McCreary Finds Success At BSG's Watchtower

For McCreary, it was not a project he took lightly, nor was it one accomplished overnight.

"It was something of a controversial decision I think," McCreary told SyFy Portal's Michael Hinman. "It would likely lead people to think that obviously the show takes place in the future and Bob Dylan's recordings have been traveling through space."

The idea to use "All Along the Watchtower" had been executive producer Ronald D. Moore's. And if he had found a way to do it, the song could've actually been heard as early as the first season of the show.

"Ron feels very strongly about it," McCreary said. "It's all about how this all happened before, this will happen again. That really has meaning to him, and this was his way in sort of suggesting that."

McCreary has already talked extensively in his official blog about all the technical work that went into making the rocking ending that not only revealed a familiar face, but a familiar planet as well. One thing that still has him shaking his head, even weeks after putting the final touches on the music, is the fact that he and the producers were able to pull this musical trick off while throwing the book out the window.

"The irony of it is when I wrote the arrangement, I had no idea what the episode was about," McCreary said. "I had no clue. I was just scoring 'The Eye of Jupiter.' The editor called me and said, 'We have this song in the last episode ...' but I didn't want to know what the episode was about, because I hadn't seen the ones leading up to [Episode] 20 yet."

McCreary had an interesting challenge because the song has been covered so many times, not a lot of people even realize that "Watchtower" is first a Bob Dylan song, and that by the time Jimi Hendrix got his hands on it, he was covering it. The last thing McCreary wanted to do was have an opera singer impersonate a rock star (yes, we're looking at you, "Star Trek: Enterprise") and decided early on that if the song was going to work, it had to be performed as if it were created by the Colonies, not by the 1960s Rock & Roll movement on Earth.

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