Everything Everywhere All at Once (soundtrack)

The band Son Lux was announced as the film's composer during January 2022.[5] Daniels were appreciative of the musical style and approach for the studio albums. They met the band through FaceTime by late 2019.[6] Daniels did not approach them as a band, instead articulated the importance of the band members' solo projects. The band's lead member, Ryan Lott, said, "[T]hey gave us a lot of license to feel free to be ourselves. They guided us along the way in developing music for this film, and in some instances, there is some interesting kind of bleeding that happened."[7]

This film marked the band's fourth film as a composer, following The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014), Paper Towns (2015) and Mean Dreams (2016), but first as a 3-piece band (previous films were all composed when Son Lux consisted of only Lott). The band's lead guitarist Rafiq Bhatia had said that the creative process of scoring for a film was very different from that of their works in studio albums, as the difference is not serving another medium, or supporting what happening in the other medium, adding "Unlike scoring a film or, or creating music for dancers, or you know, any of the other kinds of collaborations that we might embark on with artists and other media, like making a record, all there is is the sound; the sound comes first."[7] The band said that scoring for the film was similar to working on five different films merged into one.[8]

The music production went on for two to three years.[9][10] The band created the compositions while simultaneously working on Tomorrows, a trilogy of studio albums.[9] More than 100 cues were created for the film. On the creation of the score and sound, Rafiq Bhatia said that each piece of music "would have its own kind of tone where, you can just tell from the sound, color and all that sort of stuff, right away that we're in this world." They had created short themes with melodic cues as "it was about finding instantly recognizable melodic ideas, and then contextualizing them instantly with either idiomatic genre, nodding instrumentation, or orchestration, or doing the exact opposite, positing them in a world of sound that feels very strange, very alien, or flirting between sound design and score, where the particular 'instruments' involved are not really recognizable instruments."[9]

They also blended various instruments, including paigu, gongs, foil violin, and Mayan flutes made of cedar, which they referred as the "unrecognizable instruments". Son Lux made samples of the paigu in their own studio during the COVID-19 pandemic.[11] They also sampled the tuned gongs and Chinese percussion instruments which were "chopped up and processed in different ways".[9] Ryan Lott played a version of Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" using tuned gong.[9]

They used temporary music from film and television as an inspiration for creating the soundtrack. Bhatia also referenced the score for The Matrix while creating the song "Plug Fight", crediting The Matrix's composer, Don Davis, for one of the characters as a reference point.[12] They said the score for the first Matrix film was "absolutely brilliant" and helped them to find the "science-fiction palette for the film". Son Lux said that there were several "vision-specific music moments" including the use of "Clair de Lune" along with traditional Chinese music and opera.[7][13]

The album featured collaborations from several renowned artists. André Benjamin, also known as André 3000 played flute for five tracks.[14][15] The band liked his musical approach, and when they called Benjamin for the recording, he brought different kinds of flutes that had different registers, with some being double-sided so that the user might play two melodies simultaneously.[7] They recalled the recording sessions being a "surreal and crazy thing" and claimed their score work akin to a "professional recordist playing on field".[7] Randy Newman contributed for one of the tracks, "Now We're Cookin'".[lower-alpha 1] The band said that Newman's inclusion was "the Daniels' dream", and Newman had watched and liked a rough cut of the film during the pandemic.[12] David Byrne and Mitski contributed for two tracks, while Moses Sumney worked on the track "Fence". Son Lux's drummer, Ian Chang, had also played drums for Sumney on occasion. The band sent Sumney a sample of cues, and he chose one over which to write what would become "Fence".[7] Actress Stephanie Hsu sang on the track "Sucked Into a Bagel".[16]