‘The White Lotus’ Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer Breaks Down That Haunting Theme Song

Larisha Paul and Ilana Woldenberg
·3 min read
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The White Lotus doesn’t work without the eerie mystery that rests under the surface of every encounter between characters on the popular HBO series. And in order for an audience to completely lean into the suspense, they have to be fully grounded in it. That’s where composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer comes in. In the latest episode of The Breakdown, the creator of that haunting The White Lotus theme song, “Renaissance,” talks to Rolling Stone about stirring up emotions through music and why imperfections can actually make his compositions even better.

“I heard lots of people saying that they felt anxious about the show, about the music —tense and whatnot,” Tapia de Veer explains. “But they still like it, and they can stop listening to it.” Earlier this year, the composer tested the limits of just how much of an earworm “Renaissance” could be when he teamed up with Tiësto for the first-ever official remix of the theme song. Seeing the way people latched onto the song, despite him having rushed to complete it in the midst of multiple other projects, revived Tapia de Veer’s love for it.

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“The thing is that I did that really fast, and I couldn’t send it to Mike, because I was tripping when I did it. But afterward, I started thinking about the sounds, about the production and this and that, and I started criticizing. I thought, ‘Okay, this is not very good. I need to change this. It sounds too clean,'” he recalls. When he finally worked up the courage to just hand it over, the creators thought it was perfect. “I was really surprised. And then, you know, I somehow started appreciating this theme again.”

He adds: “I realized when this came out, and it became such a big thing — Tiësto doing a remix, it’s all over the place — I realized that when you do something really fast, and you’re feeling right, you have this gut feeling. But this is a very short moment, and then afterward, you start criticizing. If you take the time to perfect it, then it’s like you start strangling the tune, somehow, and you start losing elements.”

While scoring season one, Tapia de Veer found his focus the more he locked in on the characters at play. “It felt like I did have to somehow be savage about the music going into tribal sounds, percussions, and all that. With time, I started realizing why I went into that, because it’s not about Hawaii, about local music. It’s not about anything like that. It just feels like somehow the tourists could be savages,” he explains.

“You could be confused because it’s like tourists get into a wild place, and this is a vibe, you hear animals and tribal things and whatnot. But maybe the music is not about Hawaii. Maybe it’s not about that. It’s about these people who are acting like savages. Maybe the music is mocking them sometimes.”

Watch the full episode of The Breakdown above.

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