Hal Willner, longtime music producer and ‘SNL’ veteran, dies of COVID-19 complications at 64

Hal Willner, the Grammy-winning record producer and longtime “Saturday Night Live” sketch music producer, has died from complications from COVID-19. Called “Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films,” he enlisted artists including cosmic jazz traveler Sun Ra, experimental vocalist Yma Sumac, Los Angeles group Los Lobos and rock band the Replacements to re-imagine such songs as “Cruella De Ville,” “Whistle While You Work” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Tom Waits turned “Heigh Ho ” into a forced-labor dirge. In film, Willner either supervised or helped produce music for “Gangs of New York,” “Finding Forrester,” “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and “Step Brothers,” among others. More recently, he worked on the IFC series “The Spoils of Babylon” and “The Spoils Before Dying.” The experimental vocalist Diamanda Galas, who first met Willner when he oversaw booking for the late-night music show “Night Music” in the 1980s, recalled to the Quietus why artists were so drawn to him: “The man produces records by looking at the artist, and all he or she has done, and suddenly he knows the songs, the people to call for the arrangements, the musicians from his mammoth selection of musical geniuses.” Calling him “a visionary,” Galas added that Willner “does not censor his radar because some conventional fool does not understand him.”