Black Widow

Black Widow is Brian Walton’s second award-winning gold single, earning multiple songwriting awards, including the Grawemeyer Award for Best Composition. Written in 2005, it has since been featured more than 700 times, by everyone from Adidas to Warner Bros, to electrify audiences and energize action scenes.

Black Widow began in 2005 as a TV ad for a national sports retailer, but Brian knew he had a hit the second he wrote it. As he has done so many times before, he used the soundtrack as the basis for the version we all know and love today. Released in 2006, Black Widow immediately charted near the top of Asian and European rock and metal charts and has consistently ranked there since.

Black Widow was Brian’s first attempt at writing for the rock and metal genres, and he drew inspiration for the lyrics from the ex-girlfriend of a bassist friend, who was rumored to be a notorious maneater. The main guitar riff was inspired by an exercise Brian had created for one of his students who was struggling to play bar chords.

Brian recorded Black Widow during an impromptu session with his old friend and drummer, Steve Gadd. Brian was working on the soundtrack for the film “Blood Diamonds” at Capitol Records in Hollywood when Steve walked into the booth to say hi! Brian had met Steve while working in Nashville in the 80s and knew he was an excellent improv musician, so he invited him into the studio to jam on some concepts he had. One of those concepts was Black Widow, and that session became the basis for the final recording.

Brian pitched Black Widow around Hollywood, and it eventually became a go-to for background music in bar scenes or high-energy car chases in feature films. But its major success came as a single in Asia, South America, and Europe, where it dominated the charts, prompting Brian to consider releasing the track in the US. However, Sony wasn’t playing along, and Brian had to wait until he negotiated the release of his music catalog in 2010 before he could even consider releasing the song stateside.

The Vampiress theme for the cover artwork came from the genius of graphic artist and typographer Stefan Sagmeister, whom Brian met while appearing on Good Morning America in 2007. At the time, Sagmeister had recently won a Grammy for his design work on the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” album, and Brian asked him whether he would be interested in creating the cover for Black Widow. Until then, Brian had featured a likeness of Russian model Natalia Vodianova on the album cover, which was distinctly geared toward the European market. He thought a more Americanized cover might help appeal to audiences stateside. A few weeks later, Sagmeister delivered six oil paintings for Brian to choose from, and Brian chose Vampiress #3 for the cover because, as a torso shot, it was very seductive yet not too risque.

Nearly 10 years after its inception, Brian was finally ready to unleash Black Widow on the US market, but he felt it was a bit dated, so he re-recorded it with more modern sounds and engineering techniques and re-released the single in 2015 on his newly founded Musty Dungeon Studios Label. At first, Black Widow moved slowly up the charts, but it got a huge bump in 2020 when Brian, then the Associate Music Director at Disney, featured an instrumental version of the song in the TV series “Andor” and “The Mandalorian.” It has dominated the charts ever since.