Interview with Jody Gray
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Jody Gray
Composer, songwriter and producer who co-scored Courage the Cowardly Dog with Andy Ezrin. His credits also include Digimon: Digital Monsters and Space Racers.
These answers are taken from Courage the Cowardly Dog | Composer Jody Gray | Full Interview on Second Rate Film School's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
On King Ramses, Andy and I sat down at one o'clock in the morning and said, what would be the worst imaginable music that would kill us? Really terrible '70s disco. What can we come up with? It was just ridiculous, and that was one of the most creative parts, simply because the other plagues were more or less normal things. That was something we could really dig our teeth into. It's so funny, because so many people ripped that off the show and are using it as ringtones.
We were always trying to do something different. There are episodes where Andy played guitar and he doesn't play guitar, and I played flute and I don't play flute, and it was terrible. We really tried to play it, but we couldn't, so who cares? It made the score really childlike and fun. I think the whole idea of being an amateur, being primitive, brings a kind of humanity to it. It's not perfect, but so what? It's good.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
We knew that we were on to something special while we were doing it. We knew this is really great stuff, especially when the show premiered in 1999. We didn't know it was going to become so crazy and iconic, with so many rabid fans that really loved the show.
Looking back, the last two episodes, Perfect and Remembrance of Courage Past, which the late Michael Sporn animated beautifully: what a fitting ending to the fourth season. Andy and I said, okay, this is where Courage is a little kid, so what do we do here? We'll play the Courage theme on children's instruments. So we bought a little tiny piano and played the Courage theme on it. Similarly, in Perfect I played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the Mozart, because it was a school, and each time it was played it got darker and more messed up. They told the story.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
It's a little circuitous. In 1996, John's producer at that time was in a band that Andy Ezrin was playing in, and he said, I'm working with this guy, he's a really good animator, he's a really wacky guy, maybe you'd like to work with him. And Andy said, well, I'd have to bring Jody Gray in, because he's the computer maven and composer and he's done a lot of film work. So we did this thing with John called Noodles and Ned, and it was a wonderful experience as far as understanding John. John does not want anything to be in any way average. He wants to go way over the top.
Then two or three years later John had been nominated for the Academy Award for The Chicken from Outer Space, and Andy and I got a call saying, we'd really like you to do this, but it's competitive. We were competing with people like Mark Mothersbaugh, who had this huge hit with Rugrats. So Andy and I said, let's go way over the top and do something really nuts. The first thing we did was that crazy little theme for Katz, and John went crazy, and we got the gig. So began Courage the Cowardly Dog, an incredibly long journey of about five or six years.
What has been your greatest accomplishment as a composer?
We were really encouraged by John to do something that was completely out of the box. It's very much animation music, but he wanted us to score it like it was cinema. We didn't think of it as cartoon music at all. We just thought, what can we do here that's really out and weird and strange, but yet tells the story? John gave us a really long leash and we just ran with it, and it took forever, because every single show had original themes. There's something ridiculous like 5,000 pieces of music in Courage.
I think it has influenced a lot of animators and other creative folks. A lot of up-and-coming people have asked me a lot of questions or done interviews about that. I'm so happy that it's still around after 20 years and that people really love it. I'm so proud to have been part of it. It was a wonderful experience.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
John Dilworth does not want anything to be in any way average. He wants to go to 120 percent with everything. On Noodles and Ned we did a couple of things that were sort of John Williams-esque, and he said, oh no, no, no, have all of those instruments played by toy instruments. So instead of trumpets, we did all these really geeky things. It worked out well, and we kind of got his sensibility.
John is not a musician at all, but he has a lot of music in his head. He hears stuff, but it's kind of like trying to pull the stuff out of him. What are you looking for, John? So we'd get the emotional content of what he was looking for and try to match that. We didn't have a lot of time to write the themes, so we had to dig deep really fast, and it also had to be approved by John. We'd do a quick mockup and send it, or he'd come into the studio, sometimes at two o'clock in the morning, and say, ah, this is great. Or we'd know we had to do it again.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
Michael Geisler was the sound designer and did all the sound effects on the show, and I mixed all that stuff with John. So we all sat in the room together and made decisions as far as what was more effective. Was the music needed here, or just the sound design, or should they be together? If it became too cluttered, we removed stuff. We scored the thing, and that was the first pass, but the final mix, when we put the whole show together, was when we made those final decisions. Sometimes we overdid it, because we didn't know what John was going to want to take out, and he was so busy all the time.
It was more like clutter. If something was on top of each other and one felt stronger than the other, the stronger would stay. In one chase scene, all of the sound was removed with the exception of the dialogue, and we wrote a choir piece for that chase.
Describe your musical style.
My personal view of film and TV music is that the dialogue is like the libretto for an opera. I like what's going on with the dialogue and the characters, listening to the tone of the voice. There were great voice actors, Peter Fernandez, who has since passed away, and Paul Schoeffler, who was instrumental in so many voices. I would listen to those guys' voices, the texture and the timbre of them, and try to figure out emotionally what that dictates. A lot of music is just background music. It's just wallpaper. But we tried really hard to have something really iconic, something that drove the emotion.
There's a very violent scene in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange where they're singing Singing in the Rain. That really affected me when I was really little, and it's kind of infected me, so I love doing the opposite. A lot of the stuff, when you say that was perfect, might have been the opposite, but it just worked. And we did a lot of crazy stuff, like depressing the sustain pedals on the piano and running a nail across the strings, or dropping a tuning fork on it. In The Beaver's Tale it sounded like the surface of the water.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
The first season we had a little bit of leeway, because we would get animatics, the early animated drawings without the color, so we could look at it. Later on it became so fast that we would finish one episode and have to go on to the next. The first snowman episode took a day, because we had this really cool sample of a very icy sound, so we built it in and mixed it with chants and drums. Other episodes took a week, because they were just so deep and needed so much stuff. Some of those shows have 30 or 40 pieces of music in them. Sometimes it was very specific. John wanted to do The Ride of the Valkyries, and it couldn't be like Chuck Jones. It had to be something really original, so it took a while to put all that together.
Then the producer called us up and said, we're going to do two seasons in six months. It was literally doing two shows a week and trying to come up with original stuff all the time. It was pretty intense.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
Linda Simensky, who was at Cartoon Network at the time, was instrumental in getting the show on. She plays sitar, so Muriel plays sitar, and a good deal of the music when Muriel first sits down and starts playing sitar is Linda Simensky. We just had her record a couple of lines, tuning up, doing a couple of little licks, and we incorporated them into the show.
In The Great Fusilli, with that crazy music, that's actually Courage playing drums. That's Marty Grabstein, who came into the studio, and he used to be a drummer in high school. So we said, take a snare drum and just start banging some stuff, and we're going to put it in. It became part of the theme for Fusilli. Marty had even forgotten about that. I said, dude, you're doing all these interviews, you're going to Comic Con, you should tell people you played drums on that thing.
And on Freaky Fred, I happen to not be a fan of the Chipmunks Christmas song, so I did a minor version of that. It's really kind of the Christmas song backwards, and about 90 percent of the score of that show is some version of that theme.
Jody Gray's Full Biography
Jody Gray is a composer, songwriter, music producer and writer for Film, TV and Video Games. He is known for his work on Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999 - 2002), Clifford's Really Big Movie (2004), Digimon: Digital Monsters (1999), Cartoon Network Racing Game (2006) and Space Racers (2014 - 2018). He has also written songs for many artists including the late Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Grace Jones and Skid Row.