“It wasn’t really possible to score it as a narrative feature,” reveals “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” composer Carter Burwell. Because this latest Western from Joel and Ethan Coen comprises six short vignettes, Burwell couldn’t “establish some theme at the beginning and develop it, and then two hours later tie it together.” Each of the stories are “different in tone,” so a consistent melody “would’ve been completely at odds with the actual structure of the film.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEE Tim Blake Nelson (‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’) sings, dances and kills, but ‘I could never think of him as a psychopath’ [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW]

Burwell, who has scored all but one of the Coens’ 18 films, tried his level best to find a way that “music could maybe tie it all together” since the directors wanted “Scruggs” to work “as a single film.” With “all the stories being individual, all the characters being individual, and after they shot it all the looks of each chapter being so individual, music was, in a way, the last resort to try to really string it together.”

Ultimately, he couldn’t find “something that could appear musically in all six stories.” So instead, he looked at each short on its own. For instance, the second segment, “Near Algodones,” which features James Franco as a would-be bank robber, is shot in the style of a “spaghetti western” with “a great sense of emptiness” in the framing, “so the score also has a sense of emptiness.” Burwell used a “slide guitar with some electronic treatments” to give it a “stripped-down quality” typical of Sergio Leone films.

SEE Zoe Kazan on co-writing ‘Wildlife’ and co-starring in ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’: ‘I felt so protective of her’ [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW]

Contrast that to “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” where Zoe Kazan plays a woman experiencing several hardships on a wagon train. “It certainly has the most score,” Burwell explains. “It is the most like a traditional western in that the music is there playing the hopes and dreams of this wagon train heading for Oregon.” He wanted the score “to give you reason to believe that it’s all going to work out for these people, that there is some hope.”

Burwell was nominated at the Oscars for scoring “Carol” (2015) and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), both of which also brought him Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations. He received additional Globe and Critics Choice bids for “Where the Wild Things Are” (2009). For his work on TV, he won an Emmy for the limited series “Mildred Pierce” (Best Movie/Mini Score in 2011) and also contended for its main title theme music.

Be sure to check out how our experts rank this year’s Oscar contenders. Then take a look at the most up-to-date combined odds before you make your own Oscar predictions. Don’t be afraid to jump in now since you can keep changing your predictions until just before nominations are announced on January 22.

SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions