‘Better Call Saul’ Composer On Jimmy McGill’s Sonic Journey, ‘Very Satisfying’ Return Of Walt And Jesse

Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould had to be out of their minds. Were they really crazy enough to try and produce a spinoff of Breaking Bad — one of the most acclaimed television series in the history of the medium?

The meth-cooking drama was only three episodes away from wrapping up its story in September 2013 when AMC officially handed down the green-light for a one-hour prequel centered around Walt and Jesse’s flamboyantly dressed and loophole-exploiting slime-ball of an attorney, Saul Goodman (Mr. Show’s Bob Odenkirk).

“I was — I think like a lot of people — a little nervous … I think we all were,” admits veteran Breaking Bad universe composer, Dave Porter, who would go on to score both Better Call Saul and Netflix’s El Camino film. “I think it was such a unique moment and time and such a unique experience to be a part of that ending of Breaking Bad and that cultural upswell of interest in something like that. For me, I was still trying to digest it and figure out where my career was gonna go from there and what my options were and how do you top that? The last thing I had thought about was the possibility of a further chapter of the Breaking Bad universe.”

That initial raising of eyebrows turned out to be wholly unfounded. The dynamic duo of Gilligan & Gould delivered the goods, and then some. Better Call Saul first premiered on February 8, 2015, almost immediately establishing itself as a piece of must-watch television that not only matched the immaculate storytelling and production quality Breaking Bad, but, in some cases, even surpassed it.

***WARNING! The following contains major plot spoilers for the entire series thus far***

An intoxicating blend of dark humor and character exploration, the spinoff took a light-hearted supporting player from the Breaking Bad mythos and turned them into another magnetic antihero — a proverbial train wreck of a human being whose entertainingly self-destructive exploits always brought you back, week in and week out.

Despite the fact that they were working with a familiar character, Saul’s co-creators “were adamant that everything got rethought from the ground up: how it was shot, how things were written, how they approached everything about the show and that certainly included the music, too,” Porter recalls, describing his work on the prequel as “one of the toughest creative adjustments or rethinks that I’ve had to do in my career.”

“There was always this nagging part of me that was sort of like, ‘Well…yeah, ok, they want different, but do they really want different? Or do they just want somewhat different, but still recognizable to the universe that we worked so hard to create in Breaking Bad?’ But no, they were [truly adamant and] some of my half-measures at the beginning were quickly squashed. I really did have to do a total rethink.”

Taking place a little over half a decade before the events of the show that spawned it, Better Call Saul tracks the total corruption of the man destined to become Saul Goodman: Jimmy McGill. He pursues a career as an attorney in an effort to gain the acceptance of his stiff-necked older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), but can’t avoid an instinctual habit of treating the law as though it were a set of loose guidelines.

This troublesome penchant for stepping over constitutional boundaries leads to a life of crime and a cushy manager position at a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska. When the story kicks off in Season 1, however, Saul’s on-the-lam existence as the mustachioed Gene is still a lifetime away.

“Those first few seasons of Better Call Saul [inhabited a] totally new sonic world,” Porter says. “I sort of refer to it sometimes as my ‘Seventies Rock Palette,’ particularly for Jimmy as he was then, going back to his Midwestern roots. It’s got a more performed feel than Breaking Bad — lots of drums and more traditional kit drums, guitars, basses, electric pianos and that kind of world. It seemed to work really well for him, particularly when he was younger.”

A roster of new faces opened up this fresh sonic palette even further. Chuck, for instance, “felt different to me for the universe,” Porter adds. “So erudite, so polished, so smug and sure of himself with a clear musical knowledge in his own self.”

Another major addition to the canon was Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), a talented lawyer and Jimmy’s proverbial partner-in-crime, who also becomes his wife in Season 5. Kim’s got her own history of bending the rules for personal gain, but has yet to fully come to grips with her husband’s status as a “friend of the cartel.” The full weight of that entanglement reaches its boiling point in Season 6’s midway point (more on that below).

“We don’t do a ton of music for Kim, individually, but we do do a lot of music for Kim and Saul together as an entity and that’s been fascinating,” Porter says. “Because most of the relationships in Breaking Bad were confrontational. Even Walter and Skyler were largely confrontational, whereas this is very different. They’re teaming up, working together on their various plots and schemes and just being an amazing couple that they were designed to be has been fun.”

