Chris Thomas is a composer, cellist, conductor, professor, Comic-Con sound designer, film scorer… and I could keep going on and on. He is a musical treasure in both of his two home bases: Los Angeles and Bend. A native Oregonian, from Pendleton in fact, Chris realized as a child that he had original musical ideas spontaneously springing up in his mind. He asked his dad if he was perhaps inventing music and his wise father explained that’s just how authors write stories that have never been read before and artists paint pictures that have never been seen. Composers “are basically authors, but on staff lines.”
A trip to a big music store in Portland followed soon after, when he was still age 10 or so, and his dad purchased Beethoven orchestral scores for Chris to study, along with blank staff paper. What happened next is a long journey that has led him to compose for films, theme parks, orchestras, television shows (any “The Kardashians,” “Lost” or “Golden Bachelorette” fans in the house?), and the arena where his music is heard tens (or hundreds) of millions of times: Fortnight video games.
I chatted with Chris as he was making his way to Comic-Con in San Diego, where he would be working as a sound designer for a live premiere exhibit of a new television series he wasn’t at liberty to disclose at the time.
the Source: Your dad sounds like he was a wonderful supporter to you.
Chris Thomas: His whole thing was, “Life is too big of an adventure, so you have to get out and try stuff and crash and burn if you have to… What’s the worst thing that could happen in life? You have this crazy adventure, go down in flames and have a great story… and then come back to Oregon and live someplace beautiful like Bend someday? And then you do something different with your life? You can’t lose. So just go for it. You can’t fail.” So, I just always have that in my head all these years, and somehow, I got to do music and come to Bend.
tS: What was your first big break in the composing world?
CT: I would say getting into USC [graduate music school] was my break, because it put me in contact with my mentors who gave me my first credits. During my first year in school I was introduced to Chris Young, who let me intern and help on a number of film projects. And then I met Michael Giacchino, who let me come on “Lost” [television show] as an orchestrator and conductor. And then a friend, Austin Wintory, who wasn’t in the program, scored a video game for Sony, and he let me come on and do some orchestrating and help with that. So, it’s like I got out of school with a lot of great credits. And in those years at USC, the film school was just across the yard from the music school. And somewhere around like 80 percent of Academy Awards are handed out to graduates of that program, so the other important thing is all the terrible, little, short films you score at the end of every term, they belong to these filmmakers who are going to go on to do something. As they began making bigger indie features, a handful of those would get into Sundance, Toronto and Cannes, and even fewer of those would get picked up for a distribution deal… so we just kind of rose up with our generation at the time.
“For me, Bend gives me a creative capacity I was never able to find in Southern California.” —Chris Thomas
tS: So cool. You were commissioned to write an entire symphony for the Central Oregon Symphony a few years ago, and I wonder if there is another symphony that you plan to write in the future, or are you more focused on film, television and things like that?
CT: I have a handful of symphonies in my mind that I would like to see happen in the future. I have one gigantic oratorio in my head I have been carrying since I was probably 12 or 13, about Joan of Arc. I’ve always wanted to write that and one day I will. I may have to spearhead that one myself. But yeah, there’s places and stories that evoke a whole symphonic structure for me. There’s even one I thought about doing about the Cascade mountains, you know, different groupings of mountains and how they would speak.
tS: That’s amazing. So, what are some of the film scores or compositions you’ve done that you are the most proud of?
CT: Huh, I never really think about that.
tS: Or what ones epitomize Chris Thomas, the composer?
CT: Some of the most visible things I do are usually the least representative. I mean, you can hear me in them all. But often with studio and network things, you are speaking to massive audiences, and there’s an expectation that you are going to really hit a certain genre sound right on the head. So, if I’m working on Kardashians or “Golden Bachelorette,” we know what that sound is. If I went all John Williams on it. [laughing]
tS: So funny! I would like to see Kim Kardashian walk into a room with a big John Williams-esque score.
CT: Well, the funny thing is, I’ve been getting away with some really melodic music, even quoting a lot of classical tunes, in a lot of the comedy writing [for “The Kardashians”], and no one seems to be noticing… but generally speaking, that’s not where you get to be your fullest self. Two films come to mind [that show his musical voice], a short animated film I did with Samuel L. Jackson, Kathy Bates and Bob Odenkirk called “Moose.” And another one I did a few years back… it was very much an indie film called “Haymaker.”
tS: What’s it like to be a Hollywood composer who lives in Bend?
CT: For me, Bend gives me a creative capacity I was never able to find in Southern California. It has been a great hideaway from the life-sucking forces that made creating harder here [in California]. As empowering as this place is, and how much I owe my career to it, as soon as I started dividing my time and then really anchoring in on the Northwest, everybody from filmmakers to my publishers, they were all just like, “What has happened to your music? Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop!” I just noticed an upwelling of creativity, and being back in Oregon was the key.
This article appears in Source Weekly August 7, 2025.
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