Daniel Hart Drops His Liner Notes for 'The Vampire Lestat'

Image via AMC The 'Interview with the Vampire' composer breaks down some of the biggest songs of Lestat's tumultuous Season 3 arc. Published Jul 23, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT Carly Lane is an Atlanta-based writer and critic who has been with Collider in some form or fashion since 2021. She considers herself a television nerd, diehard romance/sci-fi/fantasy reader, and nascent horror lover. Her fondness of books is only eclipsed by the towering TBR that her shelves can't possibly contain. She is the author of A REGENCY GUIDE TO MODERN LIFE: 1800s ADVICE ON 21ST CENTURY LOVE, FRIENDS, FUN AND MORE, published through DK Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) and currently available wherever books are sold. Editor's note: The below interview contains full season spoilers for The Vampire Lestat. As AMC's Interview with the Vampire wrapped up its original story — or, at least, the entirety of the Anne Rice novel it had been adapting — it became clear that the show would have to reinvent itself a little. That restyling wasn't just accompanied by a retitling into The Vampire Lestat, or a pivot toward a very different leading point of view; it also led to a much more involved role for series composer Daniel Hart. While the Kansas-born musician had previously crafted the score for the last two seasons of Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat was a completely different beast, not just in tone but in the sheer quantity of songs that needed to be composed. "Season 2 is the most music I've ever written for any project that I've ever worked on," Hart admits, but "Season 3 eclipses that two or three times over." Turns out that when your leading immortal, played by Sam Reid, decides to enter his rockstar era, he's going to need a lot of songs to encapsulate his fracturing psyche, his most important relationships, and everything else he wants to get off his chest in front of a live audience. Below, Hart explains how his closer collaboration with Reid and series creator Rolin Jones, as well as a bigger presence in the writers' room, assisted in the creation of The Vampire Lestat's most pivotal, emotional, and narratively defining tracks. COLLIDER: You've worked on the show for multiple seasons, but for The Vampire Lestat, you're writing songs with lyrics, songs to be performed. Does that change the composition process at all? What tends to come first for you when you're crafting a song: music or lyrics? DANIEL HART: When I started writing songs when I was in my teens, it was always music first. I was not a very strong lyricist. I don't really like looking back at those songs. Most of them, for me, come up short— sometimes musically, but especially lyrically. I can see that I was trying for something, but I never found exactly what it was that I was trying to express. That changed a little bit, I think, in the last five to 10 years, where I felt like I had found something that I was looking for and was able to express it a bit more easily, as far as lyrics go. I'm glad that I didn't have to write these vampire songs 10 years ago, because I don't think I would have liked them very much. You're a producer, but you also have a writing credit on the season. How did your role on the show ultimately change between Seasons 2 and 3? HART: Rolin [Jones] approached me about taking on this bigger role towards the end of Season 2. He was already thinking ahead in those terms and asked me if I would be willing to do it, and I said yes because I like this show, and I said yes because I'm a contract worker, so if someone offers you work, you say yes. But I said yes because I studied playwriting at school, just like Rolin and Hannah [Moscovitch]. I just haven't been doing very much of it since a couple of years after school, so I've been looking for ways to get back to doing more of that. For someone to say, “Would you like to do more of that in a professional capacity?” is very generous, and I feel very lucky that someone gave me the opportunity, especially working on something that I already know so well and love, as opposed to starting from scratch. It's impossible to know what to expect before doing something like this, so I tried to go in with no expectations and stay as open as possible to what could be and what needed to be done. Season 2 is the most music I've ever written for any project that I've ever worked on — Season 3 eclipses that two or three times over. A tremendous amount of work, almost nonstop for about two years or so between writing the songs and then working on scripts. I co-wrote Episode 305 with Hannah, but I was at the writers’ room table, and so I think I found something that I wrote in every episode. Every episode, except for 3, has something that I wrote in it. Then going to Toronto to be on set and work as a co-producer, and then coming back and doing my usual job of scoring, it was just a monster heap of work and all different kinds of roles