Given Joseph Spallina's heritage, his rapid rise as one of Tonefarmer's hottest young composers in New York is no surprise. He started playing in bands by age 10, his uncle who was in advertising first exposed him to the sight of composers "sitting in studios all day", and both his aunt and grandmother were music teachers.

But before turning his musical impulses into a career, Spallina dabbled in production and had a stint freelance copywriting for Young & Rubicam, New York to help make ends meet while he studied music and creative writing at Florida State University.

"I knew I would either be a composer or a copywriter," he says. "But in the end, I felt more qualified to focus on music. My entire life has been around music and doing this has been my objective the whole time."

And it seems to come naturally. Spallina's only been with the company fulltime since November 2004 but has already put his flexible signature to several hit spots.

With an eclectic range of influences to call upon that Spallina himself calls weird, he feels he can turn his hand to any required style. "That's what drew me into this business," he adds. "Every job is different. You can be doing heavy metal on Monday and a classical cello piece on Tuesday. You just put on a different hat and match it to the style."

This diversity is demonstrated on his reel. He says for All "Underwear" the client wanted a mix of 1970s funk and a modern Harlem feel that was "very scored" whereas MasterCard required a spy atmosphere for "Cubicle" and Spallina was handed a country-jazz piece to work with. For Nike "Assists", Spallina delivered a continuation of a moody classical music theme that was an established part of the campaign.

"I like the variety," he says. "It's where I want to stay, being creative." He cites film composer and songwriter Randy Newman as an influence who first got him interested in scoring to picture. Spallina would eventually like to try his hand at film scoring but he's happy enough to work with short forms. And while he does write his own songs, for the most part he feels that they'd be too eclectic for a single album. Instead, he's content to find his way into popular culture through creating music tracks that "stay in your head forever".

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