’s oozing into the soundtrack more. You’re starting to hear a melody, but you don’t get it all. It is something I’m playing a very long game where his theme is one of those things that will piece together I hope very organically, very slowly over many seasons. My goal one day is when people go back and watch season one and they hear that opening texture you go, ‘Oh, I know where that, that’s that thing that turns into this other big thing later.’

As for what’s next, McCreary is already conceptualizing the sound of Percy Jackson & the Olympians season 3. Like how season 2 gave him the opportunity to work with new creatures, characters, and setpieces, the threequel is confirmed to debut iconic Greek gods like Artemis, Apollo, and Aphrodite as well as bring the first titan to live-action life in the form of Atlas.

The Chariot Race was weighing on me ahead of season 2, and Atlas is definitely one of those things. Atlas is just such a mighty character in our pop culture history and in the books. I’m very excited. That’ll be one of the first challenges. I’ve written some music for some production stuff, so most of the things that I’ve written for season three are instruments that people will be playing on camera, which are instruments that you would expect characters from that part of Greek mythology to play. So maybe one of our main characters, I don’t know.

The full tracklist for Percy Jackson & the Olympians Season 2 Original Series Soundtrack can be seen below…

1. Percy Jackson and the Olypians (Season 2 Theme)
2. The Quest for Pan
3. The Gray Sisters and King Tantalus
4. Laistrygonians
5. Tyson
6. The Chariot Race
7. The Great Prophecy
8. Clarisse and the Ironclad
9. No Rest for the Dead
10. The Sea of Monsters
11. C.C.’s Island Resort and Spa
12. The Sirens (feat. Dayna Ambrosio)
13. Polyphemus and the Golden Fleece
14. Fatal Flaw
15. The Princess Andromeda
16. Voice of Kronos
17. The Battle for Half-Blood Hill
18. Brace Yourself
19. What Really Happened
20. Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Season 2 Extended Theme)

Created by

Rick Riordan

First Episode Air Date

December 19, 2023