A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 54: Exploring the Music of 'Andor' with Kirk Hamilton

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

In our final episode of the year, we're joined by Kirk Hamilton of Strong Songs, Triple Click, and the Kotaku review of Destiny 2 fame. (No, really, it's one of my all time favorite reviews. Go read it!) Over on Strong Songs, Kirk recently dove headfirst into Nicholas Britell's excellent Andor score. Today, he's joining us to talk through music's place in the show and in Star Wars in general. Join us as we unpack the differences between Britell, John Williams, and the other musicians who've worked in the franchise. And don't worry, we sneak in one more theory about Cass' sister for good measure! Show Notes "Evolution of the Star Wars Main Theme" by Star Wars Audio Comics on YouTube (Used around minute 20) Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod "When Music is Torture" by an interview with Lilly E. Hirsch by Maggie Wang Hosted by Rob Zacny (@RobZacny) Featuring Alicia Acampora (@ali_west), Austin Walker (@austin_walker), and Natalie Watson (@nataliewatson) Produced by Austin Walker Music by Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal) Cover art by Xeecee (@xeeceevevo)  

Let us return once more to a more civilized age, a Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zackney, joined by Ali Akampora, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson. We are wrapping our Autumn of Andor before the Clone Wars Christmas Tide rolls in. Supported, as always, by our listeners at patreon.com slash civilized. Today, we are joined by Kirk Hamilton, host in producer of the Strong Songs podcast, a longtime video game critic and blogger Kitaku, Paste, and Gamer Melodico. Kirk's just released an episode digging into the music of Andor, and it's a really fun and

accessible exploration, and I think we're going to, like, play a little clip for you, just give you a taste of what you can get into, and I highly recommend actually listen to the episode, maybe before even listening to this, because Kirk's already done this work, so like this will catch you up on, I think a podcast that I just listened to, the Kirk's just worked on, and provides context for the chat we're going to have here. So it's a simple melody, but the effect of that melody is anything but simple. There's this feeling I get when I listen to this theme of a swirling darkness that is eventually illuminated by a single piercing light.

That light is the final note of the melody, that F sharp. It's a bit of brightness in an otherwise murky space. And it's a sound that I really love, a minor chord going to the first. four major, which A minor going to D major is one minor going to four major. And the reason I love it is that specific sound, the sound of a natural sixth in a minor key. You don't always have a natural sixth in a minor key, and it's a brighter sound than a flat six in a minor key, which a natural minor key usually has. Since we have discussed the music in the series so much, and because there is so much ground

to cover when it comes to the sound of Star Wars, we jumped at the chance to have Kirk come dig into this with us and talk about how music kind of shaped this series. So, Kirk, thanks so much for coming on AMCA. Oh, man, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. I have been listening to you all talk and talk and talk about Andor. All I want to do is talk to people about Andor. And I'm very excited to talk to you all about Andor.

I've become the person who goes to the party and just starts yelling about Andor the minute I walk in the door. It happens, you know. It gets you like that. You, in fact, put off a vacation of strong songs to do the end or episode. Yeah, I listened to the end of that podcast. You said you were going to take a break. I heard you were taking no more.

Now you're doing it again. No, it's true. It really has been. I'm not being the change that I want to see in the world. I'm all four people drawing better boundaries, especially self-employed people. And here I am, yeah, spending all this time. I was initially thinking, oh, it'll be a bonus episode. It'll be kind of short.

And then I got going and I went up rewatching the whole season, taking obsessive notes, realizing just how musically incredible this show is and then made yeah like a 58 minute episode what would it be like to promise yourself that you're only going to do a little bit of work to cover and or and then instead to do yeah i guess you all can relate huh that's yeah i was gonna say that that was quite 58 minutes quite succinct for i was i was like sitting i was like this is going to be my whole day of podcast listening and it was like this very tight well well done episode that yeah i i i really appreciated um i listened to that a few days ago i was preparing for this episode um and i immediately after i went and listened to the entire uh nicholas

bertel he has all three volumes of the and or score uh now on uh now out released wherever you listen to music or get music and I just listen to the music and I didn't go back and watch anything but it's interesting how when you have the music isolated you really feel

the repetition or you feel the the remembrances of like songs path that you've already moved on from and I loved how you called that out in your in your episode

