What Is The Song In The New Halo Trailer?

The new trailer for "Halo The Series" is out and it's been a long time coming. A TV version of the Xbox video game had been discussed as early as the 2000s (via /Film) and languished in development for years. Now that the Paramount+ show is finally happening for real this time, debuting on the streaming service on March 24. 

The full-length teaser aired for the first time during one of tonight's NFL games — the American Football Conference championship between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs. It's full of interesting details designed to get fans of the franchise excited. And one of them has to do with the music choices its producers have made. While much of the sound in the teaser is incidental music that appears unrelated to the video game, there's a recognizable riff, especially during the latter part of the video after the scene that reveals Cortana (Jen Taylor). You might recognize it as originating in a different era.

In the trailer, the Phil Collins song "In the Air Tonight" is performed by an unknown artist in an ethereal fashion, features the haunting lyrics "I can feel it coming in the air tonight/And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life." The 1981 song was created by the drummer and frontman of Genesis for his first solo album, "Face Value." In the original version, each line is followed by the words "Oh, lord," which appear to have been removed from the "Halo" cover version.

Collins told Rolling Stone in 2016 (via the book "Origins of a Song: 202 True Inspirations Behind the World's Greatest Lyrics" by Jake Grogan), "One day I was working on a piece in D minor, the saddest [key] of all. I just wrote a sequence, and it sounded nice. I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. I'm not quite sure what the song is about, but there's a lot of anger, a lot of despair, and a lot of frustration."

That makes the song pretty much perfect for a story like "Halo," which focuses on super-soldier Master Chief and the war against the Covenant. The tune's quiet air of desperation has also made the song popular in other movies. "In the Air Tonight" has been covered many times and has been featured in a number of movies and television shows, notably the sexy train scene in 1983's "Risky Business."