Danny Elfman was already in reflection mode before this whole quarantine process began. The composer was gearing up to perform a career-spanning set at Coachella, which would have been going on right now but has been rescheduled for the fall (for now). Elfman started thinking about his past life as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo, and he landed on their 1982 track “Running On A Treadmill” as an apt song for these self-isolated times. So he recruited his daughter to record him performing it.
“As I struggled though those first few weeks, an old tune I had written decades ago began running though my mind,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I didn’t know why, but it didn’t go away. Eventually I decided not to resist and laid down tracks, just for the simple pleasure. It’s really almost like a nursery rhyme. Maybe under all that stress that’s why it came back to me, and just the act of recording it was really calming for my brain.”
