Joel McNeely
conductor
About this Artist
Joel McNeely is an Emmy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated composer and conductor with more than 100 motion picture, television, record production, and live concert conducting credits.
McNeely currently scores Fox’s American Dad! and Peacock’s Ted. Additionally, he scored Hulu’s Emmy-winning series The Orville and composed, conducted, and orchestrated the score for Seth MacFarlane’s feature-film comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West. McNeely and MacFarlane also cowrote an original song for the film that was performed by country-music legend Alan Jackson.
McNeely has produced all nine of MacFarlane’s studio albums, including the Grammy-nominated Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements. The duo’s fourth album, In Full Swing, garnered McNeely two Grammy nominations, for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals and Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. He also produced and arranged MacFarlane’s 2015 Grammy-nominated album No One Ever Tells You, which reached No. 1 on the iTunes jazz charts; his Christmas album, Holiday for Swing!; and MacFarlane’s first big-band and orchestral standard album, Music Is Better Than Words, which received two Grammy nominations.
As a film and television composer, McNeely has worked with respected filmmakers James Cameron, Andrew Davis, Wolfgang Petersen, John Lasseter, and George Lucas and produced/arranged songs for Sara Bareilles; Katy Perry; Norah Jones; Carly Simon; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Linda Ronstadt; and Rosemary Clooney. He also wrote the music for all of Disney’s popular Tinker Bell films and the entire franchise, spanning theme parks, ice shows, and video games. His additional film credits include Mulan II, Ghosts of the Abyss, I Know Who Killed Me, Uptown Girls, The Avengers, and Air Force One, among others.
McNeely received an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Composition, was nominated for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Direction (both for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Crossover Album (The Day the Earth Stood Still). Additional television credits include the 85th Academy Awards (2013), Dark Angel, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, and Buffalo Soldiers.
As a conductor, McNeely led the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in an award-winning series of rerecordings of classic film scores. He also conducted both the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock films, as well as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in the world premiere of Uri Caine’s Concerto for Two Pianos. On New Year’s Eve, McNeely conducted the Boston Pops, and this February he makes his Walt Disney Concert Hall debut and conducts alongside Seth MacFarlane’s performance.