Meet the man behind the FarmVille theme song
If you've spent as many hours as we have playing FarmVille, you know how easily the game's folksy theme song gets permanently imprinted on your brain. The man behind that ditty is musician Steve Kirk, who has written songs for video games such as Disney's Princess and the Frog and an unannounced LucasArts game.
In an interview on Social Times, Kirk says that he wanted to create a song that was 'down home' but 'not too country."
The FarmVille Theme was written in June of 2009. We wanted the piece to have as broad an appeal as possible- a "down-home" atmosphere but not too country. So there are no banjos or fiddles, but a simple two guitars, piano and upright bass instrumentation, with the electric guitar carrying the melody. We settled on a style that hints at Chet Atkins and Randy Newman- an older style of American music that is somewhat country-ish and blues-ish in flavor.
Considering the game-play environment was very important, and because the music was to be only 30 seconds long, we wanted it to bear a lot of repetition before people would turn it off. I wanted to have real instruments be the focal point, and chose guitar because I play guitar and there was no budget to hire other musicians. I decided not to use drums or percussion because I felt that might end up being too distracting from the game.
Kirk's favorite game on Facebook, is not Zynga's virtual farming game -- it's PopCap's crack-like match-three game, Bejeweled Blitz. To learn more about Kirk, check out his official Web site.
