Whether you have children or not, you have almost definitely heard the song, “Let It Go,” from the movie “Frozen.” Guess who orchestrated it? Dave Metzger. How about the Broadway version of “The Lion King?” Again, Dave. And then there’s “Mufasa,” the prequel to “The Lion King” that came out last year? He was the lead composer on that one. The same is true of the 2023 movie, “Wish,” which was his first big break as a lead composer on a film. Over the span of his career, Dave has been the orchestrator or arranger on dozens of Disney films as well as other studios’ projects including “Ant-Man,” “The Avengers,” “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2,” “The Simpsons Movie” and many more.
the Source: You’ve had such an amazing career as a composer and arranger. Your IMDB goes on for days! How did you get started composing music.
Dave Metzger: I started writing music when I was 12 years old and that came about by being incredibly fortunate to be randomly placed in a choir class when I was in seventh grade. The teacher was well-known composer Joyce Eilers, and I noticed that a lot of the music we were singing was music she had written, and that spurred me on during the first Christmas vacation to do a quick arrangement of a song. I brought it in, and she saw some kind of promise, I suppose, and immediately took me under her wing. Whenever I would write music, she would always at least give it a read-down in rehearsal, and then pretty quickly we started performing music that I had written in concerts. So, I was incredibly lucky to get that feedback when I was very young, of what the music I was writing sounded like.
tS: What was the next step after writing for your own middle school choir?
DM: I grew up in Corvallis and I was very fortunate that the high school band teacher was kind of legendary. So, I switched to band, and it was the same thing where anything I would write, he would perform. And when I was 16, I saw the first “Star Wars” movie and John Williams’ score really just hit me head-on. I knew at that point, that’s what I wanted to do for my career, to be a film composer.
tS: Wow, such a life-changing moment. So, did you go to college to study music?
DM: Yes, knowing, especially back then, that Los Angeles was where all of the film industry was, I knew I needed to go to school down there. So, I went to college in Southern California, and I was on the seven-or-eight-year plan, I can’t remember how long it took me to get through because I was mostly interested in writing music, so I wasn’t really fully going to classes when I should have been.
tS: Your main instrument is the bass guitar, so did you also do some gigging when you were in college?
DM: Yes, through college and my 20s I played bass in different bands just as a sideline to make money to survive, because writing at that point, well, I was still getting my feet under me.
tS: Your first big breaks were writing for legendary jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, “The Ice Capades” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”. How did they come about?
DM: Where I went to college was one of the top jazz schools in the country and so a lot of my classmates ended up being top-call session musicians in the studios of Los Angeles, and in fact, I still hire a lot of them when I have scores I’m recording down there. Two of my great friends were hired to be in Maynard’s band and so they recommended me to Maynard for writing charts for the band. “The Ice Capades” was kind of similar. A friend of mine knew the guy who was producing music for the Ice Capades and recommended me to do arrangements for them. And the same deal with “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” We were just at the point of moving from Southern California back up to Oregon, and Jay Leno had just taken over. There was a brand new band, and Branford Marsalis was the leader. A friend of mine was hired to be the music supervisor, and knowing they needed all new music, he asked me to write charts for the band. So, the first five years we were back in Oregon I wrote 250 or so pieces for “The Tonight Show.”
tS: It was in the 90s that you first started working in the film industry?
DM: Yes, my first film orchestrations started in the 90s. I was actually 36 years old when I got my first film break, and it was “Speed 2,” which was a 20th Century Fox movie. This movie connected me with Mark Mancina, who was hired to produce the music for the Broadway version of “The Lion King.” He and I hit it off, and he asked me if I would be interested in orchestrating [this project]. This solidified our relationship even more for films as he kept writing for films and I became his orchestrator, arranger and occasional additional music composer.
tS: I recently read that the Broadway version of “The Lion King” is now the third longest running and the highest grossing Broadway show in history.
DM: Oh, it’s incredibly stunning and unbelievable to me.
tS: What’s it like, stepping back and looking at your career now?
DM: It’s so amazing to me that I’ve been able to have this career while living in Oregon. It’s just been a dream come true. Even composing under my own name at the late age I had that actually finally happen, is something I had given up on 10 years ago. I’m so incredibly thankful that I’ve been able to live in Salem for a long stretch, and now in Bend for several years…it’s beyond belief and I don’t even know how it happened, but I’m very appreciative for it every day.
This article appears in Source Weekly June 5, 2025.
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