Meet Vera Weber | Film Music Composer & Songwriter

We had the good fortune of connecting with Vera Weber and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Vera, can you share a quote or affirmation with us?

One of my favorite quotes that comes to mind is by Kim Gordon: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” You could interpret this in a dark way, but I actually love this quote and see positivity in it. It gets down to the core of art being a place of fearlessness. In order to create something, you have to get over the fear of failure and just do it. It’s a naive, playful, improvisational mindset, and it’s not knowing what’s going to happen next that gives you the curiosity to keep going. And I think it’s that unrelenting curiosity and element of risk that reads as “believing in yourself” to a lot of people. Sometimes it helps if you feel like you have nothing to lose by trying. Everyone struggles with believing in themselves to some extent, so artists are a testament & inspiration to why it’s worth it to be fearless in realizing your full potential. I like simplifying artmaking to a mindset that is accessible to most people, and is applicable to most walks of life.

For me, believing in myself doesn’t mean believing everything’s going to work out; it’s more about being level-headed, ready to accept rejection, and ready to move forward full-force regardless of the outcome. In other words, you need a certain amount of detachment and lightheartedness to feel brave enough to gamble; to put yourself out there and vouch for yourself in a situation that might move your career forward (or not). Believing in yourself can sound egotistical, but for me it feels more like a lack of ego that gets me lighthearted enough to take risks. I always think, if other people get crazy lucky, why not me? You never know what’s going to happen. In a lot of ways, carving out a music career feels like a game. You have to genuinely value your own worth as an artist in order to love and enjoy the game enough to stay in it. I’m a naturally competitive person, but I feel like I’ve grown the most when I learned to compete against myself versus comparing myself to others. A lot of things are out of your control and don’t feel fair, but I’m always curious and motivated to see what else I am capable of. I’m always willing to try to outdo myself and surprise myself, and I think this mindset leads to opportunities.

Funny enough, it was a time where I was feeling extremely pessimistic about film music as a career that I took the leap in blindly sending out my film scoring demo to anyone I knew who might be connected in this industry. Instead of endlessly perfecting my music or letting negative self-talk tell me I’m not ready, I just went ahead and did it. At this point, I never had my name on a major production, only shorts, independent films, and ghostwriting for composers. Out of the 10 compositions in my demo, all of them had been used in films already except for one – meaning only 1 piece was technically available to be used in a new film. Serendipitously, a director I sent this to was indeed looking for a composer for his upcoming TV series. Unknowingly, he coincidentally picked out this one single composition and declared that it would be perfect as the Main Theme for his series. So, this theme (now called “Am Ende (David’s Theme)”) is the reason I was hired to compose the music to the entire season of a really amazing drama series called “Am Ende – Die Macht der Kränkung” in 2022-2023. Like winning the lottery, this opportunity ended up being a dream job with awesome collaborators. It was my first in to the film scene of German-speaking countries, which has been an unexpected hotbed of opportunities since then. I got to score three great films following the end of the series last year, and am super excited to score an upcoming sci-fi feature and a thriller series this year. There’s definitely elements of luck that got me here, but I also know that if I didn’t believe in myself enough to even play the game or put myself out there, nothing would have happened. So through this I’ve learned that having a certain degree of self-confidence is really key in having a successful music career.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?

I compose film music for a living, mainly on German and Austrian productions. In the LA music scene, I’m a pianist and harpsichordist, and compose experimental music (like my upcoming album for electronics and prepapred piano “a soft lunacy”). I’m also a singer-songwriter who dabbles in photography/filmmaking.

What sets me apart from other film composers:

1. I sing and write songs for films. In the first series I composed the music for, I spontaneously made an end title pop song called “You Could Be”. That song was the stepping stone for me getting hired for my upcoming project as the co-composer for a Netflix series, where I’m super excited to be on board to specifically write and record songs for the show.

2. I make visuals myself (analog photography & experimental films) which further strengthens my love, appreciation, and sensitivities to visuals. To me, filmmaking is a visual artform first and foremost, so I’m always highly sensitive to the nuances of the shot-angles, colors, facial expressions, and timing of the shots, which highly informs how I write to a scene.

