Somewhere in a small Nashville studio, surrounded by strings, hand drums, and a laptop playing back a scene no one else has seen yet, two men have been quietly going through something most of us will never clock. Neither is on set. By the time the rest of the cast and crew are already raising a glass, their hardest work is just getting started — sitting with a scene until they know exactly what note belongs underneath it, and what silence does too.
Those two men are Dan Haseltine and Matthew S. Nelson, the genius composers behind The Chosen TV series. Maybe you didn’t know their names, but you’ve felt their work in your chest for five seasons running. As Cara Cotham puts it: “They have spent the last years in their studio quietly creating what Dallas Jenkins calls ‘the secret sauce’ of The Chosen.”
Dan has spent more than three decades putting his voice toward things bigger than the spotlight. He’s been the frontman of Jars of Clay since 1993, the band behind “Flood” and a catalog that shaped a generation of Christian music. Off stage, he co-founded Blood:Water, a nonprofit fighting the HIV/AIDS and clean-water crisis across Africa, and he still sits on its board today. When his friend Dallas Jenkins asked him to score a new show about the people around Jesus, Dallas didn’t go looking for a stranger with the right resume. He went looking for someone he already trusted with his sound.
Matt is the other half of this brilliant duo that must be recognized. He’s a Nashville-based multi-instrumentalist with a Bachelor of Music from Middle Tennessee State University, where he studied cello under Xiao-Fan Zhang and jazz guitar under Paul Abrams — training that shows in just how many instruments he can pick up and make sound like they were built for a given scene. Before The Chosen, his résumé already read like a small miracle: session and touring work with Amy Grant, Steven Curtis Chapman, Sleeping at Last, Cheap Trick, JD Souther, Anderson East, and Michael W. Smith, plus appearances on the Today show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, the Grand Ole Opry, and NPR’s Mountain Stage. He’d toured with Jars of Clay, which is exactly how he ended up on Dan’s radar. He had never scored a single frame of film when Dan called, and by his own account he didn’t fully grasp what he was walking into. “I had no idea what I was signing up for when Dan texted me to be involved with it,” Nelson has said. “Dan has been friends with Dallas for a long time and has worked with Dallas before. So since I had spent a little time touring with Jars, Dan, [for] some godly or ungodly reason, decided to pull me into working on The Chosen when Dallas reached out to him about it. [And] the thing has just blown up and turned into something that I don’t think anybody had any idea it would be this big.”
He said yes anyway, and by his own admission the early going was rough. “A bunch of my initial ideas didn’t work,” he’s said plainly of those first attempts — the kind of honest line you don’t hear from most people handed a job this big. But something clicked between the two of them once they actually sat down together. “The more that Dan and I experimented together,” Nelson has said, “I started to get some lightbulbs.” That’s the whole partnership in one sentence: not two solo geniuses trading files, but two friends in a room, failing together until it started to work.
It’s worth pausing on what that work actually sounds like, because Dan and Matt built it with a level of care that rewards a closer listen. Their process, as Nelson has described it, starts the same way every time: they get a rough cut of an episode, watch it through several times, and then write cues a scene at a time, sometimes a single cue at a time, taking it to Dallas Jenkins for approval piece by piece. Dan has described the palette they landed on in his own words: “[It’s] sort of Middle Eastern, Indian drone, Delta Blues, and a lot of like, slave spirituals were kind of the core of what we wanted to create.” Putting it together was a gamble, by his own account — “we weren’t sure if it was going to make a good sound or a bad sound or what, but it turned out to be a good sound. And it’s definitely become the character of the show.” But however distinctive the sound, he’s clear about what it’s there to do: “our job is to be a support to whatever’s happening on the screen… our job is not to create music that people pay attention to. Our job is to create emotional signposts to help people keep moving forward in the story.” They recorded with real strings, winds, and percussion rather than leaning on a screen, and left some of the tuning imperfect on purpose, so the sound would feel human instead of polished. A single continuous drone note runs underneath nearly every scene as a quiet metaphor for the constant presence of God, with singer Ruby Amanfu’s voice woven into it like a held breath. And across three-plus seasons, they’ve built what Nelson calls “a back catalog of associations” tied to specific characters: an upbeat mandolin figure plays when Simon is introduced, and when Jesus renames him Peter — “the Rock” — a harp pulls that same melody down into something slower and heavier underneath it. Most viewers will never consciously notice. Dan calls that kind of callback a “composer nerd” move, done for an audience of maybe nobody. He and Matt do it anyway, every season, because the story deserves it even if no one claps for it.
That’s the quiet, unglamorous shape of what it takes to make something beautiful: two people, hundreds of small deliberate choices, and nobody out front to thank them by name.
I’ll admit a bias here. Last year at ChosenCon, I got to spend an afternoon with Matt — alongside Cara Cotham, who runs The Orbit Around Matt and Dan, the Instagram fan page that covers The Chosen so faithfully and whose deep dives live right here on this site. It’s one of the warmest memories I carry from that whole trip. Matt was unhurried, warm, attentive, and incredibly kind in his demeanor — exactly the kind of person you’d want sitting quietly in a room with a scene, deciding what it needs. If you’ve only ever heard his name as a footnote next to Dan’s, I’d like this to be the moment that changes.
Matt Nelson with the group at ChosenCon.