requiring different sides of my brain. I'm exhausted. Daniel Hart Closely Collaborated With Sam Reid on 'The Vampire Lestat's Music "We had a lot of conversations about lyrics, because there's nobody who knows this version of Lestat better than Sam now." Image via AMC You're writing more songs, but you're writing them to Sam [Reid]'s voice, so how does that change the process, knowing who you're writing to and what his vocal range is? I imagine the two of you working together pretty intimately as a consequence. HART: Absolutely. I wrote all of these songs with Sam in mind, with his voice in mind. He'd already done a little bit of singing in Seasons 1 and 2, so I knew some of the basics of his range, but we'd never done something like this together before, and he'd never done something like this at all in his life. So, lots of unknowns going into it, and lots of conversations between me and Sam. He is, for the most part, a baritone, and I'm somewhere in between baritone and tenor, so I wrote some songs thinking that they would be fine for his range because of one thing I'd heard him do previously. But having to do it over and over again, having to record that, we ended up putting things a little bit lower sometimes, changing the key so that it would be more comfortable in his voice and he wouldn't wear himself out. When we filmed these scenes where he's performing on camera, even if there was no need for him to actually sing, he would actually sing anyway because it gives the most convincing performance. Doing that over and over again can be very taxing on vocal cords, so we lowered things to make them more comfortable for him. We had a lot of conversations about lyrics, because there's nobody who knows this version of Lestat better than Sam now. He's been doing it for this long, and I trust him and his interpretation of this character and of these books, so when he would tell me that he thought Lestat might not say something in a particular way, I tried to take that to heart and make changes to the lyrics that felt more suited to the Lestat that Sam knew. There are certain songs from this season that I've had trouble getting out of my head after listening to them. Do you know what the biggest earworm was for the cast and crew? Were there any songs in particular that you would hear people singing on set? HART: I'm offering this free of charge: I think AMC should set up a Which Character Are You quiz on their site, and then based on which songs you reacted to in certain ways, you would know who you were. Rolin’s favorite was “The Loneliness.” Sam Reid’s favorites were “Stained Glass Eyes” and “Brutal Love,” and he said it was mainly due to the fact that his girlfriend just wouldn't stop singing them around the house. The crew really reacted to “Brutal Love” more than anything else. That was a really touching moment on set when people got very emotional for it. I think the first time that Kevin Vitale at AMC marketing heard “Your Biggest Fan,” he was like, “That's the single.” My personal favorites at the moment are “The Loneliness” and “When I Call Out Your Name,” but they change quite a bit from time to time. When I was writing “Your Biggest Fan,” that was the first one where I felt like, “This feels like a song you would hear on the radio.” There's a song that's in the show called “Black Licorice,” and it's an old song of mine. It’s from 2010 with updated lyrics, and I had no intention of including it in the show. I didn't share it with Rolin at all, but Ryan Kattner, who plays Salamander in the show, was also in the writers’ room with us, and Ryan and I have known each other since 2007, when we were both touring with bands at the same level and playing a lot of the same festivals together, so we would see each other sporadically, especially in the summers. That was around the time when I was writing that song, and that was an old favorite of Ryan's. He played it for Rolin, and then Rolin was like, “This is a vampire song. We need this in our show.” How 'The Vampire Lestat' Grappled With the Song That Started It All "I wrote ["Long Face"] before we read any scripts." Image via AMC “Long Face,” looking back, set a very specific tone by announcing Lestat and what the season was going to be, but it is funny how the show itself grapples with the song. Even in the finale, during Lestat's concert for all the people that he's killed or traumatized, someone from the crowd requests "Long Face," and he immediately shuts them down. Do you feel any differently about it now compared to when you were first writing it? HART: I wrote that song before we read any scripts. I wrote it in the summer of 2024, and we didn't start working in the writers’ room until the fall of 2024. I hadn't even finished reading The Vampire Lestat, the book, yet. I wrote it after multiple discussions with Rolin about what Season 3 would look like and what we wanted to do musically, and what the specific needs of this song were, because it was going to be premiered at Comic-Con. It wouldn't make any