Composer Danny Elfman on Morricone Youth this Sun 5/6 at 2-4p ET

Be sure to listen to Morricone Youth on Sunday, May 6th starting at 2pm ET, as host Devon E. Levins will welcome acclaimed film and television soundtrack composer Danny Elfman for an exclusive interview and in-depth listen to his music. Danny Elfman's score to Dark Shadows, along with the composer's highly distinguished career, will be the subject of this special show.

Los Angeles-born and raised Daniel Robert Elfman spent his youth in the flickering light of a movie theater, where his affinity for film music was born. His musical idols of the time were all film composers: Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Max Steiner. Despite a career that started with a rock band (Oingo Boingo,of course), Elfman would eventually move into scoring films, where he would not only showcase a talent that payed homage to the film score masters, but to the 1930s bouncing jazz sounds of artists like Cab Calloway and classical composers Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

His personal tastes for the off-kilter and bizarre made him a popular choice for the darker edges of cinema, but that reputation as a "dark" composer seemed unearned judging by his credits. His first studio film score was for Tim Burton's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), where Elfman scored the comic exploits of Pee-Wee Herman with a Nino Rota-like carnival score. Comedy assignments followed -- Back To School and Summer School -- both of which benefited from Elfman's orchestral scores. His efforts at this point belied his lack of formal musical training. In fact, Elfman had not studied composition, orchestration, counterpoint or conducting, instead picking up these skills through trial and error, and by simply composing. His Oingo Boingo bandmate Steve Bartek acted as Elfman's orchestrator.

Despite his outsider status in a part of the film industry dominated by traditions, Elfman continued to set film music trends. His breezy rock n' roll style score for Midnight Run inspired a never-ending wave of imitators, but it wasn't until 1989 when Elfman turned heads with his towering masterwork for Tim Burton's Batman. It was this score that catapulted Elfman into A-list assignments that were often tuned into his sensibilities. It also allowed the composer to work with directors for whom he admired. In the early '90s he collaborated with Clive Barker (Nightbreed) and Sam Raimi (Darkman). His success with Batman made him a natural choice to score Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. It was at this point that Elfman had earned his reputation as the darker film composer alternative. Richard Donner's Scrooged, Burton's Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, all helped solidify the "Elfman sound." Elfman has since scored a broad range of films for a who's who of directors including Gus Van Zant (Good Will Hunting and Milk, both Oscar-nominated scores), Barry Sonnenfeld (Men In Black, Oscar nominated score), Brian de Palma (Mission: Impossible), Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan, starring Elfman's wife Bridget Fonda, Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2), Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy 2), Peter Jackson (The Frighteners) and, obviously, further collaborations with Burton (Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, an Oscar nominated score, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland).

A Danny Elfman bio would be remiss without referencing Oingo Boingo. The band arose out of the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, an avant-garde comedy/music/theatre troupe founded by Danny Elfman's older brother Richard in 1972. During that period Richard directed the underground cult film Forbbiden Zone (1980), for which Danny provided the music. When the Mystic Knights dissolved in 1978, the younger Elfman consolidated it's musical elements into a more manageable band format. With a scaled-down name, their new line-up as an octet went on to become a cult phenomenon producing eight studio albums while working around the demands of Elfman's budding career as a film composer penning ska-influnced new wave hits such as Dead Man's Party, Private Life and Weird Science. The group's final album was 1994's Boingo, released before they officially bid adieu to their hometown fans with a performance at the Universal Amphitheatre on Halloween 1995.

27 years since Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Elfman has gone on to score all but two of Burton's major studio releases—Ed Wood and Sweeney Todd—including Burton's latest, Dark Shadows, a film based on the 1966-1971 gothic soap opera, starring Johnny Depp as the 200-year old vampire Barnabas Collins and Michelle Pfeiffer as his reclusive cousin and matriarch of the Collins family. The film is in theaters on May 11, 2012 and the soundtrack is available on WaterTower Records on Tuesday, May 8, 2012.

Listen live here, or via EVR's free mobile app for iPhone and Android, starting at 2pm ET on Sunday, May 6th!