Ask him to write a song, though, and he’ll likely turn you down on the basis that he has a problem with “any form of authority, and the authority that is put upon you of writing a song”.
R. O’Connor, “Hans Zimmer: ‘I’m an embarrassing silence without my musicians’”, The Independent, 13 March 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/hans-zimmer-interview-world-of-tour-lion-king-inception-setlist-gavin-greenaway-a8819741.html (accessed 23 May 2022).
“Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight…” he says. “It’s always the same bloody structure. I end up going ‘no wait a second, this is not how life works’, and suddenly you go off and decide you need something completely different here, and that’s what film music allows you to do. People are desperately trying to reinvent pop music without realising one of its inherent flaws. They need to go and throw the structure out.”
Hans Zimmer on writing pop songs
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