sense for me to write “La Fontaine De Sang,” a French art ballad, for Comic-Con. There were specific goals in mind, and that limited choices for me in ways that are helpful. It was a getting-to-know-you song, and I think Rolin and Hannah very smartly then used it that way in the show and throughout the season. This is what you write when you think you know what you want to write about, and then you discover yourself, and you're like, “Wait a minute. I'm not so sure that is what I wanted to write about, actually, after all.” I feel like it did what it was supposed to do. Then, in the writers’ room, people cleverly figured out how to make fun of it. I've never had so much fun making fun of my own songs. I heard that you were the one who wrote the Stereogum review of Lestat’s album. Were you channeling a bit of that energy there by putting his album through the wringer? HART: I found it incredibly easy to dissect and lambast my own music and the character of Lestat. There's some line in there, “He's like a bad Robert Plant impersonator mixed with a hot dog embalmed in ‘80s hair gel,” or something like that. I think it's some of the best writing I've ever done in my life. [Laughs] The writers somehow predicted Drake releasing multiple albums, too. HART: That was a longer discussion, actually, in the writers’ room. There are people with different feelings about Drake in the writers’ room. I think even Jacob Anderson weighed in on what that would eventually be. Daniel Hart Didn't Want To Follow a Strict Genre Template for 'The Vampire Lestat' "I made a playlist for Sam and for Rolin before we started, and I listened to that playlist a lot, too..." Image via AMC Were there any songs you knew you wanted to attack in a certain style from the jump? “Your Biggest Fan” is very much a classic rock ballad, for instance, while “Big Boss,” the Armand callout song, feels more like the “Hey Mickey” or “Hollaback Girl” of The Vampire Lestat. HART: It’s totally “Hollaback Girl.” It's “Shake It Off.” It's any number of songs from Grease. It's following an already existing template for a pop song. I didn't go into it knowing that Armand's diss track would be “Hollaback Girl.” It sort of revealed itself to me as I dug in. When I started writing songs, it was always music first and lyrics second. This season, it was a lot of lyrics first and music second, but sometimes music would come first. I would be sitting at the writers’ room table, and a musical idea would pop into my head, and I would leave, and I would go to my own little corner, which I called the "songwriter’s room," and sketch it out, and then come back to the writers’ room and pick up the discussion that we were having about what kind of socks Bruce should wear when they kill him. I made a playlist for Sam and for Rolin before we started, and I listened to that playlist a lot, too, so I feel like that was influencing musical choices along the way. Again, I tried to stay open to what was possible, so it wasn't so much like, “We have to have a song that sounds a lot like Led Zeppelin.” It was more like, “I think Lestat would be into Led Zeppelin, so that's going to be in the DNA somewhere, but I don't know exactly how it's going to show up.” In terms of “Big Boss,” I think that kind of callout song makes sense for a diss track, but I didn't go into it thinking I definitely needed it to be a cheerleader chant. “When I Call Out Your Name” was one of the first songs that I wrote for the show; it came very early on, and Rolin wasn't so sure about it at first. He wasn't sure we would have a place for it. Sam was more confident in it making sense with the development of the season right from the beginning. I think that's a perfect example of one where there was no template at all needed and none asked for, and it just showed up. It feels very much like Echo and the Bunnymen to me, somewhere between alt-rock and new wave. I love where "When I Call Out Your Name" is placed in the finale, against the backdrop of a big scene between Lestat and Gabriella, but later, when I listened to it in full, I realized his stutter is in the song. HART: This was a case where the song came first, and that informed the decision to put so much emphasis on his stutter in the show itself. What a serendipitous thing. It wasn't my intention to make the stutter a big part of the show; it just made sense for the song, and then Rolin took that and made it make sense for the rest of the show. He did tell me that I had to ask you about the Witches’ Place, and since we're already on the subject of Gabriella, with “When I Call Out Your Name,” those moments do feel very linked. How clear an idea did you have in your mind of where you wanted to go with the score for that scene? HART: We worked a little bit out of order, but Episode 7 was the last one that we worked on in post-production. So by this point, I'd written 80–85% of the score for the show. I'd written all the songs, and I was on set, and I wrote scripts, and I was co-producing, and I'd had endless