I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to this phenomenon of like familiarity that we we tend to develop or that we can develop through the course of a full season of television like with Andor where I especially loved what you said about Marva and hearing Marva's theme for the first time again really hit home

this feeling home for me so I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that through line that you found in your episode yeah there's such a strong through line right I think that's getting at the remarkable thing about what Bertel did with this soundtrack

is that there's this one big idea and then he develops that idea over the course of the whole show and this is not new for him this is something he did on Succession as well if you've watched Succession you've heard that you know sort of winding spiraling stair case theme over and over and over in a million different context. So he's good at that kind

of thing. And it's not exactly how Star Wars has worked before because, you know, he's, he has so much time to work with. He recorded, I think, 300 pieces of music or wrote 300 pieces of music, which is unbelievable. They spent two years working on this, which is really, well, I mean, that's more pieces of music than there are probably in the main Star Wars film. actually probably easily. So he kind of both has more to work with and less to work with in that he's doing something entirely new. So he can't just kind of rely on John Williams

and, you know, do a trumpet fanfare and you know, okay, I get what that's supposed to feel like because I've heard this a bunch of times. He's building something new, but he does have 12 episodes and 300 pieces of music to do it. And then he made this decision that I think embodies his approach, at least as a TV composer, to take one idea, really,

and put that at the center of the whole thing and then just keep coming back to it over and over and over again and you can see how it kind of organically grew out of that in a way that I think was really cool there is you know the fact that each intro theme like each theme for each episode is different that wasn't something they planned on going in

he just wrote this theme then he created a bunch of different iterations of it he sat down with Tony Gilroy and they said well we can't really pick so what if we just made 12. We made a different one for each episode. And that winds up kind of organically informing the way that he approached the music for the whole show. Well, and you end up doing the thing of, it ends up being one vector for storytelling and for exploring the different like affective space of each arc. A thing you call out is the, in the Narcina 5 arc. You have those really like out of tune synths in the first two episodes of the arc. And then the

orchestral version comes back in in the final episode when it is time for the jail break. And suddenly, when you've committed to having 12 different versions, that's the sort of swing you can take. You can really set the stage for what's about to happen. You also point out that because so many of the episodes start in media rest, there's that second bar of the theme each time that often kind of deposits the listener in the action and kind of catches you a stride. And those are things that I think function as a viewer, as someone in the audience,

even if you don't know what's happening, right? In contrast with something like that big heavy drum hit at the end of the second episode, which I had forgotten about until you returned to it on the episode. One of those bananas things I've heard in a long time. It's so wild. And there's nothing else like it all season. They never come back to... There's nothing just like it like any.

Yeah. Just unprocessed drums to smash on with. like a cello quartet or something. Yeah, and that makes me think about things like what is being communicated with something like that in terms of where does Andrew hang to the rest of Star Wars? Because that's about the least John Williamsy thing you could do. It's just a drummer next to a microphone comes in over the theme at the end of episode two, which was the final episode you got to watch with that first blast.

The third episode only comes out a week later. So I kind of feel like there's like you're in our world now. style like not chest thumping i don't want to like it's not it wasn't aggressively i mean it's very aggressive but you know what i mean it feels like a small act of of defiance against you know the the mode of star wars that we've come to expect almost and i love i love that you highlighted that in in your episode kirk because i hadn't really thought about how the star like and or doesn't have that distinctive star wars um characterization but it feels so within the the universe which is which is very funny because it feels like at the same time at odds with

the like you said the like the you know trumpet blasting like huge swell of of the John Williams score and many other scores that followed in other Star Wars properties that, you know, are meant to be within that vein. How distinct and or feels. I feel like that drum beat is almost like its own little act of resistance. As music is so much an active resistance

as a theme throughout the show, it feels like that was kind of another, a fourth wall, maybe. Yeah, it's interesting, right? There's a sort of aesthetic trick that Andor is doing across a lot of different aesthetic categories. Music is just one of them, where it's moving away from Star Wars. And sometimes in a way they can feel a little bit like violent is the wrong word, but in your face, like, yeah, having a drum set just come in is a very sort of strong way of saying, we are doing our own thing here. This is not something you ever would have heard in Star Wars where past Star Wars was so much more interested.

in, you know, connecting to John Williams and channeling that music. But they're doing that across the spectrum, right? Like, there are no wipes. I was thinking about this for you watching it. They don't do the, I don't remember what it's called, like the diagonal wipes, those transitions that you're so used to seeing when you watch Star Wars.

There's a whole kind of aesthetic world of Star Wars that Andor moves beyond, but it's not doing it in a way that feels like it's saying that isn't cool or, you know, rejecting it or anything. It's just expanding what Star Wars can be. And I think that's what Brutel was doing as well with the music, is he knows when to lean into the heroic stuff, even though he never fully transitions into sounding more like John Williams, the way that Giacchino did in the Roe 1 soundtrack. And I'm actually really curious about what the season two soundtrack is going to sound like, because the thing is so Austin, you mentioned the way that the theme carries you into the music, it modulates. So it goes up a fifth.

