99% Invisible - 118- Song Exploder

Episode Date: June 10, 2014

99% Invisible presents Song Exploder. A song is a product of design. It’s difficult to create an original melody, but that’s only the blueprint. Every element of a piece of music could be produced any number of ways, depending on which … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A Rishikesh her way has a podcast called Song Exploder. The concept is simple but brilliant. I ask musicians to take apart one of their songs and go through it piece by piece and let listeners hear what's going on inside some of the tracks and reveal the secrets of what went into making the song, whether it's some of the sounds inside of it or just the memories of what they were going through when they were creating the song. I don't think Hershey would mind me saying, but it's kind of a design show about music. 99% indisible for songs. On the very first episode of Song Exploder, Richie interviewed Jimmy Tamborello of the band The Postal Service and invited him to take a deep dive into each individual element of the song, the district sleeps alone tonight.

It's the song that's playing behind me now. If you don't already own the lone postal service album, you've made some bored choices in life. I'm serious. Anyway, this is Jimmy Temberello isolating the backing vocal track, sung by Jenny Lewis. So here's some of Jenny's background vocals so I load out. I am a visitor here. I am not permanent. Where are you? So Timbrella was looking to add more texture to the final mix of the song and he had these beautiful backing vocals. It might have been just an accident with a delay pedal but I've looped a little bit of Jenny's vocals and made into texture in the song. I was one of the last things that we put into that into the district.

You can play that part by itself. This vocal loop comes in after the second verse when it's going into the more dancing outro part. Here's where she gets her way from the song Exploder again. I'd heard that song the district sleeps alone tonight. I mean, so many times since it came out in 2003, and I knew that part and I knew that sound, I had no idea that that was a human voice making that sound until he took everything away.

And that was the first episode. That was sort of like the pilot before the show was called Song Exploder, when I was still sort of figuring it out. And when Jimmy played that part, I was like, oh, this is it. This is the reason why I want to do this show and a radio show was born or podcast whatever. As opposed to like a magic trick where the intention is to fool the audience into thinking that their experience is something that they aren't. If you're learning all the

secrets of a song, the idea is still to just create a musical experience for you that you enjoy. And I feel like you once you know more about it, then you can have a richer enjoyment of it. Or at least that's how it is for me. So say we all. Today we're going to feature a recent episode of Song Exploder, all about the theme song to the Netflix original series, House of Cards.

This is one of my favorite episodes because it reveals so much about all the thought that goes into making a theme song to a TV show. Horseshoe spoke to the composer Jeff Beale and his home in Los Angeles and he described his collaboration with the series executive producers David Fincher and Bo Willemman, how they established the tone and musical palette of the show, and how the music theme changed from season 1 to season 2, which hadn't even noticed, but sure enough, go back, totally different. You're currently hearing the season 1 version.

By the way, there's House of Guard season one spoilers ahead, so you've been warned. Here is composer Jeff Beale talking to her she gets her way on song explainer. I'm Jeff Beale, composer. I do the music for House of Cards. I had work with David Fincher on a commercial, probably about six or seven years ago. And this was around the time I had been working

on Rome series for HBO. So I saw on the trades, this show was happening with David's name attached and I kept in touch and we'd never worked together since. And I thought this might be a good match for us. I'd watched a little bit of the British show and I was, I think there was part of my pitch to David is that because I sort of used the Rome thing. I said, well, I said, you know. I'd watch a little bit of the British show, and I think that was part of my pitch to David, because I sort of used the Rome thing, and I said, well, I said, you know,

even though Rome was a period of Rome, it was very much about politics and sort of operatic scale, cast, and storytelling. After I first met with David to sort of talk about the project, and got his initial thoughts about music, and we sort of put our heads together, based on his sort of way of thinking about music, and how much music informs his choices. He actually asked me to write some sketches before he started shooting. And of course, before we had the meeting and before I wrote these sketches, they shared with me, I think, about four or five scripts early drafts of what became season one. So it was very much Bose, Bose sense of language in the way he sort of created this world that

inspired some of the early, early work. The thing I liked about the British show is this sort of dark humor to it. And I said, yeah, the music's definitely going to have to find a way to sort of give the audience permission to sort of laugh, the sardonic darkness. Of course, once he called me in, you know, he gave me some of his thoughts on it, which we're interesting, and some of them surprising to me, it's there was one song he really liked, the super tramp crime of the century. ["The Climber of the Century"] ["The Climber of the Century"] ["The Climber of the Century"]

