The White Lotus Season 3's New Intro Music Explained By Composer

Get off the boat and turn around if you haven't watched the first two episodes of season 3 of "The White Lotus" — light spoilers lie ahead!

When season 3 of "The White Lotus" premiered on February 16, fans probably noticed that the theme song was ... really different. The same composer, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, has worked on all three seasons of Mike White's juicy HBO anthology series, but he's changed up the theme for each installment. Season 1, set in Hawai'i, featured a theme called (appropriately) "Aloha!" Season 2, which was set on the Italian isle of Sicily, got its own tune, "Renaissance" — which was pretty universally adored by fans — and now, we've got "Enlightenment," the season 3 theme that fits the installment's new setting, Thailand. So what was his inspiration for "Enlightenment?" Tiktok and cat sounds.

According to an article in Variety, Tapia de Veer was influenced by some unlikely sources for the show's third season. "I hear interesting things in TikTok or YouTube sometimes," Tapia de Veer told the outlet. "I think that the best song I heard in the last few years that I can remember is people harmonizing to a cat on TikTok. There's a cat, and somebody put some piano and then some girls started harmonizing, and then there's all these versions harmonizing this cat, it's super moving and so spontaneous and fresh that this is grabbing a lot more my attention than super-produced pop music."

Basically, Tapia de Veer's take on the whole thing is that he's rarely surprised by pop music anymore, but people harmonizing with cats on TikTok felt new to him. "I'm a fan of pop music, but it feels like it's been a while that I feel like something has surprised me," the composer clarified. "So I've been looking a lot into these eight-second bits of music that people [are] putting together and harmonizing a cat or stupid, silliest things. To me, it's like a gold mine, it's just moving to me. It feels like you are actually in contact with a person."

You might be surprised to learn that Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who's also worked on projects like "Babygirl" and "Black Mirror: The Black Museum," actually didn't like "Renaissance" when he first pitched it for season 2 of "The White Lotus" — and he thought he'd failed the assignment. The song uses the same yodeling from the season 1 theme but builds in EDM beats as it progresses — and it's a total banger — but Tapia de Veer wasn't sure about it initially. "What often happens is we start perfecting things in the studio...and generally speaking things become complicated and too brainy and somehow you start strangling the life out of that," Tapia de Veer explained. "I think there's an energy that people [liked about 'Renaissance'] and it has nothing to do with whatever perfection or skills you have in the studio. It's just a very spontaneous thing, grabbing a moment, and once it's there, don't touch it, just let it breathe."

Once he realized that the team behind "The White Lotus" loved "Renaissance," Tapia de Veer felt encouraged — and in that Variety interview, he opened up about the process behind the song. Using that same yodeling, Tapia de Veer recalled that he wanted the scale to grow, and the song became something incredible. 

"After the voices, it felt like it could become bigger. I'm a big fan of the way [Paolo] Sorrentino uses dance music and then switches to some really beautiful classical music. All the elements start slowly changing into an electronic thing. I was just tripping, really, when I started making that beat. It really felt like being in a club and just celebrating with tons of people. When the kick comes in and all of a sudden we're in a club, it just felt natural that these voices are so powerful, that every bar felt like I could go up one step and then another step. The next step it felt like we reached some kind of peak of energy and then you realize the next bar, you could still reach another one and then another one, so it keeps going."

Even though "Enlightenment" might not be as dance-worthy as "Renaissance," it's still really fun — and it fits perfectly with the third season of "The White Lotus." As usual, the season is stocked with wealthy, awful people behaving badly, including the Ratliff family from North Carolina, comprised of patriarch and troubled businessman Timothy (Jason Isaacs), lorazepam-popping mom Victoria (Parker Posey), and their children Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and Lochlan (Sam Nivola). 

There's also Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), a couple with a huge age difference whose energies also don't quite match up (Chelsea is as bubbly and positive as Rick is misanthropic and grumpy). Belinda, Natasha Rothwell's spa manager from season 1, is back and ready to learn new wellness techniques at the White Lotus in Thailand, and longtime friends Kate, Laurie, and Jaclyn — played by Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, and Michelle Monaghan — have some scores to settle on their first vacation in years.

Throughout the first two episodes, we've watched Victoria pop lorazepam like M&Ms, Timothy take some frantic phone calls about the workplace he left behind, Saxon be a huge creep, Rick treat Chelsea poorly, and Kate, Laurie, and Jaclyn navigate their obvious contentious relationship, just to scratch the surface. Nobody but Mike White (and his cast and crew) knows how this season will shake out, but thanks to Cristobal Tapia de Veer, it's got a great theme song to see it through.

"The White Lotus" airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on HBO and Max.