The Santa Clauses Season 2 Interview: Composer On Reflecting Holidays With The Score

Season 2 of The Santa Clauses is currently available to stream on Disney+ with new installments releasing on Wednesdays. The latest batch of episodes sees Scott train his son, Cal, to take over as Santa Claus despite being ill-equipped for the role. However, after choosing a successor who almost destroyed Christmas, Scott is determined to make sure the business stays in the family and among those he trusts.

Grammy-winning producer Ariel Rechtshaid serves as the show’s composer and has worked with artists such as Vampire Weekend, Usher, and Madonna. In addition to serving as the composer for the Gossip Girl reboot, Rechtshaid’s music has been featured in films such as Scream (2022) and Divergent. Season 2 of The Santa Clauses stars Tim Allen, Elizabeth Mitchell, Elizabeth Allen-Dick, Devin Bright, Austin Kane, Matilda Lawler, Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, and Eric Stonestreet.

Screen Rant interviewed Ariel Rechtshaid about incorporating classic sounds and creating a score that reflects the show’s whimsical holiday environment.

Ariel Rechtshaid Talks The Santa Clauses Season 2

Screen Rant: To start off, I’d love to know if you were a fan of the original The Santa Clause movies.

Ariel Rechtshaid: It’s funny. I have this relationship with a lot of major culturally relevant shows and music that happened around that era. In general, I’ve always been a Disney fanatic, and, weirdly, for a Jewish guy, a Christmas fanatic. So, yes. It fit into my world, but I was excited to revisit it when the opportunity came up. The franchise and Tim Allen and Santa Claus were all a part of my upbringing, but this particular one, I’ve been sort of reimmersed in.

How did you end up getting involved in the show?

Ariel Rechtshaid: The music supervisor, Rob Lowry had worked with me before. My background was in writing and producing albums. I make records. There have been a couple of people over the years who have asked me if I would be interested in scoring. I always admired film composers. I was just as moved as I was by discovering music by The Clash or The Beatles. I was also extremely moved by Fantasia as a child. I listened to that soundtrack over and over again. My mom, just in general, pressed classical music upon me and stuff like that. I didn’t come up in a discipline-trained classical music world, but I admired it as a fan. Not a professional in the field, but someone who went to concerts.

I grew up in LA going to the Hollywood Bowl and seeing the greatest hits. It was a very prevalent part of my musical DNA, which did bleed into my career. It’s a very long story short, but there are different types of approaches to scoring, and a lot of people are into modern synth-pop music scores and things like that, and that’s cool. That’s interesting to me as well. Something that I think Rob, the music supervisor, learned about me, is that I’m into classic stuff. The idea of doing a Christmas score with an orchestra just really appealed to me.

They love that I have sort of an edge in alternative music, indie rock, or pop music. I make kind of progressive pop music. At least in this project, and the only other project I’ve done, I’ve been very interested in referencing the classics. I guess that really works with something like The Santa Clauses because there is an element of pop music and the look is modern. There’s a modernity to all of it, but then, just in my mind, there’s this magical Disney, Fantasia, Christmas spirit going on beneath it all.

Tying into that, the first film came out in 1994, and the 2022 continuation reflects the current day. What’s that balance like of paying homage to the original, but also modernizing the music?

Ariel Rechtshaid: Before accepting the project, I made sure that I knew what I was talking about, what comes to me naturally and what moves me—if I would be a good fit, essentially. I felt like it was a continuum of the classic Disney Christmas. There was a lot of referencing of the classics like Tchaikovsky. Sonically, I had an idea. I just like the way real and raw instruments and orchestras sound, which you hear in John Williams and things like that. I didn’t have to think about it too much, to be honest with you. I had good conversations with the showrunner, Jason, and the music supervisor, Rob, and I was able to do my thing.

Also, just to say, there is an element of instinct with this stuff because it moves so fast. Coming from a world of writing and producing for albums where we work on music from the beginning to the end, and then going back and revising the beginning and thinking about it and changing it and this and that—having not done a feature film yet, maybe that’s closer referencing a feature film, but for a series, the speed is unbelievable. As you’ve probably noticed, the music is wall-to-wall. It was an incredible amount of music. There was a basic concept in mind.

