Paul McCartney meets Martin O’Donnell to discuss collaboration on “Destiny” video game

Paul McCartney met with composer Martin O’Donnell for the first time, to discuss his future collaboration on the soundtrack of the upcoming video game from Bungie studio. O’Donnell had previously composed the soundtracks for the “Halo” trilogy and earned several awards for this work (the commercial soundtrack release of the music to “Halo 2” was the best-selling video game soundtrack of all time in the United States).

The meeting went pretty, and the two of them, along with composer Michael Salvatori, would work on the soundtrack for “Destiny” over the next two years.

Our longtime partner in LA, Lev Chapelsky, came up with the idea of collaborating with somebody new. He says “what do you think about Paul McCartney” and I’m like “well, yeah”. Most of what I first showed to Paul was some tracks from “Halo: Reach”, and he was completely on board with trying something he’s never tried before and he wanted to do it. he actually really wanted to collaborate. He said something like “Take some of my some of my bits of melodies and combine it with your spooky music and it becomes our music”.

Martin O’Donnell – From Youtube

What was it like working with the actual Paul McCartney on Destiny?

That was the absolute high point of my career. We had a guy, Lev Chapelsky, who would always be getting us connected with good actors, like Ron Perlman or Nathan Fillion. Lev called me and said you should try working with Paul McCartney, and I said sure. He didn’t have a connection with Paul so I didn’t think it would ever happen. But he figured a way to get in touch with Paul’s people and he said ‘Hey, if Paul is interested in working in games, he should work on this game called Destiny with Marty O’Donnell.’ I think they looked at the offer and thought it was an interesting way to go.

So we had a meeting in Los Angeles and Paul came in. He was excited about meeting with us. We spent a little over two hours talking about writing music for games and what’s unique about it, and then we spoke about kids and grandkids, which was great.

Marty O’Donnell – from an interview with DIY Magazine, January 7, 2016

I got a phone call saying “Do you want to be involved in a video game?”. I said “well, like what?”. They said “well, you know, to do some music” so I said “okay great, let me look into it”. We had a meeting in LA, I liked the people. So I went back to England then I thought of a couple of little musical phrases that I thought might be good as a sort of heraldic fanfare and that was how I started to get involved.

Paul McCartney – from the ‘Hope For The Future [Behind-The-Scenes]’ YouTube video

A little concept piece I made back in April of 2011. I showed it to Sir Paul to see if I could get him interested in Destiny. It worked.

Martin O’Donnell – From Youtube