This is something I didn't even really realize watching the show until I sat down at the piano and figured it out. But every theme starts out at they're all in the same key. They're all in a minor and you can layer them on top of one another I've heard this and it sounds completely bananas. It's the hugest thing you've ever heard but it's pretty cool But then they modulate up a fifth to E minor. So not to get in the weeds of music theory, but just it changes keys and it slightly changes the chord progression, but it's the same melody. You can hear it in there, kind of, and the cellos is just quieter. So the theme immediately changes. The very first time you hear it in the first episode, it happens, and then it changes.

And then it just keeps changing and changing and changing for 12 more episodes. And that, I think, is, I don't know, it's central to what he's trying to do. He's establishing one idea and then just changing it over and over and over again. He tells you that from the start. One thing I wanted to sort of frame this with a little bit is when we talk about, like, we all know John Williams' like Star Wars score. We all know it. But in terms of like what the elements of that sound are, like what are they? What are the colors he's painting with? What's the sonic palette we listen to? Because like Williams himself has a style that you can sort of like

you don't confuse a Jerry Goldsmith score with a John Williams score for instance. But then Star Wars itself is is incredibly distinctive. And that has has become, that has become the sound of Star Wars. Like, yeah, Giacchino ends up doing variations on it, inverting it in places, it sounds like. And then we watch, you know, the Clone Wars cartoon, and that is constantly just riffing on that. But, like, we're talking about that palette.

What is it, what is it drawing from? What are the brushes that Andor is pointedly refusing to pick up? It's a mix of things. So Williams was influenced by, you know, Wagner. He did Wagnerian light motif was his whole thing, which is there's a motif and it's associated with the character. So when you see, you know, a superstarist or you hear the imperial march, you know, when you see Obi-Won could be doing something with the force, you hear the force.

Right, right. And so he was very influenced by Wagner. You can find, there's a lot of people who know a lot more about Wagner and John Williams. I'm just a jazz saxophonist who plays other instruments badly. That's what your card says, right? It's Kirk Hamilton. I am just a jazz saxophonist. Just a jazz saxophonist over here. So, but Wagner,

Holst, Gustav Holst is a huge influence if you've ever listened to the planets you will hear direct quotes of the planets in Star Wars. It's that same I mean, listen to Jupiter, bringer of Jolity, which I think is the full name of that piece. Or listen to Mars, you'll hear the Imperial March in Mars.

So you can hear those influences in Williams and then Williams is a fantastic composer and he synthesized those into his own thing. So he has his own whole approach. And then he became the most influential composers in Hollywood history. So now a whole bunch of people, this whole new generation of composers, grew up listening to him.

And, of course, he's done scores that go far beyond Star Wars. He's an incredible and really versatile composer. So people like, yeah, Kevin Kiner, who scores Clone Wars, he's great John Powell. He did solo Star Wars story. Giacchino, great composer. These guys are working Hollywood composers who just can really do the thing. And they all came up, I'm sure, listening to John Williams. So there's kind of, John Williams has become a kind of, you know, musical identity unto himself.

And now everyone, I'm guessing, if you go to film scoring school, like if you go to get a degree and learn how to score films, you probably have a whole course on John Williams, just on the techniques that he uses. And so there are specific things. You know, you'll hear, I don't know, a solo piccolo up above very low strings with the kind of tinkling wind chimes. The beginning of, I think a new hope begins that way, or one of the main trilogy begins. that way. There are a lot of these little isms that people will channel. I was listening to the score to Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, that game, which is just shameless about it. And the old games are that way too. I say shameless, I guess. I mean, this is the double bind, right? Like, this is the heart of a lot of the, you know, halfway through the season when it seemed like

Ander was doing poorly. I said that the audience was mid because the audience, because there was a subsection of the Star Wars devoted audience that is like there's no lightsabers in this, it's not good. There's no, there's no, there's no, it's not Star Wars. It's not Star Wars. I mean, they were also saying it wasn't good. But you're right. They were saying it's not Star Wars. And I, there is a bind. I can imagine, if you asked me, someone who doesn't know, if you paid for me to go to music school and said, Austin, you're going to go to music school, you're going to spend five years developing talent after that and connections. And then you become, and then you, And then you have a Star Wars property waiting for you to score.