Zoom meetings with anybody that I could possibly need to talk to about anything. All that to say, there was no point at which I knew this show and this show’s music better than I did going into Episode 7 and having to write for it. So, it was pretty easy to find what I was looking for there. Thematically speaking, the music for the Witches’ Place reprises the melody from the beach scene in Episode 4 with Lestat and Gabriella. It's the same melody that comes back. That was very easy, and it felt pretty obvious to me that those two pieces of music needed to be related. I recorded the orchestra for these episodes in Vienna with the Synchron Orchestra, and have since Season 1, and I've had the same concertmaster this whole time. He's a very, very talented violinist named Damir Oraščanin, and I know Damir, and I know his abilities better than I ever have at this point, so I knew what he would be able to do, and I knew if I wrote a solo that went right to the top of the fingerboard that he would be able to accomplish it with the intensity that we needed. I guess the answer to your question is it was a very time-consuming piece to write because orchestra music takes time to write, but it was very easy to find what I was looking for there. I didn't have to search for something. It just presented itself, and I said, “Yes, that's what we need,” and then I went and wrote it. Daniel Hart Explains Why "Stained Glass Eyes" Was the Hardest Song To Get Right "I knew the importance, the weight of the scene, and that bears responsibility, and I try to take that responsibility seriously." Image via AMC Previously, we spoke about which song was easiest to compose and which was more difficult, and you said “Stained Glass Eyes” ended up being the one... it was three different times, you said, that you had to write from the ground up? HART: Yeah, it took the most time. It's such an important moment in the season because it's Lestat grappling with his Claudia feelings, which he hasn't really done until this point. What do you think ultimately helped you land on the right version of “Stained Glass Eyes”? HART: When things that I think will work end up not working, like I set out with an idea and I think this idea will work, and then I execute it in the form of a demo, and then I listen back, and I'm like, “No, that's not going to be right,” or someone else listens back and says, “No, that's not going to be right for this reason and this reason,” because of the way the scene is set up or because of the way the dialogue goes, because the pacing of the episode, it's not going to work, if I do that a couple times and I still haven't found what I'm looking for, then, at that point, I just start stumbling around, is how I think of it — musically, mentally stumbling around. It's sort of like playing a video game that I haven't played before, where I don't know all of the rules, and I don't know exactly what I'm looking for — or if I know exactly what I'm looking for, I don't know where to find it, and so I just sort of wander for a little bit. I climb a tree and look out over the landscape and see if there's anything shiny in the distance, and then I climb back down, and I meet some horses, and I talk to them for a bit, and I maybe feed them a couple of apples, and then all of a sudden, as I'm just wandering, something shows up. A character appears out of thin air, and he's like, “Ahaha! You’ve found the three gems of Crystalis. Welcome to the temple.” I think the same thing applies to songwriting, to making music in general. Sometimes, after a couple of stabs in, where I think I'm pointing my sword in the right direction, it's not going anywhere, and so then I just sort of stumble along until something shows up in my path. I feel like that's what happened with the third version of “Stained Glass Eyes.” I tried something, it didn't work for Rolin, and I tried something else, and it didn't work for me, so then I stumbled a little bit, and I just sort of hung out at the piano for a little while and tinkered around, even though lyrically, I knew what I was writing about. You could say from that general perspective that the lyrics came first, but I think what really came first in that third version was the right hand of the piano going de, de, de, de, de, de, de. That was the thing that unlocked another path for me to go down and made the rest of it possible. But then it still took a long time to keep going, and I think it's because trying and failing twice and then restarting makes you less sure of your footing as you go forward. This version of Claudia in our show is my favorite character, and so I treat her with the kind of reverence and care and trepidation that I might not with other characters with whom I feel like I could be a little bit more reckless or have a little bit more fun. I knew the importance, the weight of the scene, and that bears responsibility, and I try to take that responsibility seriously. It Only Made Sense for Most of 'The Vampire Lestat's Songs To Be About Loustat "And