["The Climber of the Century"] Just a great song, a section of that song towards the end where it just becomes a sort of driving piece. ["The Climber of the Century"] It had this sense of sort of operatic sort of classicism and sort of gravitas, but it also had a very gritty, earthy and almost jazzy or bluesy kind of instrumentation or rock and roll. You know, as we dissected that together and sort of thought about why that spoke to him, that's the show. The show is, it's all about the underbelly of Washington.

The dark corner is what you don't see and what really happens is opposed to sort of the West Wing, you know, heroic, more aspirational. The sort of hail to the chief, you know, Washington, your typical sort of film score, gestures about the capital and politics. I wrote about four sketches for David. One of the things that became the main title theme. It's got that bass line, it's got that sort of cloud, a dark electronics that sort of precede it like a fog or something.

And the tune is there, although in this case, it was just played by the piano, a very simple orchestration. And then in the second time, it goes around, the snare drum comes in. Very simple, but there's a tune in there. There's a little sequence of chords and melody. Part of the reason sketching is useful is because it's like the bones of something. If the structure of the skeleton has integrity, it should be able to stand without an abundance

of sort of instrumental embellishment. And so by sketching and by doing simple versions of themes, you were able to sort of make sure that you have an idea. I always thought of this as sort of the puppet master theme, the idea that like Kevin Spacey's character is just a sort of manipulator who's a virtuoso at pulling the strings on people and getting them to do what he wants them to do. But the reason I'm sharing this one in the context of the main title is when we got around to finally doing the arrangement, David said he'd be cool if the main title felt like this

sort of stew of a lot of different elements from the score, which would then be deconstructed into its individual parts. So you'll hear this sort of descending chromatic line in the high piano that became one of the signature of the main title sequence. As the sketch grows, the electric bass comes in. So it's this sort of minimalist piano motif by putting that bass under it, it sort of gave it a tension of something that's pushing against it. David and I talked about the piano a little bit because that was in the Super

Tramp Q and it's an instrument I like a lot and it felt like a good instrument for Kevin's character because it can be very precise and very sort of mechanical in a way, which I love about it. The sort of called arm things that was dropped into the main title sequence and it never left. Once it was in there, that was what we're going to do. And I started, you know, a few passes through. I started to work on the arrangement. The story of the main title sequence is visually lyrical and flowing, but I remember this came straight from sort of those original scripting of the main title.

It's basically the whole idea of the sun going down in Washington. You know, you started in really broad daylight and as the sequence progresses, you end up in night. So, you, so there was a way in which you went from something very open and airy and light to like the darkness falling, you know. So that was, that was a little bit of a visual storytelling thing I tried to play off of. The first thing we hear is the fog, the fog of the cloud of doom. It's this sort of low synth drone.