On October 18, Dan posted something on Facebook that we think deserves more than a scroll past — and when he writes about “our little music team” in it, he’s writing about this exact partnership with Matt. Season 6 is almost here, and in Dan’s own words, it was the hardest creative work of his life. We’re printing his post below in full, because it’s the clearest window anyone has given us into what this costs the people who make it, even when, as here, one of them is speaking for both.
Aside from the occasional message of gratitude over the opportunity to be part of some wonderful storytelling and creative work, I haven’t written much about The Chosen over the last 9 years. I was as skeptical as any about how the show would develop. It was unclear how the storylines and character arcs would avoid common tropes or denominational perspective pitfalls. I have always trusted my friend Dallas and knew that if there was ever a person with the tenacity to only lightly consider the expectations of the religious entertainment consumers and gatekeepers, he was the person who could do it.
There were a handful of people working on the show who shared the burden of engaging with every frame, every piece of dialogue, and every emotional shift on a wildly granular level. Each one of those people stepped into that role with a sobriety and reverence to the task. What has come together is nothing short of miraculous.
Regrettably, I was not able to be with everyone on set for the final wrap party. I have only spoken briefly with a few cast members and a few production crew members since that day. Wrap parties are not for the composers or for the large portion of the post-production team because our work is just beginning. Editors, special effects, coloring, sound design, music, etc.. we are only now slipping off our shoes and stepping into the sacred space where our contributions connect to the greater viewing experience. We will celebrate after the last credit roll is approved and the last fade to black is properly timed.
As one person entrusted with shaping the emotional movement of this story, and as one of the last people to have an influence on the story before it received its final grain and polish, I have quite a lot to say about the convergence of all the different ways excellence was achieved by The Chosen production team. It seems near impossible to fully honor every person whose contributions made the show so powerfully resonant in the world. Whether or not you are devout to the content, the production quality and the elements of storytelling are worth a great deal of respect.
Season 6 is being released starting in November. This was the hardest creative work I have ever experienced. Many people will watch the episodes one time. There aren’t many who will watch them as many times as I have. The process of adding music to this chapter of the story nearly broke me. The role of music in these episodes as truth teller meant that I experienced the brutality, the shock, the sadness, the darkness and the humanity of each scene as intimately as a person could. The choices our little music team made never happened quickly or without a hard fought perspective and reason. I hope you will find the score to be a welcomed companion as you watch.
There are far too many moments in this upcoming season to list when the acting performances took my breath away. The actors have always been remarkably good. Seeing the characters have their moments and experiencing what 5 seasons of character development has built, meant that there are large pieces where the work of making a moment was handled entirely by the acting performance and the score was not needed. When you watch it, I think you will see what I saw.
Season 6 is a lot to take in. I am, as always, grateful for the creative work of composing and that I am allowed to expand, risk and apply artistic license to this story being told.
Beyond the work of composing, I am grateful for the additional trust that was given to me in writing and bringing original songs to life for the end credits of each episode. I know that my bent has always leaned farther away from obvious descriptions of faith. Taking each episode and finding a small crevice to foothold a lyric and help keep us lingering in a mood was challenging and satisfying work. The songs will hopefully evade expectations the same way music in The Chosen has done from its humble beginnings.
This has been quite a journey. Thanks to Dallas for inviting me into this work. I raise a glass to the entire Chosen production for the long obedience in the same direction. I raise a glass to the audience of millions who have not loved the show in secret, but who have loudly encouraged us all onward. Oh’ child..come on in.
— Dan Haseltine, October 18, 2026
Read that again and notice what he’s describing: eight years of restraint before he said much of anything, a wrap party he didn’t get to attend because his real work hadn’t started yet, and a season that “nearly broke” him before it ever reached a screen. That’s a man telling you plainly what it costs to carry something sacred to the finish line — not a line from a press release. And every “we” and “our” in it belongs to Matt just as much as it belongs to Dan.
Matt, notably, did make it to that wrap party. He and his wife, Katy, were there in person — a choice he’s said wasn’t obvious going in: “it seemed too meaningful an opportunity to pass up… it was the right choice.” Two composers, two different ways of saying goodbye to the season: one in a room full of people he’d helped bring the story to life for, the other in a post written weeks later, from the only seat his own work had left him.
We forget this too easily. A show like The Chosen arrives on our screens looking effortless — a performance here, a sweeping shot there — and it’s easy to let the credits scroll by without a second thought for the two names that made the ground underneath it. But every frame that moved you was built by two people who sat with it far longer than you ever will, usually without applause, often without even being asked. Dan Haseltine spent three decades building a career out of service before he ever touched this show. Matthew Nelson walked in as a working session musician who’d never scored a frame of film, said yes to the hardest job of his life, and let his first ideas fail in front of his friend until the right ones showed up.
So consider this our small attempt to even the ledger, for both of them. When Season 6 premieres November 15, listen for the drone underneath the quiet scenes. Listen for the mandolin that becomes a harp — Matt’s hands are on those instruments. Listen for the end-credit songs Dan said were the hardest things he’s ever written. And then say their names — out loud, in a comment, to whoever you watch it with. Dan Haseltine and Matthew Nelson built the heartbeat of this story together, for six seasons and eight years, mostly unseen. It’s our turn to see them both.
And this story isn’t finished. As Cara Cotham puts it: “The composers’ work is far from done. Matt and Dan will be hopping on Season 7 soon.”
A hug for the road, from one of those warm ChosenCon memories.
Oh, child. Come on in.
If the score moved you the way it’s moved us, the official season soundtracks are available to purchase at TheChosenGifts.com.