How Acclaimed Composer Bear McCreary Corralled Heavy Rock Royalty for ‘The Singularity’

For the last two decades, Bear McCreary has made his name composing scores for shows like Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, and The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, as well as movies including Godzilla: King of the Monsters and The Last Voyage of the Demeter. But it wasn’t until he started with Battlestar in 2003 that he became a heavy metal convert, and he has since been enamored with the genre and befriended many of its stars. That inevitably led to his first solo album The Singularity, which arrived this past spring and features guest appearances from music A-listers. It also spawned a graphic novel that can be appreciated standalone or as a companion piece.

Planting Seeds

The seed for The Singularity was planted back in 1995 when McCreary was just 15 years old and living in Bellingham, Washington. He wrote a sci-fi song called “Escape from the Machines” that was done on a four-track cassette recorder. The first 15 seconds became part of the final version. His friend James Ryan Ho, now a Grammy-winning producer and songwriter who goes by the name Malay, played guitar on it. The version on the 2024 album features Slash and Joe Satriani, which “was like this fulfillment because those were the guitarists I was listening to at the time,” McCreary tells American Songwriter during an interview at New York Comic Con. “But my career moved into scoring—film, TV, video games—and I was always yearning to go back to writing songs, especially rock songs. You could hear it.”

In many ways for McCreary, The Singularity represents a collection of material that had been previously started and abandoned. “It was also an excuse for me to go back and look at everything I’d learned over the last 30 years of my creative life,” he says. “And come back to it one more time. I wasn’t done exploring this sound or that sound.” Once he figured out he had something, McCreary wrote a bulk of the songs in 2019, with more material completed between 2020 and 2023.

Although metal is clearly the throughline for the album, orchestral accompaniment is pretty regular as well. Some tracks cross over into different musical territory. “Exiles” has a Scottish flavor. “The Last of the Old Gods” invokes the Nordic. “Redshift” includes ‘80s video arcade game sounds. There is death-metal growling, rapping, and ethereal female vocals. Electric, electronic, and organic sounds intertwine.

Onboarding the Icons

Doing a crossover metal album was new territory for the Grammy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning composer. Singer and composer Serj Tankian was the first person whom McCreary sent demos to. The two bonded previously over their Armenian heritage, and McCreary valued and trusted his input. Once Tankian picked a song he liked and wanted to do (“Incinerator”), McCreary felt empowered to reach out to other metal luminaries he knew, including Brendon Small of Metalocalypse and Dethklok fame, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, and thrash drummer Gene Hoglan. When they all responded positively, McCreary felt emboldened to reach out to people he didn’t know, including Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor and guitarists Slash and Joe Satriani. They all said yes. “It empowered me to see how far I could take it, which is pretty far,” McCreary notes.

The composer has enthusiastically scored pictures for two decades, so The Singularity allowed him to stretch himself artistically rather than shape his ideas to someone else’s story. Once he realized there was a story in the songs he was creating, McCreary pitched his comic book writer friend Kyle Higgins (Radiant Black, Nightwing) on the graphic novel idea, and Higgins connected him with fellow comics scribe Mat Groom (Ultraman, Inferno Girl Red).

“He’s just a brilliant writer, a really thoughtful guy,” McCreary says of Groom. “It’s funny because he looks like this Viking dude, but then as soon as he opens his mouth he’s like a poet. He’s so thoughtful and makes his arguments so emotionally. He’s all about the clarity of story, which is good when you have a crazy album like this. He came up with the idea that ultimately became The Singularity, the graphic novel.” Image Comics released the title.

Feedback Loop Process

In the comic, the character of Blue Eyes finds himself cycling through hundreds of lives, always facing down a nemesis he thinks is somewhat responsible for his endless deaths and his horrific, Quantum Leap-like jumps into new lives in different environments. But as the story progresses, he recognizes another threat and tries to understand what his purpose in this multiverse is. It’s reminiscent at times of the movie Heavy Metal, but there is one storyline extending through many fantasy and sci-fi worlds.

“The graphic novel was working so beautifully that I realized I want to now feedback loop influence more on this project,” McCreary explains. “Let’s get some monologues from this book and record them with actors on a record. We worked with Lee Pace from Foundation, Danai Gurira from Black Panther and Walking Dead, and Ryan Hurst from Sons of Anarchy and Walking Dead. I heard these three voices, and I wanted them to communicate these monologues. Then I actually scored them. The very last thing I did on my record was scoring their monologue like it’s a scene from a movie. So I got to do every permutation of how music and story can interact on The Singularity.”

“I Know How To Do That”

McCreary’s goal with the project was not to have famous names to make him sound good, but to bring songs to them that would make them sound good. As the composer notes, Rufus Wainwright’s track includes metal riffing and a section of blastbeats that are not part of his repertoire, but McCreary found a melody and lyric the singer/songwriter could connect with. He also collaborated on songs with his contributors, including his brother, singer Brendan McCreary.

He sent Tankian three songs, two of which “were outside the box, but one of them is obviously very influenced by System,” McCreary says. “It was written with him in mind, and I think it’s a testament to my impulse that he chose that song because I wrote it like, ‘This will make Serj sound good.’ He heard it and goes, ‘I know how to do that.’ The same thing with Slash. He heard the solo on ‘The End of Tomorrow,’ and he didn’t just do an improv solo—he played all these melodic lines. We tracked that song for nine hours together, and he heard it and goes, ‘I know how to do that.’”

The project turned out well, and people can enjoy the ambitious Singularity comic and double album separately.

“Absolutely,” McCreary concurs. “I feel very strongly we wanted the book to stand on its own, which is why we put in all that work. I want the record to stand on its own. I want the concert to stand on its own. And when you put them all together, it’s like chocolate and peanut butter.”

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