The Last of Us is a story about tension: the tension between love and loss, violence and intimacy, protection and destruction, life and death. It’s a study of how incredibly delicate life is, but also the terrifying stubbornness of our will to survive. As a composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and score that tension, a mediator between the game’s conflicting themes. His mission was to compose music for a video game that did something different and actually had something to say.
Santaolalla tells me that as a child in rural Argentina, one of his tutors abandoned him after just a few lessons, telling his parents that “there’s nothing I can teach him.” His career proper began in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialized in fusing Latin American folk with rock. Later, after leading a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he began to strike out on his own, releasing solo albums and composing for television shows, commercials, and eventually films (most notably Amores perros, 21 grams, and The Motorcycle Diaries).
In 2006 and 2007, he won an Oscar for his work on Brokeback Mountain and Babel respectively. He is now a household name in Hollywood and in the following years many film and television directors and producers hired him, as well as some game developers.
“After I won the Oscar, several companies asked me to do music for video games,” Santaolalla recalls. “A company in Europe wanted me to work on a Western video game that would have been a huge project, both financially and in terms of visibility and what it could represent. But it was more of the same, you know? I wanted to do something that connected what you do in games to the heart, something more than just gymnastics, shooting, fighting, survival.”
Santaolalla was approached by Naughty Dog to work on The Last of Us early in the game’s development, around 2009. It’s about an orphan girl named Ellie and a man named Joel who is still grieving the loss of his daughter. Set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, the two slowly open up to each other and show their vulnerabilities – a tricky hedgehog dilemma in a relationship where the two protagonists hurt each other more the closer they get.
It was perfect for Santaolalla. Here, he was able to bring his soulful, Argentine-inspired music to something other than a Western, infusing the urban wastelands of Boston, Massachusetts, with a flavor of Americana music that sounds familiar and dreamlike, but still distinguishable from its American counterparts. Even the way he plays the guitar, his fingertips audibly strumming and scraping the strings, is well-suited to the game’s low-key humanity.
The soundtrack’s greatest triumph is the hypnotic interplay between the Bolivian guitar—the ronroco, Santaolalla’s signature instrument—and a Fender VI, a six-string bass from the 1960s that sounds an octave lower than a guitar, slightly different from most modern basses. Listen to any song on the soundtrack and you’ll hear a gentle conversation between these two instruments: a silent but incessant back-and-forth, sometimes in agreement and sometimes at odds.
This particular bass, famous for its presence on Beatles and Cream records, is Joel’s voice. And the ronroco, more delicate but no less insistent, is Ellie’s. “That six-string bass, for sure, is the masculine side of the story,” Santaolalla tells me. “And the ronroco, the fragile side of the music, is Ellie’s side of the story. It wasn’t something I knew I was doing when I wrote the music, but listening to it again, I could see it very clearly.”
“And then the banjo and the electric guitar play a central role, between these two extremes. As the story opened up in Part II and more characters and complexities began to appear, the music needed more timbre; I couldn’t stay with this combination that I had in the first game.”
Everything Santaolalla does, he tells me, “is instinctive.” He spontaneously introduced a banjo for Abby’s theme in The Last of Us Part II, and it was a perfect match. He’s not a natural banjo player, so the use of the instrument in his score feels unfamiliar to the ear: searching, reflective, pensive. “I just got out of bed one day, picked up the banjo, and it just came out of me,” he laughs. “Some of the character themes are almost magical in the way they happen. They come out when I’m not really thinking at all. I pick up the instrument and it’s like someone else is playing.”
The 72-year-old musician guides his scores with his intuition, knowing that the emotional response we get as listeners comes as much from “what you hear” as from what you hear. and “What you don’t hear.” That’s one of the reasons The Last of Us’s soundtrack stands out: There’s a lot of maximalism in video game music: bombast, orchestral highs, intensity. The Last of Us is a far cry from that, more introspective and quiet, making a statement with the absence of music as much as with its melodies. The HBO TV series, for which he also composed the score, follows the same principle.
“I love the use of silence,” Santaolalla enthuses. “I love it. I love the space that silence gives, because that’s what gives resonance to the notes you play around it.” Suddenly, he starts talking about parkour, a recent new interest that has been sparked by a group of British athletes called Storm.
“I’ve related the jumps in parkour to the silence in my music. I think that’s very important,” he says. “Runners measure how they’re going to jump, and they run, and then they measure again before they jump, right? They measure that jump and decide how many steps they’re going to take before they put their feet on the ground and jump. It’s like choosing the note you play before you leave it silent. Before you jump. Then you choose the note you’re going to play when you land. And that note makes the silence a triumph. You’re not going to fall. You’re going to be in that moment of space, of silence, and when you land, everything is relevant.”
Between this interview, a masterclass he gave and a performance within the framework of the Game Music Festival At the concert at London’s Southbank Centre, I spent quite a bit of time with Santaolalla. The way his brain works and the way he connects concepts to practice is inspiring. When he played Ando Rodando, a song from his 1982 album Santaolallawhich he now dedicates to Joel for his “rough and rocky” personality, the room fell silent. The fact that Santaolalla can find traces of The Last of Us characters deep in his back catalogue, and the way he has brought them with him into his performances, shows his deep knowledge and affection for Naughty Dog’s work.