if a lot of them are going to be about Louis, then they're going to be about a lot of different feelings that he would have about Louis..." Image via AMC There's a scene in the penultimate episode between Louis and Lestat where they're sitting on the bench, which is already a recurring motif in their relationship, and Lestat admits that most, if not all, of his songs are about Louis in some way. “Why Do I Have to Feel” is where Lestat confronts him with Daniel's book, and “The Loneliness” is also a bit reminiscent of Louis, but it all really builds to “Brutal Love.” Were you, Rolin, Hannah, and the other writers ever talking about using the songs to track not just Lestat’s emotional evolution but also the different points of his relationship with Louis? HART: I think my memory of it is that it was more organic than that. We didn't have to do quite so much plotting. I got a bit luckier with the way that scenes and episodes were unfolding, and then songs had places to slot in in a fairly easy way. I don't feel like there were too many discussions. I've studied music for a long time — I don't think I've studied songwriting formally, but I've done it for 32 years, and so I feel like I've studied songwriting for a long time, too — but as much as possible, I try not to think in technical terms when I'm composing. I sort of equate it to an actor; you study the lines, and you study the lines, and you study the lines, and you've done all your movement training and your vocal training, but you try, in the moments when you're on stage or on screen, just to be present to everything that's happening around you and the other characters that you're interacting with so that you give the most believable performance. I try to apply that same kind of mentality to composing, where I don't think about the chord structure too much and I don't think about what I need to say or not say lyrically, so that I can remain at least a little bit open to the possibility of new things coming in lyrically or musically that I might not have planned on. We got lucky that I feel like that was true for the songs and their placement within the season, as well. We didn't have to have too many discussions ahead of time, like, “We need this kind of song for here, and these songs have to go in this kind of arc.” It was more like, well, yeah, if you're going to write a bunch of songs for The Vampire Lestat, then a lot of them are going to be about Louis. That's not even a discussion that we need to have. And if a lot of them are going to be about Louis, then they're going to be about a lot of different feelings that he would have about Louis, because it's a very tumultuous relationship. However loving and internal it feels, and however deep it feels at times, it's also going to feel rather shallow. There's so much anger and hurt between them, with each other, and then individually, too, that there's plenty of room for any kind of song you would want to imagine between the spectrums of hate and love. Is there anything that sticks out in your mind from the season as being the clearest example of that — a song that surprised you, where something you weren't even necessarily thinking about from the beginning emerged in the composing process? HART: “Big Bad Wolf” is a song that feels very much like a ‘60s, ‘70s, very straightforward rock and roll song, but then in the middle, there's a breakdown, and Lestat launches into a monologue rant about Louis. Originally, “Big Bad Wolf” was intended to go where “Black Licorice” is in the episode. I wrote it first for Episode 1 for that specific scene, and when Rolin heard “Black Licorice,” he was like, “No, no, this is the song for that scene.” So I said, “What are we going to do with ‘Big Bad’?” He was like, “We'll find a place for it. Don't worry about it.” So then, when we found a place for it, things had to change, because originally there was a rant that happened in the middle of the song, but the rant was about Larry, and it was about Larry being a bad collaborator and being a selfish musician and being a jerk to Lestat on stage — regardless of how much of a jerk Lestat was being in return. When that was no longer necessary, I just thought, “Well, what is this song about then? What does it need? Who could it be about?” And I think the obvious choice is always Louis. The first question is, “Is this about Louis?” And it seemed like it could be. I started writing another rant about Louis, and then I asked other people in the writers’ room for details from the book that they remembered about things that Lestat would be angry about because Louis got them wrong, so that I could include those. Sam and I started talking about that rant, and Sam was like, “I don't think he would say this at this point.” I think the first version of it that I had written for Louis was like, somebody comes to you with an apology and a sadness in their eyes, and Sam was like, “I don't think Louis has actually apologized to him yet. I don't think there's any kind of apology here, so that