3. I actually love films as much as I love music. Weirdly, I also love films that have little to no music; I love quality over quantity. When I write, I prefer a less-is-more approach, which is also atypical of film music composers.

4. I’m open-minded, empathic, and compose & perform in many different styles – I’m like a chameleon and am highly adaptive. I’m not here to project my singular sound world or inject my ego into your project. I have a very broad spectrum of taste and I know that there’s a right time for everything in its unique situation. There’s no rule or formula you can apply to every film or artistic process. I have the musical versatility to pull off unexpected challenges and requests, and I have a really good understanding of film & music history to understand directors’ diverse reference points and visions. From the projects I’ve done so far, I’ve learned it’s just as much about navigating emotions and reading the intuitions of everyone involved in the creative process as it is about actually writing the music– which to me is a special, humanizing part of the job that I really enjoy.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.

– the Los Feliz theater matinees on Sundays where they project classic black & white films on 35mm; go to a diner beforehand like House of Pies.

– York Boulevard on a Saturday, vintage shopping, go to Delia’s my favorite breakfast place, see if Moryork Gallery is open

–Dinner at Grand Central Market & a REDCAT show

– Dodgers game when in season!

– Whale watching at Oxnard or Dana Point

– Picnic on the cliff at Point Dume (if in summer, not on a weekend)

– Rollerskating at Venice Beach (not on a weekend)

– Whatever you do, don’t go to Santa Monica and Malibu and Highland park in the same day! or any variation of that! That’s insanity and no one does that who actually lives in LA because we regard those areas as entirely separate cities. Each of these places are day-trips, but there’s plenty to explore within each area, so just do one thing a day!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

There are a lot of people who I could shout out – (my mom, my piano teachers) – but if I have to pick one, I will pick the most obvious one which is my dad, and try to explain what was not obvious.

What’s obvious is that he’s a film composer and I have followed in his footsteps; but I don’t take for granted that he took extra care to instill the confidence in me to become a composer. I absolutely didn’t have to become a film composer – there was no pressure (for the record, my older sister did not pursue music.) Basically he made it really simple by showing me very early on like, “hey, you see what you’re doing? I see you playing piano, you’re singing, you have a good ear – see what I’m doing over here? By the way, you can do this too, it’s basically the same thing.“ He’d show me various simple tricks and things he does in his composing, in a chill and casual way, like he’s showing me a fun little secret. Whether it was a chord progression that works for a lot of scenarios, or a type of plugin that makes a certain virtual instrument sound exponentially cooler – he completely demystified being a composer to me at such an early age that I never doubted my own abilities to do this. I honestly didn’t think of it as being a big deal; like it’s just a job that happens to be more fun than some other jobs, depending on what you’re into. (My cousins in rural Germany mostly all continued their family businesses as well, so I saw this as kind of an extension of that culture.)

Meanwhile, as I grew older and went to music school, I started to realize that a lot of great musicians don’t dare compose because they think it’s this completely untouchable high art, which was a strange concept to me. And only once I was one of the only girls in my composition classes did I realize that this must mean that not a lot of girls were given this type of encouragement at all, and that it was a great privilege that thinking of myself as a composer was never really a mental/emotional obstacle that I had to overcome. It was just ingrained in me that I’m capable of this – not because I’m some sort of prodigious genius, but because my dad made it seem like it’s not rocket science. I think he approaches music with a very playful, improvisational mindset which I’ve inherited; an ego-free lightheartedness that is uplifting and makes things feel easier than they really are.

So for that I have to give my dad a big shout out! Because I don’t know where I would be if I never took the leap from being a performer/ interpreter of other people’s compositions to becoming a creator/ writer of my own music. And for the record, there are lots of successful film composers with sons who became composers, and daughters who somehow grow up believing that they can’t compose. In this way I think of my dad as being an accidental super-feminist, which I’m very grateful for.

Website: https://vera-weber.com/home

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veramarieweber/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vera-weber-40a30226a/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/verawebermusic

Other: https://vera-weber.bandcamp.com/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/1F8cIy3XXXYNp7JVpKP1cW https://music.apple.com/us/artist/vera-weber/1686864259 https://vimeo.com/user123999462 https://veraweber.darkroom.com/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6110709/

Image Credits
Meredith Minne Ben Scolaro Vera Weber