The haunting songs of the video game and TV series get to the heart of Joel and Ellie’s story. The man behind them talks about the ‘magical’ process of composing

The Last of Us is a story about tension – the tension between love and loss, violence and intimacy, protecting and destroying, life and death. It’s a study of how impossibly delicate life is, but also the terrifying stubbornness of our will to survive. As its composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and soundtrack that tension, a mediator between the game’s warring themes. His mission was to score music for a video game that was doing something different, and really had something to say.

Santaolalla tells me that when he was a child in rural Argentina, one of his tutors quit on him after just a few lessons, telling his parents “there is nothing I can teach him”. His career proper began in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialised in fusing Latin-American folk with rock. Later, after leading a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he began striking out on his own, releasing solo albums and composing for TV shows, adverts and, eventually, films (most notably Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries).

In 2006 and 2007, he won Oscars for his work on Brokeback Mountain and Babel respectively. Now a huge name in Hollywood, he was headhunted by plenty of TV and film directors and producers in the years afterwards – and some game developers, too.

“After winning the Oscar, I was approached by several companies to make music for video games,” Santaolalla remembers. “One company in Europe wanted me to work on a western video game that would have been a huge project – both financially and in terms of visibility and what it could represent. But it was more of the same, you know? I wanted to do something that connected what you do in the games with the heart – more than just the gymnastics, the shooting, the fighting, the surviving.”

Santaolalla was approached by Naughty Dog to work on The Last of Us at the beginning of the game’s development, around 2009. It is about a young, orphaned girl named Ellie and a man called Joel who is still mourning the loss of his daughter. Against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, the two of them slowly open up to each other and show their vulnerabilities, a complicated hedgehog’s dilemma of a relationship in which the two protagonists hurt each other more the closer they get.

It was perfect for Santaolalla. Here, he could lend his soulful Argentinian-inspired music to something that wasn’t a western, infusing the urban wastes of Boston, Massachusetts, with a flavour of Americana that sounds dreamily familiar, yet still distinct from its US counterparts. Even the way he plays guitar, the pads of his fingers audibly scuffing and scratching on the strings, is well suited to the understated humanity of the game.

The biggest victory in the soundtrack is the hypnotic interplay between the Bolivian guitar – the ronroco, a signature instrument for Santaolalla – and a Fender VI, a six-string bass guitar from the 60s that is one octave lower than a guitar, slightly different from most modern basses. Listen to any song on the soundtrack and you will hear a soft conversation between these two instruments: a quiet but incessant back and forth, sometimes in agreement, and sometimes dissenting.

This particular bass, famous for its presence on Beatles and Cream records, is Joel’s voice. And the ronroco – more delicate, but no less insistent – is Ellie’s. “That six-string bass, absolutely, is the masculine side of the story,” Santaolalla tells me. “And the ronroco, the fragile side of the music, is Ellie’s side of the story. It was not something I knew I was doing when I wrote the music, but hearing it back, I could see so clearly.

“And then the banjo and the electric guitar, they play the role in the centre, between these two extremes. As the story opened in Part II, and more characters and complexities started to appear, the music needed more timbre – I couldn’t stay with this pairing I had in the first game.”

Everything Santaolalla does, he tells me, “is instinctual”. He spontaneously introduced a banjo for Abby’s theme in The Last of Us Part II, and it was a perfect match. He is not a natural banjo player, so the use of the instrument in his score feels unfamiliar to the ear – searching, reflective, pensive. “I got out of bed one day, I picked up the banjo and it came out of me,” he laughs. “Some of the character themes are almost magical in the way they happen. They come when I’m not really thinking at all. I grab the instrument, and it’s like somebody else is playing.”

The 72-year-old feels his way around his scores with his intuition, knowing that the emotional response we get as listeners comes both “from what you do hear and what you don’t hear”. That’s one reason The Last of Us score stands out: in games music, there’s a lot of maximalism – soaring bombast, orchestral highs, intensity. The Last of Us is a world away from that, more introspective and quiet, making as much of a statement with the absence of music than with its melodies. The HBO TV series, which he also scored, follows the same principle.

“I love the use of silence,” enthuses Santaolalla. “I love it. I love the space that silence gives, because that’s what gives resonance to the notes that you play around it.” Out of nowhere, he starts talking about parkour – a recent new interest of his, piqued by a group of British athletes called Storror.

“I have connected the jumps in parkour with the silence in my music. I find it so important,” he says. “The runners measure how they’re going to jump, and they run, and then they measure again before they jump, right? They measure that jump and they decide how many steps they’re going to take before they put their feet down and leap. That’s like choosing the note you play before you let it go silent. Before you jump. Then you choose the note you’re going to play when you land. And that note makes the silence a triumph. You’re not going to fall. You’re going to be in that moment of space, of silence, and when you land, everything is relevant.”

Between this interview, a masterclass he taught and a performance as part of the Game Music festival concert in London’s Southbank Centre, I spent a fair amount of time with Santaolalla. The way his brain works, and the way he connects concepts with practice, is inspiring. When he played Ando Rodando – a track from his 1982 album Santaolalla, which nowadays he dedicates to Joel for its “rough, rock-y” personality – the room was stunned into silence. That Santaolalla can find traces of The Last of Us’s characters in the depths of his back catalogue, and the way he has carried them forwards with him into his performances, shows his deep understanding and affection for Naughty Dog’s opus.