Wendy and Lisa prepare 'Heroes' score album

Although most folks probably best recognize Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman as members of Prince's 1980s band The Revolution, the duo has quietly spent the past decade and a half composing music for film and TV, most recently scoring NBC's Heroes, which they've done since the show debuted in 2006. Now, they tell EW.com that they're putting the finishing touches on an official Heroes score CD. The disc will develop the short on-air music cues that they wrote to accompany various scenes (mostly from season 1) into roughly 10 longer themes, each keyed to a specific character.

"The first [track] will be Peter, the second one is Claire, and so on," Lisa says. "There are spots that are really hypnotic. I listened to it in my car a couple nights ago — I got stuck in my driveway!" (A separate soundtrack CD featuring several of Wendy and Lisa's shorter compositions, along with tracks from artists like Panic at the Disco and Wilco, hit shelves this past March.)

Wendy and Lisa's involvement with Heroes goes back to a Christmas 2005 dinner with creator Tim Kring and soon-to-be exec producer Allan Arkush. At the time, the duo was working with Kring and Arkush on NBC's Crossing Jordan. "Tim was like, 'I got this idea,'" Wendy recalls. "He asked if we would be interested in coming aboard [Heroes] even before he had finished writing the final draft. Lisa and I were totally nuts about it!" That night, the two began working out a musical approach that would complement Kring's concept. "We wanted it to have a Steve Reich feel, more repetitive than your traditional scoring," says Wendy. "And we thought, at that meeting, of our friend Shenkar, this amazing singer, to be a vocal character that represented the supernatural element of the show." Shenkar's vocals ended up featuring heavily in Wendy and Lisa's on-air scoring, most notably during the show's opening titles. 

At the moment, Wendy and Lisa are busy recording new scores for Heroes' third season, which began airing this month. They say they generally have only a week between first seeing an episode and writing up to 30 minutes of music to air the following Monday. "We pretty much do the show in two or three days," says Wendy. "You have no time to second-guess yourself. You should see the gray hairs I have now!" ("I actually kind of thrive on it, personally," Lisa chimes in with a laugh.) This week, they've been occupied with writing a theme for a soon-to-be-unveiled season 3 villain they referred to as The Puppetmaster. "It sounds like if Gepetto were on acid," Wendy says.

The two are also simultaneously getting ready to release a new Wendy and Lisa album titled White Flags of Winter Chimneys, which they recorded during the downtime from Heroes provided by last year's writers' strike. "It's pretty epic-sounding," says Wendy, "a huge sound coming out of two women." Preview MP3s from White Flags are available now at Wendy and Lisa's website, and they plan to release it digitally within weeks via Topspin, the service that David Byrne and Brian Eno used for their recent album.