First of all, I wouldn't sleep. I'd be anxiety written for the rest of my life. That sounds like a nightmare. It's like Brewster's Millions, but weirder. I'm locked in. But I would know, like, how do you resist? You know the audience is out there. And that for them, that is what Star Wars sounds like.

And if you try to diverge from that, they will have, a difficult time or they will have a different experience. You won't be able to count on being able to pull on some of that and leverage some of that. And that's, you know, I think it's kind of fearless to decide to not do that. It is. It is. And it's an aesthetic choice that isn't, like, there are a lot of different ways that something can be not Star Wars. I've thought about this so much because I'll see, I read comments on articles about Andor for some reason.

And a lot of, I'll always see someone in there saying this, well, this show is cool, but it's not Star Wars. And I don't agree, for reasons that you guys have pointed out, I think. You know, there's a lot of the ideas of Star Wars are explored on Andor just in more subtle or more grounded ways. But also, there's just an aesthetic. Aesthetically, it isn't. Like, it is its own thing aesthetically. They aren't doing all of the aesthetic tricks. And, like, I think that that's cool.

I'm into trying new aesthetics. But I do understand finding comfort in, you know, in hearing that music and seeing those transitions, you know, and having everything begin with the fanfare, the trumpet fanfare a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I remember as a kid playing the games, probably like Jedi Night games, and they would always begin with that. You know, they'd play the music,

and that was how you knew it was real for me. It was just- Audio technology by how the sounded, like the fanfare would sound different, depending on the chip it was playing through. Right, what kind of PC speaker you were using, and then you got a sound card, yeah, yeah. But there is something there is something there that is...

interesting, which is that Star Wars isn't Star Wars. A lot of those aesthetic tricks, you know, Williams, you've already talked about what he's pulling from musically, but things like the screen wipes and the text crawl and the establishing shots that we've talked about. Lucas is pulling from a

huge range of things. We say a lot, we talk a lot about Republic serials of kind of like adventure stories and pulp stories. He's pulling from all of that stuff, not to say that that isn't valuable or doesn't work well. It totally helps to form what the Star Wars identity is, but all of which is to really say that when

Gilroy is now pulling from, for instance, the history of spy fiction or the history of prestige TV, and it's pulling a techniques from that. Like, that's the same thing. It's just that the source is different, you know, instead of pulling from, you know, the old Raygun, you know, sci-fi shorts, he's instead pulling from HBO dramas, you know. Well, and I think to that Austin, like the one thing I will say is it is kind of like a daring direction for a Star Wars show to go and it does sound like such a different soundtrack, but one

thing as I was listening to it is I was also kind of struck by like how calling it trendy sounds pejorative but I can't think of a better one right now, but like this soundtrack like called to mind this whole season has been bugging me like what it reminds me the most

of and I'm thinking of like Oliver Arnold's like soundtrack work and such like more sparse minimalist type compositions like that has become a like that has become sort of a an aesthetic mode in a lot of prestige TV and a lot of like serious films serious sci-fi films and I think you even see that style shift like one of the other things when you were talking about the Aldani raid the sort of ticking clock I sort of flashed to Zimmer's score for Dunkirk. And the funny thing is, Zimmer's style has shifted in the last 10 years.

Like, a Zimmer score used to be, why he recycled dames? Like, that guy cut once and just kept putting the same soundtracks out there. Basically, it was like, what do you think of this? You liked it in Crimson Tide. Yeah. But I would say, like, recently, like, his soundtracks also sounds. a bit different. And so, like, it does also feel like there is a,

there's that, like, generation of composers that, like, came up listening to Williams and were informed by him. And we now seem to have moved into a, you know what, let's get away from the big orchestral composition. Let's, let's, like, Williams and Bernstein in their grave and then move on. And so it does feel like there's. a backlash or a different movement underway here. Yeah, I think that Bratel is a really good sound designer in addition to being a great composer,

and that's the core of what makes his music in general, but especially his music in Andor so interesting. This is a mode for a composer that, you know, I can't speak to every trend in Hollywood, but it seems pretty unusual for him to work hand in glove with the showrunner for two years designing the sounds and the music and the whole sonic identity. of this TV show. Like normally, the way it used to be is, you know, you'd just get your reels and you'd go into the studio with the composers and they'd play the thing up on the screen

and you'd play along with the music and they'd record it and they'd put it on the soundtrack. Like that was, it was a super straightforward thing. This is akin to, you know, I think about Austin Wintery talking about journey and what a big deal they made out of that, which it was a big deal, that they brought in the composer from the start.

