You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas came out in 1993. It's a stop-motion animated musical with music by legendary composer Danny Elfman.

He's won Emmys, a Grammy, and he's been nominated for four Oscars. From 1979 to 1995,

he was also the singer and songwriter in the band Oingo Boingo.

The Nightmare Before Christmas takes place in a world where different holidays all have their own realm.

And the story is about Jack Skellington, the leader of Halloween town, a place where it's always Halloween, and Halloween is all they know, and Jack has grown a little tired of it.

But then Jack discovers a portal to Christmas town, with snow and Santa and all things Christmas and happening it.

The song What's This takes place in that moment of discovery.

In this episode, Danny Elfman tells the story of how it all came together, and how writing and singing this song for Jack Skellington ended up profoundly connecting to his own life.

My name is Danny Elfman. Tim Burton just called me one day and he said, Disney came across this story idea I had years and years and years ago when I was working there, and it never got made and it got stashed away.

And somebody found it and said, oh, hey, look, we've got this Tim Burton thing.

By the time Tim called me about Nightmare Before Christmas, we'd already done five movies together. We'd done the two Batman movies, we did a P.W.E. Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Edward Cesar Hans.

So we already knew each other fairly well. He would present me with these universes that he was creating and they all just seemed completely normal to me.

We kind of came from similar backgrounds. I grew up on monsters and science fiction fantasy as Tim did in the same era.

So his world didn't ever seem that weird to me, and I guess that's why it worked out. So it's not like I'd ever go, oh my god, this is weird. What am I going to do?

I don't get it. It was for me. It was just like, yeah, I totally got it. So Tim came over the house and it was really as simple as this.

He sat down and he pulled out these wonderful drawings that he did. And as soon as I saw what Jack looked like, said, oh yeah, right, this makes perfect sense to me. Let's just do it.

And then he would start telling me the story.

The way we did the whole musical was, I would say, just tell me the story as if you were telling it to, like, you know, some nephew or niece around the fire or, you know, at night.

And just tell me a little bit at a time. And he said, okay, Jack wanders into the forest and there's three doors. And he's mystified. And I'm picturing this.

And he said he's going to open the door. And he gets sucked in when he pops out. He's in this snowy world. There's snowflakes falling.

And he's seeing things he's never seen before. Everything's new to him. And I would kind of write down little notes and I'd say, okay, I got it. I got it. Go, go, go. And I would kind of shoo him out the door.

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