Shortly after that comes the bass line. Which I know David affectionately refer to as the rip tide. I always like that description. It's kind of like the idea of something that pulls you under, you know. Basically it's a combination of several things. It's analog-y, modeled, sin-things that I've designed, some of my hat for a long time. There's a couple different of those base samples mixed together, but I also record a live base player playing the part. It's actually my son, Henry, who is a

wonderful young musician. He's actually now studying jazz bass. The bass line was so important, and the orchestration was getting big enough. I actually recorded the bass an octave above. It gives it enough mid-rate content so that when all this other stuff is happening, that bass is still driving. One of the fun things about the composition for me was that the harmony changes a lot over that bass line. In fact, bass is always playing an A minor, but the harmony sometimes goes to A major. And it creates this very strange dissonance in this sense of collision. It's basically a wrong note, you know. It's like the bass player is playing the wrong note, but it doesn't sound like a wrong note because it's a synchrony, it's got its own logic to it. It's almost like

Frank will push through anything, he doesn't care, he's not going to stop playing those notes. My original sort of called arm sketch two times through, which is kind of the original demo, was almost long enough to cover the main title sequence, but we needed some more time. And I also had this direction from David to sort of work in another theme. So what I did was I kind of extended the intro. I added a lot of percussion, but I also added that little pupper master riff, the da da da da da da da da. You know, that thing, it has a slightly different cadence because this is in 4-4, and the pupper master theme was always in 3.

Frazes are broken up a little bit, but it's still got that descending chromatic line. Another layer that was sort of one of the last things I came up with, but was really useful is the trumpet. I'm a trumpet player, and again, it's the most expected cliche thing you'd hear, you know, show about Washington would be that sort of military trumpet kind of thing. And it's the most expected cliche thing you'd hear in a show about Washington would be that

sort of military trumpet kind of thing. Because we're seeing the sort of iconic shots of Washington, it just felt right to have something that references that icon. Because obviously the rest of the composition is telling you that this isn't the heroic version of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington monument. And there's a way in which it's sort of lonely to me too. I like the sort of loneliness of it. One of the things David visually did was to pull out a lot of the people in some of the time-lapse shots he has. It was much creepier seeing some of those shots with no people in them. It just made

it feel like he was a ghost town or had this sort of surreal quality to it. It's basically in talking to David Fincher about the second season. I was just sort of surprising to me, but I think we were spotting the first couple episodes. He sort of tried to give you notes on the main title about what he wanted different. David saw the second season as even more operatic and darker, too, which was shocking to me because the first season was pretty dark. But you know who everybody is. You've seen who Frank is and what he can do.

He's killed somebody in the first season. I mean, it's obviously very, nothing's going to get in the way of what this guy wants to do. In general, for main titles, people get attached, especially when they like something. So it's very careful, you know, to like steer the ship enough, but not so far as to make it feel like your old friend was not your old friend anymore. So I added some voices, some voice samples to a lot of it. I also added some low strings to the intro.

The high string line that used to be, you know, sort of pup a master theme, we just do that in the celly. So again, it's lower, everything's sort of skewing down, skewing darker, and so that it feels like this cloud has sort of come over the whole thing. The sort of lightness and sense of that type of energy is dissipated. You know, he's no longer the puppet master. He's ever the vice president in season two. We know he's very much in command, so there's less of a game going on and much more of a,

it's like the Ascent to the Throne. You know, I think so many networks, for even filmmakers are afraid of a real main title sequence. It's sort of an old-fashioned idea, but the whole idea of a little mini film that settles you into a world and gets you ready to experience something is a wonderful sort of a storytelling device. You know, it sort of frames a moment for you and gets you settled into what you're about

to take in. And now here's the season two version of'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room.

I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5%

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1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc . That was song-exploder, on 99% of visible.

It was produced by Hiroshikeshirwe, who is also the driving force behind the band, the one a.m. radio, who is playing behind me right now. Song Exploder is part of the Maximum Fund Network, which shows like the memory palace bullseye with Jesse Thorn, judge John Hodgman, my brother, my brother and me, all kinds of good stuff. I have been a listener and monthly donor for years. You will find a show you love at MaximumFond.org. 99% Invisible is Sam Greenspan, KB Mingle, Avery, Truffleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of

the offices of Arxon. Collaboration-minded architecture firm in collaboration-minded Oakland, California. You can keep up with this show and all the people who make this show on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. We are very interesting in all of those places. But our home on the web is 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX. you