This is the video game journey, I'm sure, a lot of your listeners about it. I think you're safe here, yeah. Just to not to assume too much about everyone listening, But, you know, he was brought in from the beginning, and he was a whole part of the creative process, and that allowed him to, you know, write music that feels much more organically of a piece with the game.

And it's an amazing achievement because of that. This is kind of a similar approach. It's a more like resident artisan approach to scoring. That they, you know, one of the first times he says that he and Gilroy worked together, they live 11 blocks away from each other in New York. This is such a story. This is one of those, such a like, ah, this is how we made the thing stories. and they're banging the pipes in his building

trying to get the sound for the time grappler and so they spent forever just crashing things together and recording them and trying to find them that is just a very different mode of composition than someone like a John Williams or it's a different mode of what you think we trash Obi-Wan the TV show

a lot on the show I don't because it's pretty bad it's pretty bad yeah Rob have you seen it yet have you watched it yet looking forward to it Stack for vacation. At this point, you really should be. The, the, I have no idea what the creative process was like for Obi-Wan,

but it sounds like the, it feels like it would be the opposite of that. I think fairly rushed and tortured. Yeah. And forced into certain creative processes that have been tried and tested and accepted as the default. And much less the like, okay, I'm going to sketch these things out with a composer in my apartment building. Yeah, just like walking, walking, That's such a beautiful image of like an organic creative moment where you're just like looking looking for inspiration wherever you can find it and looking around your surroundings and things. And it does feel very I imagine there wasn't really a walk and talk in a New York apartment building trying to figure out the sounds of Obi-Wan.

It just feels like we went from, Obi-Wan seems like the most Disney-fied, like the perfect Disney example of a Disney Star Wars show. I say that also, have we not seen it yet? I will watch it. You should. You should. It's not great.

I was going to say, oh, well, you go ahead. So I think that, yes, I think we can deduce some things about Obi-Wan, and also Rogue One for that matter, because we know Rogue One was a pretty tortured development, and that Alexander Desplot was going to be composing the score to that, and he is a very different kind of a composer, not necessarily. He's a pro. He could probably do the Williams thing. But I could imagine an Alexander Desplot soundtrack, or a score for that film, that could be very different than what Giacino did. And I don't really mean to knock what Giacchino did. I don't love his main theme, that main Rogue One theme. It's just, it's very derivative. But I think that he's actually done some lovely work on that score. And obviously, I mean, the guy is like the most successful composer in Hollywood for a reason. But he was, it does feel like he was brought in. And they said, okay, it's kind of like bringing in J.J. Abrams for episode nine. Well, we just need someone who's a steady hand and can do the thing.

And unfortunately, that was, I don't think musically what that movie needed. Well, Rogue One was kind of a mess. So they just got it where they could get it. But it is interesting to watch Andor. And know, okay, this is what it would have looked like. if Tony Gilroy can sit down from the beginning and, you know, spend two hours right in the apartment figuring out just the sound

for this one guy in the world. But everything can come from that, right? Because once you get the time grappler, a lot of pharix starts to come into effect. You get the people begging the aluminum and tin and stuff throughout the place. It all, it grounds it in this physical way. All that stuff is of a kind in some ways.

Rob, you had something. Like to that point about, The boundary between sound design and composition here, I think, is really interesting. I didn't really hit me until I listened to the Strong Songs episode, the way that, like, dietic sounds are, like, folded into and are playing against the composition that is playing over a scene. Like, you know, can we play the coolest one of those in this, right now? Like, the air raid siren, when they're loading into the tie fighters during the eye and the siren starts playing. I'm just going to play it right now, so you guys can hear it.

hear it, but you could put it into the episode so that everybody can hear it. Because that is the coolest thing. The first time I heard it, I was like, this air raid siren kind of has pocket. This thing is kind of in there. Here it is. Come on, come on. Yeah.

Yeah. I want the episode. I just hear that. Chills. I need the club remix to that. Oh, man. For real. For real. The Niamos beat. That kind of thing. And then you have the Aldani ritual, like those, there are the bells that they're using. clangs and like the sound of that.

This is a thing that I've learned making strong songs. I actually, I did an episode on HBO theme music. I actually talked about Bertel's Succession theme there. But I also talked about the Watchmen remake. And the music for that is fantastic as well, Trent Rezner and Atticus Ross. And I did a similar thing where I was like just pulling out audio from the show and just listening to it. The whole sequence where, I'm forgetting her name now, but the main character of the show, when she grabs the guy and throws him in her trunk and this music is. playing and it's this kind of really pulsing music. And the editing and the sound design of the

slamming doors and the pulling like tape. And it's all in sync. And it's a similar approach to sound design and composition. And just closing my eyes and listening to it without the visuals really underlined that. And I found that was totally true of the Aldani Heist of listening to those transitions between the people singing, this beautiful song that I'm assuming Nicholas Brutel wrote that they, you know, that was invented by musicians. They're not real people, but it sounds like a totally different mode. Right, right, right, right. Yes, yes. The musicians are real.

