There is a particular shade of twilight that belongs to Tim Burton and Danny Elfman alone. The sky is bruised purple, the air feels a little electric, and somewhere just offstage, a carousel is turning too slowly.
The music, from their 40-year collaboration, is playful and mournful at the same time—like remembering childhood and realizing how impossible it is to get back inside it.
That shared world returns to San Francisco this week with “Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton,” a two-night multimedia event at Davies Symphony Hall (Thu/13-Fri/14) conducted by Sarah Hicks.
The San Francisco Symphony, the Symphony Chorus, and violinist Sandy Cameron perform selections from Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Frankenweenie, and more, accompanied by projected storyboards and concept art.
In the concert hall, these scores stand on their own emotional architecture, revealing how irony, sentiment, and wonder hold the films together. Yet the event is more than a celebration of a long-running collaboration. It is also a homecoming.
Before Oingo Boingo, film scoring, and concert stages, Elfman spent years in San Francisco with The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo—a theatrical, multi-instrumental troupe whose surreal cabaret found an early, enthusiastic audience here. San Francisco was where the eccentric, expressive, and strange first made sense—and where Elfman’s artistic identity first took root.
“My most significant connection goes back to the very beginning, in the ’70s, when I spent seven years with The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo… and our first really indoor theatrical performances were all in San Francisco,” Elfman told 48 Hills. “The Alcazar Theatre and our San Francisco runs were crucial because that was where we could actually get a theater and put on a show for four weeks. That was a massive deal to us.”
The Mystic Knights were not designed to appeal to a broad audience. Their humor was surreal, their staging chaotic by design, their sensibility unapologetically odd. Some cities didn’t know what to do with them. San Francisco, however, recognized its own reflection.
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“That was our receptive audience for this bizarre show,” says Elfman. “God bless them. That show was so whacked. In the Bay Area, there was a skewed sensibility enough to accept the extremely skewed Mystic Knights. We couldn’t have made it through those years without the Bay Area support.”
This connection wasn’t only about where audiences bought tickets—it was about where Elfman felt culturally and creatively understood.
The Bay Area’s underground art and comic scenes of the ‘60s and ’70s valued provocation that was less confrontational than playful, less cynical than gleefully anarchic. Elfman remembers being part of that world long before he ever met Burton.
“There was a crazy sensibility to the whole thing, which definitely ties into some underground Bay Area thing,” he says. “And it ties in with Robert Crumb and Zap Comix.”
He vividly recalls driving from LA to Berkeley as a teenager just to be the first to get each new Zap Comix issue.
“It was worth it,” he says. “That whole aesthetic that permeated The Mystic Knights, trying to offend everybody all the time, yet being kind of good-natured and surreal, ties into both the Bay Area and all those maniacs who were functioning up there in that period.”
This is where the emotional connective tissue between Elfman and Burton becomes clear. Their films and scores work not because they share style, but because they share worldview—a belief that the outsider’s imagination is not a defect but a lens.
When Burton hired Elfman to score Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, the relationship was natural from the first conversation. “We were both monster kids and grew up on the same crazy horror films,” says Elfman. “When we met, we realized we had so much in common.”
Over time, the collaboration expanded into a space of artistic trust that is increasingly rare in film scoring.
“I’ve done much of my best work because he’s given me these fertile canvases and a long leash,” the composer says. “Later, I realized how lucky I was not to be reined in.” This freedom shaped Elfman’s voice. So did the challenge. He describes his early film scores as an ongoing apprenticeship.
When working on The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box in 2011, the artist, who claims never to listen to his scores after the fact, was finally able to view the incredible breadth of work he produced with Burton.
“Here I had to open up and listen to all the scores one after another,” says Elfman. “It was exciting for me to hear how simple it was. My primitive approach in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and how I was able to do more and more with each subsequent score. I started with minimal tools, but I didn’t want to be limited. I wanted to do much more.”
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate his less-is-more scores for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. If anything, it was a reminder not to overthink one’s skills or overuse what one’s developed. That sometimes it’s OK to trim it back to the bare bones again.
He points to Haruki Murakami, who realized his early Japanese novels were overwrought and chose to rewrite them in English, using fewer words and simpler structures to develop the more direct voice he’s now known for.
“It’s a weird analogy,” the composer says. “It’s about, in his case, stripping down skills, and in my case, building up skills, and then asking myself whether I need to strip them back at times. Now I’ve got more abilities, but there’s also a lesson in when I shouldn’t be using some of them.”
Returning to San Francisco to perform this body of work with a symphony feels like an alignment of identities that once felt contradictory. “It’s just amazing,” says Elfman. “To have been there as a rock artist years ago and to be returning to a symphony hall—these are the extremes in life that I live for.”
This was why the composer was so excited a few years back to debut a cello concerto in Vienna, appear on stage at Coachella less than 10 days later, and, in short order, premiere a percussion concerto in Costa Mesa. The contrast is not accidental. It is who he is. It is why the work still feels alive. And just as this concert looks backward, Elfman is looking forward—new albums, new scores, and new animation work.
“I’m working on a new album,” he says. “It could be an album or two, because I’ve written a lot of songs in the last couple of years, and I’m very pleased about it. And I just released my first little self-produced animation called A Danny Elfman Christmas Story, an homage to Edward Gorey.”
His personal life follows the same logic: support the conditions that allow the work.
“When you’re in a relationship with somebody who understands the personality quirks that go with doing what you do, it’s beneficial,” Elfman says of his wife, Bridget Fonda. “She understands when I’m off in the middle of a score that my mind is just elsewhere… She lets me go because she understands, as an artist, that this is what you have to do.”
That kind of understanding creates the space for him to keep moving forward creatively, which is why this concert is not a retrospective. It is a continuation, a homecoming, and a re-entry into the city that consistently embraced him.
San Francisco, which once made space for the curious kid with the wacky costumes and too many instruments, now welcomes back the composer whose strangeness became beloved worldwide.
And the music—still—makes the world feel just a little haunted, and a little more tender for it.
DANNY ELFMAN’S MUSIC FROM THE FILMS OF TIM BURTON November 13-14. Davies Symphony Hall, SF. More info here.
