By Karl Quinn
The last thing Australian musical comedy trio Tripod ever expected was to be in the running for a Grammy. But on Sunday night (US time), Scod (Scott Edgar), Yon (Simon Hall) and Gatesy (Steven Gates) will take their seats in the Crypto.com Arena and hope for the best.
Along with LA-based games composer Austin Wintory and Sydney singer Montaigne, they are nominated in the Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media category. In a David v Goliath showdown, Stray Gods, the musical role-playing game for which they composed lyrics, and which was developed by Melbourne indie Summerfall, will do battle with some of the biggest Triple A titles in the business: Call of Duty, Hogwarts Legacy, God of War Ragnarok and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.
The comedy trio is nominated, along with Montaigne and Austin Wintory, for a Grammy Award for best score for a video game.Credit: Justin McManus
“I just can’t get my head around it,” says Gates. “We are not a group that wins awards.”
“It’s a very strange cherry-on-top moment for our career,” agrees Edgar.
“Our secret weapon is that Stray Gods is a real innovation,” says Hall. “All the other nominees have done incredible stuff, but if the award is for pushing things forward, then I think we deserve it.”
And how do you actually rate your chances of winning?
“Low.”
Tripod has been performing musical comedy together for 27 years. It’s a niche field, but one that occasionally throws up strange and unexpected opportunities, like being invited by the MSO a decade ago to create a show they could perform live with the backing of a full orchestra. They came up with This Gaming Life, in which they married lyrics that told stories from their lives with music inspired by the computer games they had spent decades playing.
The MSO paired them up with Wintory to help develop the idea. They got on terrifically, and he invited them to write some songs for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the ninth instalment of the mega franchise.
“It was set in Victorian London, and if you go into the pubs in that game, you’ll hear murder ballads about your exploits,” Edgar explains their contribution. “That was a really fun gig.”
Other collaborations followed, including a score for a first-person shooter musical that, says Hall, “none of us could really get our head around”, but they mostly went nowhere. Until that is, Wintory began working with producer Liam Esler and writer David Gaider on the idea of a role-playing game where the soundtrack was the whole point of the exercise. And Wintory knew just the guys to pen some lyrics.
The Grammys will be the first time Montaigne, pictured, Tripod and Austin Wintory have been in the same room, despite having spent two years working on the project together. Credit: Jess Gleeson
But Montaigne’s route to the Grammys was a little more straightforward.
“I put out a tweet a couple of years ago saying I would like to do some music for a game, and Summerfall saw it and got in touch,” she says. “They said, ‘Your name came up in a meeting a couple of weeks ago anyway, so this is great news’.
“Honestly, it was as easy as that. They were already thinking of me. I wanted to do a game. It was a nice coincidence that it was an Australian one.”
The project was born at the start of COVID. It took two years to complete, largely because of the complexity of marrying music and lyrics to a multiple-choice interactive storyline.
“It was a monster volume of work,” says Edgar. “There are maybe 12 to 15 songs in there, almost all of which are interactive, so for a three-and-a-half-minute song you’re writing 40 minutes of material. It’s nuts, man. If you saw the flow charts you’d get a nosebleed.”
“Austin likes to say there are millions of possible play-throughs of the game,” says Hall. “But within one song I can’t really say. Can we just leave it at ‘a lot’?”
COVID conditions meant that each of the five worked alone. “Although it’s Tripod, there’s significant differences within the pieces, you can tell who wrote what,” says Gates.
A bit like The Beatles’ White Album, then.
“Yes! Here’s hoping we’ve got an Abbey Road left in us.”
The Grammys will be the first time the five collaborators have all been together in the same room. Tripod did a run of shows last year, but right now they are meant to be on hiatus.
“The Grammys have f—ed the break-up, basically,” says Gates, adding this moment feels a little like Michael Corleone’s dilemma in The Godfather.
“Here we are, just trying to spread our wings,” he says, “and they pull you back in.”
A Grammy nomination, though, is an offer they just couldn’t refuse.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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