feels a little off to me.” We had to change that line. There was another line in the rant that I had written that bumped Sam in a way, and so then I called up Rolin from the recording studio, and I said, “Hey, Rolin, give me one more thing that would have been wrong in the book.” And Rolin was like, “We never see scars on his chest in Seasons 1 and 2. He should be angry about that, because it's this huge part of who he is, and it came from before he was a vampire. So he's not Vampire Fabio.” And I was like, “Oh my God, Vampire Fabio. Incredible line.” The other side of it, I think, would be “The Loneliness,” which, again, is one of my favorite songs from the season, and I think the first song that I wrote that isn't about a specific character. It feels like it talks about Louis a little bit, but it was more my attempt at thinking of Lestat writing about vampirism and what that means to him, and what it might mean to other people and how difficult that might be to capture this idea of loneliness and how that might be different from anything else that we would know of our relationship with loneliness — but then still, because I'm a human being, write it from a human being's emotional perspective. I think that one turned out better than I thought it would, more easily than I thought it would, and the lyrics came really quickly and faster than I thought they would. That was a surprise. 'The Vampire Lestat's Encore Song Was Written on the Road "They were filming Episode 7, but I was already on my way home because I had to start writing the score." Image via AMC When you first hear “Butterscotch Bitch,” you don't necessarily think that that's going to be the song to close out the season. Do you remember when you decided to make that the sign-off? We first heard it so early in the season that I don't know how many people expected it was going to be in the finale, too. HART: [Laughs] Yes, well, that's marketing for you. Things get released at times that make sense for them to be released — sometimes, irrespective of where they end up in the show. “Butterscotch Bitch” was the last song I wrote for Season 3. They were filming Episode 7, but I was already on my way home because I had to start writing the score. There was just so much score that I couldn't stay till the very end of production, so I left like 10 days earlier or something like that. We filmed in Toronto, and I lived in Los Angeles, and I had my dogs with me in Toronto, so I was driving the dogs home across Nebraska and Colorado. At this point, the idea was that for those places in Episode 7, where “Butterscotch Bitch” appears, it would be a reprise of one of our previous songs. But as I was driving, I had lots of time to think, and I kept thinking about those scenes and about which one of our songs would fit there, and I felt like none of our songs really fit there well. None of them really encapsulated everything that needed to be encapsulated for those specific scenes, and then to close out the season, so then I started writing a new song in the car on the drive. I got to Denver, or just outside Denver, where I was staying for the night before driving another chunk the next day, and I texted Rolin, and I was like, “Hey, buddy, what would you say if there was a brand-new song?” And he was like, “Well, we're filming it two days from now. What did you have in mind, and what can you get me?” Because you have to perform it on camera, so they had to have something to do. So in a little Airbnb outside Denver, without any of my usual tools and just a laptop, I made a very, very shitty demo of “Butterscotch Bitch,” and I sent it off and, Rolin had no notes. Then they filmed it, and that's that. Then I went home and made a real demo. [Laughs] Right before that sign-off, the season also technically wraps up with the lead-up to the vampire concert, and Rolin also happened to mention to me that he's sitting on the best song from you that we haven't heard yet. HART: What a responsibility for that song to now carry for however long it takes before anybody hears that song. What a crazy thing for Rolin Jones to say. How could any song possibly live up to that kind of hype? I don't know. But I did write a song for the concert, back when the concert was going to be a part of Season 3, and it exists, but we never recorded it. Before we started recording things for the end of the season, the pieces got moved around the board, and then we knew there wasn't going to be a concert, so we never recorded it. It exists. I'm not sure I would say it's the best song of Season 3. I like it. I think it's good. I think it's right for a potential concert scene if a concert scene gets filmed in the future. It's a fun song, but I don't know if it's the best song of the season. Thinking about it now, I'm listening to it in my head as we're talking, and yeah, it's not my favorite song of the season, but Rolin Jones, enjoy your song that no one else has heard for however long! All three seasons of The Vampire Lestat are now streaming on AMC+.