“There was a sadness to it. But he’s also pretty badass”: Lanterns Composer on Scoring John Stewart’s Theme

There is a quiet revolution happening in how we score the future, and Stephanie Economou is one of its architects. In her interview with Reactor about *Lanterns*, she describes building John Stewart's theme from a guitar riff—an instrument with deep roots in the human, the terrestrial, the now. But the speculative twist is how that familiar texture gets warped, layered, and refracted through the lens of a character who is literally a living battery of cosmic will. The riff becomes less a melody and more a transmission: a signal from a man carrying the weight of a dying star in his ring and the weight of history in his posture. Economou's observation that the theme carries "a sadness to it" while remaining "pretty badass" is the kind of dialectical tension that defines the best world-building. We often think of futuristic soundtracks as cold, synthetic, alien—think of the theremin's eerie wail or the metallic clang of cyberpunk industrial. But Economou's approach suggests that the most resonant future-music is the one that remembers its human origins even as it transcends them. John Stewart is a Marine, an architect, a guardian; his theme must contain multitudes. A single-note drone might signal the infinite, but it takes a guitar riff to signal the *struggle*. The decision to let "Gasoline Dreams" stand on its own is equally telling. In an era where every streaming score is padded to algorithmic length, there is a radical restraint in allowing a piece to exist without embellishment. It echoes a broader speculative principle: the future is not always more complex, sometimes it is more distilled. Economou's willingness to trust the raw material speaks to a confidence in the audience's intelligence—a belief that we can hear a single musical idea and understand its gravity without being spoon-fed orchestral signposts. This interview is a reminder that the invisible architecture of speculative fiction—the score, the sound design, the silence between notes—is as vital as any visual effect. As we hurtle toward a future where AI-generated music becomes increasingly prevalent, the human touch of a composer like Economou becomes a precious artifact. She is not just scoring a show; she is mapping the emotional frequencies of a character who must be both a soldier and a saint. And if that means letting a sad, badass guitar riff carry the weight of a galaxy, so be it. Source: [Reactor – Lanterns Composer Interview](https://reactormag.com/lanterns-interview-composer-stephanie-economou/)