Joseph LoDuca

Detroit native Joseph LoDuca has built a career as a film and television composer whose most prominent partnerships have been with director Sam Raimi. As a teenager he hoped to become a rock guitarist and fronted a band that opened for Bob Seger and Ted Nugent at Detroit clubs in the early 1970s. He later pursued formal training in guitar performance and composition at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University before relocating to New York City, where he immersed himself in the local jazz community and performed extensively as a touring jazz guitarist. In 1982 he issued the jazz album Glisten. Raimi first contacted him in 1979 to score the forthcoming feature The Evil Dead, marking LoDuca’s initial assignment for the big screen. The composer subsequently contributed music to numerous Raimi productions, among them Crimewave (1985), Evil Dead II (1987), Army of Darkness (1992), and the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, the latter earning him his debut Emmy Award in 1997. He supplied additional music for the 2004 blockbuster Spider-Man 2 and composed original scores for The Messengers (2007), the series Legend of the Seeker (second Emmy, 2010), and Ash vs Evil Dead (2015), along with further joint projects. Beyond the Raimi association, LoDuca has written for Stryker’s War (1985), Lunatics: A Love Story (1991), Brotherhood of the Wolf (César-nominated in 2002), the TNT Librarian television-movie franchise that began in 2004, the 2007 comedy My Name Is Bruce directed by and starring Bruce Campbell, the crime series Leverage, Joe Dante’s Burying the Ex (2014), and the 2015 supernatural thriller Pay the Ghost starring Nicolas Cage. That film’s fun-house and Halloween environments, dimension-bending otherworldliness, and sustained suspense aligned closely with LoDuca’s characteristically animated and often boldly whimsical approach.