Owlboy Soundtrack: Tribute to Johnathan Geer’s Music 🦉

Owlboy the soundtrack by Jonathan Geer

One of our indie game favourites is Owlboy (2016) and it’s celebrating its seventh anniversary this month.

Developer D-Pad Studio paid tribute to it. During a two hour presentation on Twitch, it highlighted the Owlboy soundtrack as an outstanding project by composer Jonathan Geer. The music is a big part of the game’s success story (and made our list of best indie game soundtracks).

The November 2023 tribute also included in studio performances of some of the pieces, giving fans a chance to see how the magic behind the scenes works. What a treat!

Owlboy OST Offers Beautiful Sweeping and Swooping Orchestral Numbers

The original Owlboy soundtrack consists of 70 tracks, totally some 94 minutes of fabulous music. You can buy the soundtrack online or find it on YouTube in full for free.

Or you can, of course, just play the game to experience the music as the creative team intended.

At the time of the game’s release, Geer told Alternative Magazine during In Conversation With D-Pad Studio:

“I’d say [the music is] very orchestral, lush, romantic and varied. I always wanted to support the mood or emotion of whatever was happening in the game. There are also a few more nostalgic chiptune type moments in the score, but I definitely wanted to avoid going that route for the overall sound.”

Some of these have been rearranged recently by D Pad Studio with live performance videos (as above) or with new animated music videos (as below).

We’re always happy to see this sort of thing in action, though, with the musicians working together to put this all together.

Johnathan Geer can be seen in these recorded clips at the piano.

Of his creative process, Geer noted for the Owlboy OST there weren’t any particularly influences. He said in 2017:

“I usually try not to be too conscious of my influences while I’m writing. I know they will come out regardless of whether I’m purposefully focusing on them or not. There were a couple of tracks that didn’t end up in the game where I was thinking of specific composers as I wrote them. One was very Debussy inspired with lots of impressionistic sounds, and the other was a bit of an homage to Revueltas, a Mexican composer best known for his works Sensemayá and La Noche de los Mayas.”

Our absolute favourite from the whole work is Strato.

It really caught our attention the last time we played the game and captures the emotive experience of the story (even if everyone else seems to prefer the main theme).

There’s no denying the orchestral sweep to the music, although Geer does occasionally make nods towards more retro-styled bleeps and bloops.

In 2016, he told the press ahead of the game’s release:

“I’m going for vibrant themes and an overall feel that is very adventurous and romantic. I think if someone didn’t know much about Owlboy and they just saw some screenshots they’d probably expect a certain type of music. In that sense, I think people really will be surprised by the variety and breadth of things that they hear throughout the game. And since it’s been such a long development cycle I’ve written quite a bit of stuff that didn’t make it into the final game.”

We think he’s right there. The whole work has a tremendous sense of harmony to it, plus it’s adaptative.

When the game transitions from day to night, the music changes to match what’s going on (which is something great game composers do very well indeed).

The start there, Tropos By Day, includes a segment of the Owlboy’s soaring theme music.

This is very popular with fans and, we’re happy to say, Geer did note his creative process for that piece. Again, from 2017 he said:

“I wanted a very strong motif that could be used throughout the game in a variety of contexts. I composed all the music in the game (including the main theme) in Logic Pro on my Mac Pro using MIDI instruments and a wide variety of third-party sample libraries. For all the orchestral pieces I tried to get them to sound as realistic as possible with the sample libraries and then during the final phase of development I recorded a lot of live musicians and mixed their performances into the MIDI recordings. I recorded each instrument separately to have maximum control of mixing and blending them into the existing recordings.”

It’s interesting to note the composer didn’t have much gameplay footage to work with when creating his score, primarily as Owlboy was 10 years in the making (production began in 2007).

D-Pad Studio provided him with ideas to work from, which served as the influence for him to create specific pieces. This approach did allow for greater creativity in the long run.

It takes real talent to do that. And there’s no denying Geer is a very talented musician. His piano work in particular is beautiful—have a listen to Such Perfect Peace below.

The Owlboy soundtrack is certainly a high water mark achievement for the industry. There are so many incredible pieces go out these days it’s difficult to keep up with them, but Geer’s work stands out.

And although we appreciate most of our followers don’t play video games much, these posts are here to highlight the creative talent involved.

The music of video games can be extraordinary and we think the Owlboy OST is a fine example of that.

A Little Bit About Jonathan Geer

Geer is self-employed musician and lives in Austin, Texas. There he’s a composer and pianist who’s worked across video game soundtracks and film. He studied a BA in film scoring from Boston university.

His music has appeared in film and TV such as The White Lotus, Archer, Saturday Night Live, and Dickinson (on Apple TV).

Asides from Owlboy, he’s produced music for games such as Neon Chrome, The Prime Mover, Sparkle, and The Franz Kafka Video Game.

But he also produces hiss own albums (here’s a bit from one of them).