Musicians are real people, though. I want to make sure it's clear. The Eldani are real in our hearts. They are real in our hearts. Yes, exactly. But yeah, those transitions just from that, the chanting, it's this really beautiful thing to suddenly this pulsing music. You hear people yelling time check like guns are sliding around. Money is, you know, cards are tipping over.

You're getting all of these percussive sounds. It's pretty amazing. you can ground that stuff in the history of heist films. You can go find those, that sort of technique elsewhere. It's just not quoting the same stuff that Star Wars tends to quote, you know? I think ironically, we don't think

that way about Solo, which is a heist film. And it's not a conversation I have very often. I think you guys described it that way and I remember thinking, oh yeah, I guess it kind of is a heist. It centers on two heist. Three. It is. Yeah, it is. Two or three. I don't, yeah, we'll get there. I have to wonder if it

if it's that so, we're so used to Star Wars actually borrowing from itself at this point. First, you know, when, even post, you know, in the original trilogy, as soon as we enter episode 5 and 6, we're already making references to the episode before it, similar shots, or especially, especially with the music, that I want. wonder if it's if like we created this like insular um taxonomy of aesthetics and uh visuals and editing and music uh that is you know capital star wars um that that that's what feels so like that's where the we're feeling that or that's where the absences felt from

because we're so used to being constantly reminded of hey here's this thing that you should recognize if you're like a true Star Wars fan or you know here's that that riff that like that's you know the force is here we feel it which to be completely honest I always felt like was extremely

especially musically very distracting and often felt kind of and I guess we'll talk about this eventually when we talk about the original trilogy is felt at odds with the scene I was watching because I was being told like here's this person

instead of here's the emotion of this scene rather interesting I think about that a lot with specifically episode um specifically episode six whereas in and or the because of the the modularity of the that that those five you know of that melody that carries us all the way through it feels like we're able to shift and change and move between emotions and tones and moods that I don't really feel in other, like I feel so much more is carried in performance for me

in terms of emotion in the original trilogy versus here in Andor. I like that a lot. It's kind of, it's a bit of rigidity versus modularity or flexibility. There's a flexibility to the way that Brutel approached composition just by the way that he designed it from the start, that he can grow Luthan's theme in that scene where Luthen changes for the first time for Choruson. It starts with the and or chord progression. And then it grows and Luton's theme kind of blooms out of it and sooner you're in this whole other realm. ...hean... ...that...

...their... ...that... ...the... He can do that because of the way that he approaches that theme. That kind of thing kind of happens sometimes with Williams as well. Like Williams can be a very clever composer. You know, he'll hear the imperial march in a different way when they show young Anakin or that kind of thing. But it's not the same kind of approach.

And I totally agree about how limiting it can become to have an aesthetic, you know, there needs to be this one aesthetic identity for any huge, thing like Star Wars or Marvel or whatever, all of these mega franchises that we live our lives sort of, you know, in the shadow of these days. And it's so exciting to hear somebody just try something totally different. Because for me anyways, what Brutel did and also what Gilroy and everybody who worked on the show did is they removed a lot of that aesthetic stuff that I think a lot of people would tell you is Star Wars.

So, you know, you hear the John Williams music, you see the sort of certain types of visuals, you get a certain type of character. You hear those echoed lines that, you know, turn up in every Star Wars thing. And a lot of people would tell you, well, that's Star Wars. When you pull that all out, you do get a lot of people saying, well, now it's not Star Wars. But I don't agree. And I really think that it's still very much Star Wars because it takes Star Wars so seriously, which raises a really cool question of, well, if we strip all that stuff away, we still got Star Wars.

