Black Widow

Black Widow is Brian Walton’s second gold single, earning multiple SGA & SCL awards, as well as 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 first came to life in 2005 as the backing track for an advertisement by a national sports retailer. But Brian knew he had a potential hit the second he wrote it, and he composed the version we all know and love in 2006. It immediately charted at #1 and has consistently held the top spot on worldwide rock and metal charts to this day, and has been featured in numerous television series and major motion pictures.

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 notorious for fooling around on him behind his back. The main guitar riff was inspired by an exercise Brian had created for one of his students who was having a particularly hard time playing bar chords accurately.

Brian was at Capitol Records Studio A in Hollywood, working on the soundtrack for the Warner Bros. film Blood Diamonds, when his old friend and drummer, Steve Gadd, walked into the booth to say hi! Steve had been working on a jazz-fusion project in Studio B and, since his drums were set up, Brian thought it would be cool to try out some ideas with him. One of those ideas was Black Widow. Brian recorded the session and later overdubbed the vocals, bass, and guitars for the final production at his studio in Colorado.

Brian pitched the song around Hollywood, and it was picked up as background music in bar scenes or high-energy car chases in a few films. Its major appeal came as a single in Asia, South America, and Europe, where it dominated the charts and stayed at number 1 for a whopping 16 weeks, prompting Brian to consider releasing the track in the US. But 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.

About 10 years after its inception, Black Widow felt a bit dated, so Brian re-recorded it with more modern guitar sounds and engineering techniques and released it in 2015 on his newly founded Musty Dungeon Studios label. Black Widow climbed the US charts slowly, but it got a huge bump when Brian, then the Associate Music Director at Disney, featured the song in high-energy scenes in the series Andor and The Mandalorian.