Music Supervisor Peymon Maskan Makes Ads That Don’t Skip a Beat – Muse by Clio

You did a lot of work for Apple, but can you pick a favorite?

I was able to work with Hudson Mohawke on an unreleased song [“Chimes”] that he finished and released simultaneously with an ad, which was more of a film behavior. It was the “Stickers” ad. It was just love for all the stickers people put on the back of their MacBooks, and it is set to music. It was a fun process—just sitting with the creatives and playing music and being able to find something really unexpected. 

What did it feel like to help this artist find a larger audience?

It was incredible, because when you’re learning what your voice is—sometimes for me it was a little bit of a struggle of, “What do I want, and what do I think other people want?” And when the thing I got excited about got everybody else excited, it was very affirming. It allowed me to trust my instincts and understand how things that I really was excited about could play on a much bigger stage and tell bigger stories.

When would you recommend that a client or an agency bring a music supervisor into a project?

[I can’t count] the number of times I’ve been hired on something, and I’m like, “Oh, if you had just called me two months ago, I could have saved you money and really helped the creative.” It’s almost always too late. The beauty of Apple is, it’s done at the script stage.

You got spoiled by that approach.

Totally! Every place is set up differently. So, if your agency is set up in a way that the impact of music can be harnessed early, it’s super beneficial. A lot of what my company Radish does is plan a music strategy for an agency to present to their clients so that everyone can get on the same page about vocabulary and vibe and what does the brand sound like. We’ll do all this work to pave the road so that when it comes to actually creating the ad, these conversations [about music] go smoothly. It takes a lot to actually be able to do ads that are driven by music even when that conversation happens early. If it’s an agency-wide value, it takes an agency-wide effort to make it go beyond the creatives and the music supervisor. Everyone’s got to align early.

Let’s talk about some recent ad work out of Radish. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for Jeep Grand Cherokee features an orchestral version of the iconic song, and it’s a pleasant surprise.

They came to us with the idea of wanting to do an interpolation of that song. The trick with that song is it’s melodically all over the place. It’s made to be chanted, and when you make something to be chanted, you can do these wild melodic swings. That can get a little wonky when you’re trying to get some emotion out of it. We were able to work with a young composer, Taylor Lipari-Hassett, who works with Rob Simonsen [the composer behind Darron Aronofsky’s The Whale].