The 60-year-old Johnston works out of a studio in WWE's Stamford, Connecticut production facility, and lives in the next town over, only occasionally hitting the road. He's reserved, thoughtful, a tad self-deprecating, and as elusive as he is influential. Johnston, whose favorite musician is James Taylor, has never stepped into the ring on-air, and his appearances have been largely confined to the rare behind-the-scenes vignette.

On Sunday, April 7, WrestleMania 29 airs live on pay-per-view from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Before wrestling's equivalent to the Super Bowl unfolds with Johnston's work scoring the spectacle, the composer spoke with me about his process and WWE's changing musical terrain.

You've spoken before about your process involving just being handed a wrestler's name and having to start making a theme from there. Ordinarily, how much interaction do you have with the talent?

It really runs the gamut. Some people really want to be very involved in the process, and a lot of times on the other end, I never even speak to the talent. It's more through the grapevine [with] the vibe they want. I approach each one of these things like movie scoring. It really is not so important to know the person because in the same sense if I'm scoring a movie, it's not important that I get to know Tom Cruise. It is important that I know as much as I can about the story that Tom Cruise is going to play as that character in this movies. If anything, sometimes, getting to know Tom Cruise can be deceptive because he may start saying, "You know what music I really, really love? I love Beethoven. I really do love Beethoven." Sometimes, that can screw up my head where I want to please the guy and give him something he's comfortable with, but maybe Beethoven is really the wrong direction for his character. It's all about character.

Characters in the 1980s were especially bright and flamboyant, and in the mid-1990s, you had over-the-top gimmicks such as a racecar driver and a trash man. Since the end of the Steve Austin-led "Attitude Era" in the early 2000s, characters are now more subdued and relatively realistic. Has that change made it more difficult for you to make themes?

As with many composers I've spoken with, if something—whether it be a person, an actor, a storyline, an emotion—inspires you, it's really easy to come up with a lot of ideas. It only gets difficult when you're not inspired or when I'm asked to write something for maybe a guy who's brand new and no one really knows where he's going yet. So I'll get a very little bit of information about what the nature of his character is going to be, but I can just feel it in the air that no one really knows where this guy is going yet. That's when it gets hard because it's like being given a movie to score, and the director says, "Okay, I want to score you this scene." "Okay, can I see the scene?" "Well, no." "Can you tell me about the scene?" "Yeah. It's going to be really, really cool. It's going to be a really, really, really good scene."