Jay Wadley

Jay Wadley seriously has his fingerprints all over the best corners of indie film and TV—kind of wild, honestly. Based in New York, the guy’s racked up two Charles Ives Awards (not exactly a participation trophy) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is a mouthful, but basically means he’s super legit. IndieWire has already thrown him onto their “10 Best Scores of the Year” lists more than once—yeah, twice actually, in 2020 and 2016. That’s not something that just happens to anybody. His recent credits are kind of a flex, too. He scored Charlie Kaufman’s trippy psychological drama, "I’m Thinking of Ending Things." For that, he didn’t just do the usual moody soundtrack stuff—he wrote an original ballet, cooked up a fake 1950s-style ice cream jingle with Kaufman himself (you can’t make this up), and even produced a couple of numbers from "Oklahoma!" that got dropped into the movie. Not your average desk job. Wadley’s also worked with Oscar winner Ben Cleary on "Swan Song" (that Apple/Anonymous Content one), and scored Minhal Baig’s "We Grown Now" for Participant and Sony. If you’ve caught Hulu’s "Tell Me Lies," that’s his vibe, too, thanks to Meaghan Oppenheimer. He did Heidi Ewing’s "I Carry You With Me," which snagged a Sundance NEXT award, plus a modern dance commission from CoLab Ensemble for the Guggenheim. There’s more: Emma Tammi’s "Blood Moon" (yep, that’s Blumhouse and Hulu again) and he even did extra music and percussion for M. Night Shyamalan’s "OLD." Basically, if there’s a cool project with brains and style, Wadley’s probably somewhere in the credits.