We recently connected with Devin Reilly and have shared our conversation below.

Devin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I have been working as a full-time composer and arranger in LA for about three years now. After graduating college in Seattle, I was lucky to work full-time in musical theatre almost immediately. When I moved to LA, I had to start over. I had a series of survival jobs — barista, host at a ramen bar, guitar store clerk, etc — and I took composing and arranging projects on top of that. I also happened to move here six months before the pandemic. Naturally, the amount of creative work during that time plummeted. Theater was on hold, live music was on hold, and established composers certainly were not expanding their teams. But eventually the pandemic ebbed and I was able to take on more and more creative work. In 2021, I started working with film and TV composers Jacob Yoffee and Roahn Hylton. On their team, I’ve written music for projects for HBO, Netflix, and Peacock. In fact, we just wrapped work on season 3 of Bel Air, streaming on Peacock. Most recently, I have been working as an orchestrator and music director for a new musical called The Brass Teapot, which just debuted at the Chicago Music Theatre Festival.

Regarding how I got here, I’ll start with a milestone that I did get right. When I was still a senior in college, I cold-emailed a bunch of film composers and flew out to LA for a week to meet with them and hear any advice they had to give. One of them was Jacob, who remembered me seven years later and offered me a spot on his team. I think it’s definitely important to make those connections early without the expectation they will immediately lead anywhere.

I probably could have moved to LA a little earlier. It would have been helpful to have been more established out here before the pandemic, but of course no one could have predicted all that. Taking a summer internship on a composer’s team also might have been advantageous. That being said, I took other internships and spent the earlier part of my career working on musicals. Both choices have brought me important professional connections and work that continues to this day.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I moved to LA to score films and television, and to write and produce songs. When the pandemic hit, I launched an artist project called Birds at Night as a vehicle for those songs. Over time, I met my musical compatriots John, Nate, and Dakota in the indie rock scene here and the project became a full-fledged band. We released our first EP last summer and followed it up with a run of shows in the LA area. We are currently at work writing our next record and planning future shows!

I had written music for a few small student films and commercials here and there, but I got into scoring for film and TV in earnest when Jacob Yoffee and Roahn Hylton brought me aboard their team, Th3rdstream Productions.

Stewart Copeland once suggested that film composers were more akin to craftsmen than artists. I think that’s absolutely right. As a composer, my job is to support the story the filmmakers are telling. Often times filmmakers will have an idea of the sound of the film or series in advance, but it’s up to me and my colleagues to create a musical world unique to their characters, their setting, and their story. The biggest thing I’ve learned doing this for a living is that it requires something above and beyond musical ability. Great composers have a kind of sixth sense about character and narrative and tone. It’s a kind of multidisciplinary empathy that allows them to effectively collaborate with the director and producers. That’s something I think about every time I watch a new project for the first time.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

While there is great joy in the actual act of scoring a scene, writing a song, or orchestrating a piece of music — and there must be to make it worth it — I would say the most rewarding part is sharing what you created with an audience. So much time as a composer is spent alone in a room. It’s easy to lose the sense of play and collaboration that’s so important in music. And it’s easy to lose sight of who the music is for. The first time you stand in front of an orchestra ready to play your music, or bring the curtain down on the first performance of a show, or watch something you scored with a group of people — these are the most rewarding moments you can have as a composer. And they more than pay for the work you put in to get there.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Go see your favorite band live. Buy something from the merch table afterward. Go see your friends in their new musical. Buy a ticket to see that movie you’re excited about in a theater.

For the last twenty or so years, the tech giants have been encouraging us to think of music and film and TV as essentially valueless. More importantly, they have encouraged us to think that these are things that can exist without audience support. You can just log into your streaming service and have instant access to nearly every film, TV show, and song ever made. In some ways this is wonderful. Instant access to the history of recorded music or film is an immense resource. But this completely frictionless transaction has both lowered the bar of what we expect to see and damaged our willingness to actually trade anything (money, time out of our day) to see it.

Art is a fundamentally human endeavor. It’s something that takes resources to make. One of those resources is the participation of the audience. If you like someone’s work, you have the power to help them make more.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devincreilly/
• Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13801086/

Image Credits

Photo 3/4 (me performing with Birds at Night at Hotel Ziggy) is a still from film recorded by Grant Guillot.
Photo 4/4 (me and my bandmate, John Krause) was taken by Brit O’Brien.