You could easily while away an afternoon lighting your pipe, sitting back in your rocking chair, and wondering what forces led to 59-year-old German film score composer Hans Zimmer making his festival debut at Coachella this past weekend. Is he the post-millennial answer to John Carpenter, the soundtrack idol of an older, black-T-shirt-clad generation of movie lovers? Do the “Brammmmmmmm”s from the Inception score make your skull vibrate on a particularly ecstatic frequency when you’re hippy flipping?
We wouldn’t know about the latter, but regardless of the reasoning behind his appearance—which probably has more to do with the fact that Zimmer’s currently on tour than anything—Hans Zimmer played Coachella last night, and by all accounts the crowd loved it.
According to reports from Pitchfork and The Los Angeles Times, Zimmer took the stage accompanied by a full orchestra composed of dozens of musicians, performing selections of the scores from Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Lion King with Lebo M on vocals—during which people in the audience could reportedly be seen holding up their pets in tribute—The Dark Knight, Gladiator, Inception, and more as festival-goers “practically openly wept and generally lost their minds,” as Yahoo! Music puts it. Zimmer was also joined onstage by Pharrell for a surprise performance of Pharrell’s song “Freedom.” (The duo recently collaborated on the Hidden Figures soundtrack.) The biggest problem for the largely young, EDM-loving crowd seemed to be figuring out how to dance to Zimmer’s set: