Landman's Sound Design and Original Score: How Andrew Lockington Built the Audio World of West Texas

Most viewers notice Landman's licensed country soundtrack first — the Turnpike Troubadours kicking in over a night drive, or Charley Crockett soundtracking a man-camp scene. But underneath those licensed songs sits an entirely separate audio world: a 14-episode original score composed by Andrew Lockington, mixed by the Formosa Group, and built on field recordings captured in real oil country. This article covers that second layer — the score and sound design — which is distinct from the episode-by-episode licensed music guide we cover separately.

Composer: Andrew Lockington

Andrew Lockington wrote the original score for both seasons of Landman. Canadian-born but widely recognized for work in American prestige television, Lockington had already composed for two other Taylor Sheridan productions — Mayor of Kingstown and Special Ops: Lioness — before joining Landman. That prior relationship with Sheridan's storytelling style matters: Sheridan's shows share a visual grammar (wide landscapes, tight close-ups on working men's hands, silence used as punctuation), and Lockington had already learned to score against that grammar rather than over it.

In a January 2025 interview on the Brian Funk Music Production Podcast (Episode #391: "Building Worlds with Music"), Lockington described his core philosophy as building sonic environments rather than reacting moment-to-moment to what's on screen. For Landman, that environment had to feel like West Texas — not a romanticized Hollywood version of it, but the actual industrial, loud, rhythmically relentless place the show depicts.

The Mayor of Kingstown Lesson

Lockington's approach to Landman was directly informed by what he learned on Mayor of Kingstown. For that show, set in and around a Michigan prison, he obtained permission to record inside an actual functioning correctional facility — using steel gates, concrete walls, cell bars, and the ambient noise of an institutional environment as musical raw material. Those recordings were then processed and woven into the score, so that the music of Mayor of Kingstown literally contains the sounds of the place it depicts.

He carried that same logic into Landman. The Permian Basin oil patch has its own distinctive sonic fingerprint: the slow, metronomic thud of pump jacks (which can run 24 hours a day), the high-pressure shriek of drill pipe under load, the low-frequency rumble of mud pumps, the chain-clatter and steel-on-steel of rig floor operations. These are not sounds that can be approximated convincingly in a studio. Lockington's team recorded them on location, building a library that became the tonal foundation of the score.

Sound Design Team: The Formosa Group

The sound post-production for Landman is handled by the Formosa Group, one of the most prominent sound facilities in American film and television. The credited team includes:

• George Haddad — Supervising Sound Editor
• Brad Zoern — Re-Recording Mixer

Formosa Group's credits span prestige television and major studio films. Their involvement matters practically because Landman presents a specific technical challenge that most shows don't: the show requires its industrial environments to sound genuinely dangerous and loud, while simultaneously keeping dialogue — often delivered in quiet, controlled Billy Bob Thornton exchanges — perfectly intelligible. That balance is harder to achieve than it sounds.

The Dialogue-vs-Environment Problem

Real oil field operations are extraordinarily loud. A working drilling rig generates sustained noise levels that require ear protection; a pump jack in a nearby field creates a constant rhythmic thud that carries for hundreds of meters. Filming dialogue scenes in or near these environments is a known challenge in the industry — the production sound recorded on set is often unusable, requiring extensive ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) work in post-production.

Landman's solution was layered. Production sound mixer captured primary dialogue on set using directional microphones and radio mics positioned to minimize industrial bleed. In post-production, the Formosa Group team rebuilt the industrial environment from Lockington's field recording library, mixing it back in at levels that feel authentic without masking the actors. The result — particularly in the roughneck work scenes in Season 1 — is an audio environment that feels genuinely industrial while remaining a watchable television drama.

Score Architecture: How the Music Is Structured

Three Sonic Registers

The Landman score operates across roughly three distinct registers, each tied to a different dramatic context:

1. The Industrial Register — underscore built from processed pump-jack rhythms, metallic percussion, and low-frequency drones. This is the sound of the oil patch itself: impersonal, relentless, slightly threatening. It appears under rig scenes, accident sequences, and any moment where the machinery of extraction is the dominant presence.

2. The Family Register — quieter, more melodic, built around acoustic strings and piano. This is Tommy's domestic world: the Norris house, conversations with Angela and Ainsley, the scenes where the show's human cost becomes visible. Lockington deliberately keeps this register spare — single piano lines, gaps between notes — so it doesn't sentimentalize material that Sheridan wants to feel ambivalent.

3. The Tension Register — hybrid scoring that combines elements of both, used in scenes where the industrial world is about to collide with the personal one. The Gallino cartel scenes are the clearest example: the score introduces low brass and distorted industrial texture alongside conventional dramatic underscoring, signaling that what appears to be a business conversation contains something more dangerous.