So then what is it? Like, what have we got here? And what else can be done with it, right? Because this is not the final configuration of the stuff that's in Star Wars. Wars. One of the things I came to towards the end of the Andor season was like, what I want is for Disney to take more swings that are as varied as this is from the core. And I think a thing that's probably worth saying, and like maybe I'm just in good spirits

today and I'm like, I'm being, you know, generous in some ways is we might not give Mandalorian enough credit for opening the door a little bit. Musically, you talk about this. Yeah, Ludwig Urensen deserves a lot of credit. He did a great. The Mandeloran music is great and is very, very different. I mean, that's Ennio Morricone. It's very different. Now, the fact that it is quoting a different, it is more, it is very clear that it is doing the sort of quoting work that Lucas loves, but of Westerns instead of pulp cereals. But it nevertheless, I think, does like open that door for something like Andor to come in and to be a little bit wider, you know, away from the chorus. So shout outs to that. I don't know if you had any other mandala. Music or Sound Design Thoughts there?

Yeah, well, I love The Mandalorian because it features a bass recorder. And as a woman player, I just, I love that the bass recorder is now the kind of iconic instrument of this whole TV show. And it's such a good sound. And yeah, I think Yerunsen is another one of the great, most interesting composers working right now. He and Brutel are both guys that I think are just amazing. And they both bridge that gap with sound design. I mean, he, like, Ludwig Joranssen writes lovely orchestral music, but he knows his way. around a drum machine.

Like he knows his way around a beat. Same as Bertel. Brutel's background was like doing all kinds of stuff with hip hop and like 808s and sampling and whatever back when he was in school. And if you listen to the succession theme, it's like, you know, there's this huge sub-based drop on that. And I mean, there's, that is definitely also.

There's that push-a-tie version of that song, right? It works because it's exactly a beat, like. Don't judge me. Got my hands tied. The powers above me. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just a puppet here. If you want a place blame, then look to the puppeteer.

Family, fortune, envy, jealousy, privilege, passed on legacy, secrets, sabotage, borderline, felony, suicide, subtract, selfish pedigree. When the love's gone and it hates there, better watch out because it can't fear. When your family ain't your family and your legacy is just a name there. In your mother's eyes, it's a blame stare, but your father's picking who remains here. It's a power struggle It's a tug of war That's amongst the keys And it ain't fair

Right And that's all in line With his sort of musical influences I think Ludwig Geronson is the same The Black Panther soundtrack Is the same kind of idea So there just is a new school of composers who are doing new things

And taking a bass recorder And putting it through a bunch of filters And turning it into this whole weird sound that then becomes the defining sound of the soundtrack and of the character I mean watching Book of Boba Fett when that show takes its weird turn and the Mandalorian shows up.

Ludwig Urensen composed, I think, the main thing for that show, but then somewhat someone else compares the music. The best turn in that. Well, yes, it was, that is true. It was good in a weird way. It was unexpected. Finally some good fucking television.

Yeah. It finally became good. But when the Mandalorian turned up and I heard that base recorder, I was out of my chair. I was so excited. And that's my question about where we... Just because of the music. Where we go from here is, the machine works in a way, and the way it works is, and or is a hit,

Mandalorian is a hit, they want to revivify the core Star Wars brand at some point, presumably. When does someone say to a composer, and now you have to cross the streams, bring in the sound, that deep sound for Mandalorian, and then also bring in those out-of-tune synths to communicate something from viewers who've seen Andor and try to make all of these disparate things, which are better and more powerful because they're allowed to be disparate, you know, re-thematize them into, you know what I mean? And like, I'm a little terrified of it, but I also kind of want the Rogue One Gilroy cut that also has an entirely new score that does try to build that, make that bridge, you know. So I think we might get that in season two because that's really the thing of the Andor theme.

This is what I'm always saying about this theme is the Andorra music changes. It just changes. And that's in line with the show. This is a show about change. It's about a person changing about this, you know, this sort of disparate rebellion forming. So it's always moving. And in season two, it's going to keep changing. It's not going to just be synths and strings.

Right. It's kind of remarkable how few tambural elements he used in the soundtrack. I mean, it's really synths and strings. Occasionally you get horns. When they escape from Narcina, you get the big brass. that sounds like a Zimmer score. Of course, you get the marching band in episode 12. But other than that, it's really largely strings.

There's a cello no net that plays that beautiful piece when Andor finds out his mother is dead, but that's just cello. There's synths, of course, all over the place. And then they just mix those two. But they've got a whole brass section. I mean, he can hire whoever he wants because he has Disney money. So I would guess that we're going to see a lot more development in season two. And I'll be interested in that just because,

you know, Giacchino's music exists. And like I said, there's some really cool stuff in the Rogue One soundtrack. And I could see someone like Bertel synthesizing that and doing kind of what you're talking about. Building that bridge. And if Nick's Bertel does it, and if he does it on and or a show that has a score that's constantly evolving and changing, that would actually be a great place for it to bring all that in. And then I guess also, like, you know, Dingeron shows up in a base recorder shows up. Right, right. He's a little baby or whatever.