For Porter, the closest the show had to “a moral center” was Ignacio “Nacho” Varga (Michael Mando), a lieutenant in the Salamancas’ New Mexican operation. His hands aren’t exactly clean, but his core motivation — wanting to provide for a father who wants absolutely nothing to do with him — is at least understandable. The composer compares Nacho to the character of Jesse: “It’s someone who’s clearly made a lot of poor choices, but whose heart, more or less, is in the right place. Michael Mando was fantastic and I really enjoyed some of the moments getting to write music for him.”

And then there’s the wild card — Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) — the charming, yet sociopathic nephew of the bell-ringing Hector (Mark Margolis). Lalo’s currently on an unstoppable rampage to prove that Gustavo “Gus” Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is planning to launch his own drug empire in direct defiance of the cartel.

Porter describes Lalo as “a whole new kind of villain and I’ve really enjoyed writing music for him because he’s a Salamanca and yet, he’s not a Salamanca. We have long established music for what we call ‘The Cousins,’ the twins who are the Salamanca assassins and for Hector and those horrendous drug cartel guys. But Lalo is so much more nuanced and interesting and, dare I say, a little sexy.”

As Better Call Saul’s story continued to creep ever forward with the passing seasons, Jimmy’s became more and more intertwined with the parallel storylines of Breaking Bad mainstays like Gus and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks).

“Like many things about the beginning of working on Saul, I was surprised by it,” Porter continues. “I was surprised by the bold choices that they made and the differences they made. The importance of it in terms of my score didn’t become clear until later on when the show did start to merge back in towards introducing Gus, for example, or bringing in some of the darker elements that we knew from Breaking Bad. It enabled those things to feel fresh when they came back because we hadn’t been using them and I was able to reintroduce them slowly in little drips and drabs along the way.”

That convergence between the two worlds will come full circle in the final six episodes. Back in April of this year, Gould finally confirmed what many fans had been wondering since Saul was first announced: Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul would indeed reprise their iconic characters of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.

“I can only point to what Mr. Gould has said,” Porter says when asked about the mysterious circumstances surrounding their return in the final batch of six episodes. “I wouldn’t want to say more than that, other than to say that in the fashion with which they are very good at doing this, it feels very organic and very satisfying.”

“I know they’re not gonna just throw in Walt and Jesse just to do it,” Paul told me over the phone last year. “It has to make sense and it’s gotta be honest. It can’t be gimmicky and out of left field and seem cheesy at all. But if anyone’s gonna figure out a way to do it, it’s them, so if they came knocking on my door, of course. Vince gave me my career and everything I have, so I would follow him into a burning bush, that’s for sure.”

Before we get there, however, Jimmy’s origin story must first come to a close. If you’re anything like me, you’re still processing the midseason finale, which ended with a literal bang: Lalo murders Howard (Patrick Fabian) in cold blood. Jimmy and Kim’s triumph over ruining Mr. Hamlin’s professional reputation devolves into utter horror as “the two worlds of the show have become inextricably linked,” Porter says.

For this scene, the composer looked back on his work for the penultimate installment of Season 5, which was the last time Lalo stopped by Jimmy and Kim’s apartment.

“I wanted to revisit that same tension, but knowing our audience would subconsciously remember that last time Lalo was there, it all turned out relatively fine…and knowing folks would be hoping for a similar outcome in a play to create as much tension as possible while still making what happens as shocking as possible,” he explains. “As we often have done in Breaking Bad, El Camino, and Better Call Saul, we used the score to wring as much tension and terror for the moments leading up to a big event, but then ultimately allow the big event to play out without music [so it could be] as raw and as realistic as possible.”

He concludes: “I’m only a few episodes ahead of where you guys are in terms of what’s aired. But I will say that Better Call Saul is like nothing I have ever worked on — even Breaking Bad,” he concludes. “It has consistently felt like a new movie every week and, of course, there’s a lot of connections that get made to the powerful backstory and universe that we’ve created, but there’s also totally new challenges every week and I think that is feeling like it’s gonna be especially true in the second part of this final season.”

Better Call Saul returns to AMC for the latter half of its final season Monday, July 11 at 9 p.m. EST. The first five seasons are currently available to stream on Netflix.