What I wanted to do was what they wanted—to be big, emotional, and really score the scenes. There were themes, but really scoring the movement of what was happening on screen and capturing the emotion of all the dynamic different characters—Santa, Mad Santa, children, and surreal Easter Bunnies. It was basically, for me, just themes and trying to play with the classics of Christmas, reinterpret classic Christmas songs, and arrange and orchestrate it all in time to mix it and get it into the episode. It was a very fast-paced process.

How specifically does the Christmas theme play into your creative decisions? What are some elements you add to the music to reflect this whimsical holiday environment?

Ariel Rechtshaid: I think everything. I might be speaking kind of naively, to be honest, but just the woodwinds and the pizzicato and the sleigh bells and the percussion and wood blocks and the orchestral palette and even just referencing things that are classic like Bach and Beethoven and Debussy and Tchaikovsky and Schubert. Those just aren’t things I feel like you hear too much these days in television series. I pick it out when I’m listening to classics that I love. Sometimes I feel like my reference points are kind of bizarre, but even Carl Stalling and the early animated series and Warner Brothers or Disney—you just don’t see it so much anymore.

I don’t know if it’s because there’s so much content out there now and budgets are always a thing. Live musicianship is less of a thing, because there are so many computer programs that either emulate orchestras, or people have moved past that in some cases and do really interesting stuff, myself included, on synthesizers and different ways of scoring. With this, I wanted to go back to, essentially, the way it was done in the 40s and 50s with a romantic orchestral score.

It’s not something that I feel I see as often in recent times, but there are characters or relationships that have their own recurring cue or theme. Is that something that you like to incorporate into your work?

Ariel Rechtshaid: Absolutely. A lot of the themes that we developed in season 1, we brought back in season 2. Season 2 built on the universe that we created in season 1 by going back into Mad Santa’s world and the origin story of everything and adding an Old World element to the score. Old World is the best way to reference it for me. I don’t know how else to say it. There were tribal elements. I almost felt like I was drawing from​ Klezmer, which is the polar opposite of Christmas, but not, for some reason, in my mind, and a little bit of Godfather and Italian aspects. We created new themes in this show, but that’s definitely the case. There are a lot of moving parts. The elves had their themes, and Santa had his theme.

You touched on this a bit earlier. The general mood of the scene obviously impacts the music selection, but how much do specific storyline decisions impact your creative choices?

Ariel Rechtshaid: It’s only that. Again, I’m admittedly kind of new to this world, but that was my approach. It was just fully reacting to the picture and what Jason Winer had in mind. Of course, you just naturally draw references to what you know in your head and what moves you emotionally. It was very story-driven. I suppose I’ve heard of people submitting music, and editors cutting it up and putting it to picture, but I was writing to picture. Season 2, like we were saying, had enough material already established from season 1 that there was a fair amount of temp music coming back in that made a lot of sense. I couldn’t have written it better a second time.

How do you feel that season 2 differentiates itself from season 1?

Ariel Rechtshaid: I don’t want to say that it’s a better, well-oiled machine because I really liked season 1, but I think season 2 is even better. It’s more dynamic, it’s funny, and it’s smart. I love the cast this year—Eric Stonestreet, Fluffy, and Tracy Morgan. It’s hilarious. I think this season is really good. In my career as a musician, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been involved in some really crazy stuff. It’s all been mostly sort of invented. I didn’t really have a reference point in my life.

I just hung out with friends and made music that was weird that nobody liked, and suddenly, everybody liked it. This is a bit of a dream come true from being a big fan of TV and movies in my childhood and the emotional response that I had. Fantasia has always been a top one for me, which I use as a reference point. It’s Christmas and it’s Disney. It’s not Tim Allen, but it’s been a dream come true to be at the helm of this kind of thing. As opposed to other things where I created a world, I felt like I was let into a world. I was very proud to be a part of it.

About The Santa Clauses Season 2

In the second season, the Calvin family is back in the North Pole as Scott Calvin continues his role as Santa Claus after retirement plans were thwarted when failing to find a worthy successor in season one. Now that Scott and his family have successfully saved Christmas, Scott turns his focus towards training his son Calvin to eventually take over the “family business” as Santa Claus.

Check back soon for our other interviews with The Santa Clauses season 2 cast:

• Production Designer Melanie Jones
• Tim Allen & Elizabeth Allen Dick
• Eric Stonestreet
• Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias