Danny Elfman gave an extremely memorable Coachella performance over the weekend in which he ran through a bunch of material from his long career, including Oingo Boingo songs and songs from The Simpsons and The Nightmare Before Christmas and songs from last year’s Big Mess, his first solo album in almost four decades. The performance has been a long time coming — Elfman first approached Coachella about it in 2019 and it was supposed to happen in 2020 — and Elfman talked to Variety about the whole thing and what he’s changing for Coachella this weekend.

“I was just relieved to have made it through in one piece,” Elfman said in the interview. “I was joking to a friend before the show, ‘Look, we have 30 minutes to set up a show that’s never been performed before with 50 musicians on stage. What can possibly go wrong?’ And then I’m sitting there before we went on, thinking, Fuck, man. That was a joke, but it’s no joke.'” He continued:

There were a hundred things to go wrong. But in the end, the one thing that I really wasn’t planning on was a dust storm, an actual sandstorm, in my face. Everything else came together really well.

I read a lot of tweets and stuff where people were kind of confused and rattled and startled and like, “What’s going on?” — and ultimately that’s what I wanted. I wasn’t expecting to get such a reaction, and some of the crazy headlines — like, Yahoo said, “68-year-old Elfman and 20-year-old Eilish make festival history.” And I just thought that was hilarious, Billie and I being the wunderkind and the elder statesman of Coachella. Stuff like that was priceless in its weird way.

It’s been amazing and an intense and insane feeling. Going into it I knew it was going to be a really risky endeavor. I don’t think anybody’s tried that before, mixing up these kinds of elements in this kind of insane musical mashup. When you’re trying a conceptual idea, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But in the end, not having a safety net is also extremely exhilarating. It’s what it’s like when you’re up there on the high wire and the net is down and you know that the chance of just like falling into an abyss is extremely high. That, of course, is super exhilarating in itself.

He also talked about the “spontaneous” decision to take his shirt off halfway through the set. “The sixth or seventh song, I just remember going, ‘The hell with it. I’m just going to take it right back to, if there’s somebody who saw me in 1990, this is what they would have seen,’ and just go for it. It was just part of putting myself out there,” he said. “That was the last layer, I guess, of protection, of armor, and I decided to give that up too.”

Elfman said that the mix will be fuller next weekend, too, after talking more with the Coachella production team. “I only just learned today that they were trying to do their own mix from scratch in the audio truck, with 50 players, you know what I mean? And so a lot of the band didn’t make it into that feed out of the music,” he noted. “I just assumed they were getting the same feed that we were giving the house, but they weren’t, so next week they will, and it’ll be even better because you’ll hear the guitars.”

Elfman will take the Coachella stage again this Saturday night.