The Season 1 Episode 1 Opening

The pilot's opening sequence is the clearest statement of the score's intent. Before any dialogue, before the title card, viewers are dropped into an active drilling site at night. The sound design here is almost entirely Formosa Group work: the rig's mechanical noise, the wind across the Permian, radio chatter, the specific creak of the monkey board. Lockington's score enters late and quietly — a low sustained note that rises to meet the visual energy of the rig rather than arriving ahead of it. It's a deliberate choice to let the real industrial sound establish the world before the composed music asserts itself.

The Accident Sequences

Landman depicts multiple oilfield accidents across both seasons, and the sound design of these sequences is where the production's approach is most clearly visible. Real blowouts and rig fires generate sound events that are both extremely loud and extremely specific — not the generic explosion sound used in action films, but the particular acoustic signature of pressurized hydrocarbons venting rapidly, steel under catastrophic stress, and fire in an open industrial environment.

Rather than using generic sound effects, the Formosa Group sourced and processed recordings from controlled burns and decommissioning operations to give these sequences acoustic authenticity that trained industry workers would recognize. The goal, as with the rest of the sound design, was that a real roughneck watching the show would hear something that matches their memory of what that environment actually sounds like — not a Hollywood approximation of it.

Music Supervision: Andrea von Foerster

While Lockington handles the original score, music supervisor Andrea von Foerster is responsible for all licensed music placements — the songs you hear during driving scenes, in bars, playing from truck radios. Von Foerster previously served as music supervisor on Yellowstone, which means she came to Landman with both an established relationship with Sheridan's creative sensibility and deep connections in the Texas/Oklahoma country music world that the show draws from.

The key creative distinction between the score and the licensed music is context: licensed songs in Landman are almost always diegetic — playing from a specific source in the scene's world (a jukebox, a truck radio, a bar). The original score is non-diegetic background that the characters cannot hear. This separation is unusually clean in Landman compared to many contemporary dramas, where the line between score and licensed music is often blurred for emotional effect.

For the complete episode-by-episode breakdown of which songs appear in each episode, see the Landman Soundtrack Complete Guide.

Lockington's "Imperfection as Authenticity" Philosophy

One aspect of Lockington's scoring approach that distinguishes the Landman sound from more conventional prestige television scores is his stated embrace of imperfection. In the Brian Funk podcast interview, he described a philosophy in which small recording artifacts — room noise, the natural decay characteristics of an acoustic space, the slight intonation irregularities of live performance — are treated as contributions to the music's character rather than problems to be corrected in editing.

For a show about an environment as rough and unpolished as the oil patch, this is an apt approach. The Landman score is not a pristine orchestral recording. It contains the grain of the industrial recordings it's built from, and Lockington made a deliberate decision not to sand that grain away in post-production. The result is a score that sounds like it belongs to the world the show is depicting — slightly dirty, slightly imperfect, entirely functional.

Season 2: Evolving the Sound

Season 2's audio landscape reflects the story's changed circumstances. Tommy is no longer inside M-Tex — he's building CTT Oil Exploration and Cattle from a position of greater personal agency but also greater personal risk, given Gallino's financing. Lockington's score for Season 2 introduces more low brass and unsettled harmonic choices in Tommy's scenes, reflecting the cartel money now running through the Norris family enterprise. The family register is still present, but it now appears against a backdrop that's subtly more dangerous.

The Formosa Group's sound design work in Season 2 also expands the geographic range of the show's sonic world. Where Season 1 was almost entirely Permian Basin industrial environments, Season 2 includes more interior scenes in Midland offices, restaurants, and the Norris family home — environments that require different acoustic treatment and different approaches to the score/environment balance.

What to Listen For

If you want to hear the Landman sound design and score as distinct layers from the licensed music, these are the most instructive moments across both seasons:

• S1E1, opening sequence — almost entirely Formosa Group sound design, minimal score; establishes the industrial baseline
• S1E1, first rig accident — the clearest example of the practical effects sound design philosophy; listen for the acoustic difference from conventional TV explosion effects
• Any scene with T.L. Norris (Sam Elliott) — the family register score is at its most spare in these scenes; Lockington essentially withdraws and lets Elliott's voice and the dialogue carry the emotional weight
• Gallino scenes across both seasons — the tension register is clearest here; the score introduces specific tonal elements that don't appear in other dramatic contexts
• Tommy's night drives — these often begin with a licensed country song (diegetic, from the truck radio) before transitioning to solo score as Tommy arrives somewhere and the scene's emotional register shifts