Frank Klepacki is, in a word, prolific. What that means in this context is that this pre-interview bio will be—in video game parlance—a speedrun.
A professional musician since age 11, Klepacki has worn a lot of hats over the years: composer, drummer, producer, sound designer, touring musician. He created the score for the massive Command & Conquer franchise—a legit blockbuster, with more than 30 million units sold—and provided music for games based on the Blade Runner, Dune and Star Wars franchises. (That last one took him to Skywalker Ranch for recording and mixing, a dream come true for a huge Star Wars fan.)
Klepacki has played with a number of local bands, including Home Cookin’ and The Bitters, and toured with several veteran rockers, such as Blue Öyster Cult’s Buck Dharma and The Tubes’ Fee Waybill. He makes lots of records—two of them last year alone—under his own name and with collaborators such as Grammy-nominated cellist Tina Guo. He’s the audio director for Vegas-based game studio Petroglyph, and he occasionally tours with pioneering funk act the Family Stone, featuring Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Jerry Martini.
But that’s simply what Klepacki does. What he is, at his core, is a restless, passionate creator and sonic experimenter driven by one animating principle. “I just make the music that I personally want to hear,” he says, “because I don’t feel there’s enough of it.”
I visited you in the studio years ago, when you were scoring the first Command & Conquer game; you were having the time of your life. Is it still as much fun? Yeah! I’m always looking for what gives me fulfillment. Sometimes I’m just filling a task, and other times I really get into it. I just try to always just be in the moment and figure out, What is this, what does this need and what is the best way for me to get it there. When you do creative work this long, you have to keep your ears and your mind open, otherwise you just get stagnant.
Speaking of stagnation, how did you handle the COVID lockdown? Well, [Petroglyph] closed, and we were all working remotely. I have my own [home] studio, so I was still able to do what I needed to do. But I was having conflicting feelings, because what was once my man cave was now my office, and it was the last place I wanted to be at the end of the day.
I have an old song off my first album called “Virus,” and I thought how fitting would it be to re-record it and do a fun video of it, with me playing every instrument and wearing different masks. That led to me going through my back catalog and revising and remixing some of my older tracks, re-performing them with live drums, live guitar, live bass and live keys on everything and very little programming. It was a fun project to do, and it helped me get through the year.
That’s one of the albums you made last year. How about the other? It’s an all-metal album, Coded Number. It sounds like old-school metal influences—a combination of older Metallica, Anthrax, King’s X, Armored Saint, maybe even a little Pantera. And I was able to involve different guests on it, a lot of guitar shredders, and a couple of guest vocalists as well. I got Doug Pinnick from King’s X to actually sing one of my songs, which is pretty awesome. A friend of mine here in Vegas, Austin LeDuc—he was the vocalist for [Vegas bands] Phatter Than Albert and Clockwise—sings on one of the tracks. I have Nita Strauss playing lead guitar, and Christian Brady, lead guitarist for Hellyeah, plays on one of the tracks. … I met some of these people at the NAMM [National Association of Music Merchants] convention they have every year at Anaheim. It’s like going to a convention at Guitar Center.
The UFC uses some of your compositions on its pay-per-view broadcasts. How’d that come about? Back when I first started releasing solo albums, the UFC was just starting to pick up some momentum after the Fertittas took it over. I knew their audio director, who dug what I was doing on my solo albums, and he was like, “Some of this stuff might really fit what we’re doing in UFC, if you want to consider a licensing deal.” Subsequently, every album I released after that, I always offered a copy of it to them. Sure enough, they kept using different songs, and my stuff has been part of their regular programming since the mid-2000s.
That must be an out-of-body experience, flipping on the TV and hearing your own music. Oh, man, it was even cooler in person. I got to go to a few of the events where they used my music for the fighter walkouts. It was blasting on the PA, and the crowd was hyped. It was fun to experience it that way.
You’ve done so much fun and cool stuff, and you’re not slowing down. Above all things, what motivates you? It’s really the subject matter of the project. I try to embrace it and immerse myself in that and then figure out, you know, what kind of decisions I should make. And it’s the people that I work with, too. Through the years, I’ve found that no matter what the situation is—whether I’m doing a game, playing in a band or working on a production—if the people you’re working with are cool, are all on the same page and are part of that same energy, that really gets me through those projects and gigs. It makes you enjoy the experience that much more. I’ve come to value that, perhaps a lot more now than I used to.