Yeah. There's one of the thing that, you know, when we think about the Williams score, characters have entire, like, pieces associated with them. Like, there's the motive and there's the piece. But, like, a Skywalker appears on screen, you know what you're going to hear. Leia shows up, you know what you're going to hear. Yeah. One of the things that I hadn't really realized, both listening to your episode and then, you know, going and listening to the soundtrack.

It almost feels like there's almost a I Am Spartacus quality to the Andor theme in that so many characters share or have variations on us. Like the thing that really jumped out at me, maybe I'm mishearing it, but when the track that's just titled Clea, when we meet Clea, sounds like it's just the Andor theme

and then plunges into this murky, like, subterfugee spy world. Yeah, it's when she's walking through a croissant meeting with Vell, that music rules. Right, and like, it was kind of like, you know, if you're looking at like, what's the thesis of the soundtrack? Is it and or, you know,

to some extent, maybe it's just the theme of the show. But usually, this thing is most associated with the character of Cassian, and then so much of it is borrowed or remixed through other characters recontextualized, like like the Clea track, basically being Andor's

theme, but existing a completely different genre, reflecting her completely different role within this nascent rebellion. Yeah, it reflects something about the show. And I, you know, I don't know whether this was on purpose or not, or this is a super deliberate thing. But one of the cool things about Andor is that Cassie and Andor himself is kind of in the background. That's his, one of his great strengths is that he can, he knows that Kino needs to be the guy

to give the speech, right? he understands that he's not always going to be the guy in charge. And so he doesn't have a heroic theme exactly in the same way that, you know, whatever someone in the main trilogy might, that Princess Leia might, because when Andor is there, it's really all about the people around him. And then the theme is used and reused for everyone around him and just winds up being kind of the theme of rebellion. That's more what it is.

And it's a function of the way that he wrote the music, but it's also a function of the way the narrative and the characters work. Well, and once again, I'm recalling that his code name eventually, of course, becomes fulcrum, right? He isn't, he is the thing on which other people turn, right? And so it's almost kind of interesting that that is the role that his theme plays here is it leads into everything else. It connects the various pieces, but it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to be the lead solo.

You know what I mean? it's not what his role is, not even all the way through Rogue One. So I think that that's kind of an interesting element. I mean, also the other reason that the Clayah stuff is connected to Andor's theme is because now I am Clayapilled and Clay is his sister. I'm now, that is now, that is now the one that has drilled into my brain. I've, I've thought about that for weeks since we recorded that last podcast and I think I'm also pretty clay appealed. Okay, so wait, what's the evidence in favor of Clayah being his sister? I think...

Dark hair. Dark hair. Okay. Both start with a C. Both start with Clea and Casse have a sort of resonance as sounds. And so these are arguments from the structural production thing, right? Which is that like, it's clear that the sister stuff isn't a closed door because if it was, Gilroy would have closed the door in interviews, et cetera.

From the interior of the story, I think it's very interesting that Luton knows a lot about who Cassian Andor is without... having learned it from anyone close to him. Bix tells Cass that she didn't tell him stuff like where he's from, that he's from Canary. That's something that Luton knows before separately. So he found that out somewhere. Now, maybe he could just dug around and, like, found a list of everybody who was part

of a Canary disaster. Or maybe he knows Clea. Also, I like the structure of Clea having been the... person who is the most, we have to just fucking kill this guy. And I don't know that she knows what his really, that's not what I'm saying, but I think there's something there. That's fun. Yeah, I feel like the stuff with Dedra and Cyril in the finale wound up sort of sticking a finger

in the eye of something the show was doing otherwise, which was never adhering to that kind of, you know, oh, actually, you know, Clea is his sister. That has never proved out. And the idea that Cyril was just going to die in the 12th episode, you know, just sort of in the street or something ignobly, it seemed more like that was the kind of show that they were making. But now that they've... But Star Wars has a gravity, and we know we get to Rogue One, right? Like, we will get to Star Wars eventually. And so it's like pulling people off of the Deadwood track and into the Star Wars.

It's like logic, you know? Right. So... They need to make that transition. And it's Star Wars. siblings have power in Star Wars, right? There is something about that. And I would be happy for it to not be.

I would be happy for Marvel to have been right and for cast to find out six episodes into the next season that they were all dead. They were killed by Republic, you know, troopers, whatever, right? Do you think she was, my sense of that was that she wasn't telling him anything that she actually knew. That is mine. We agree.

I also agree. We agree. Yeah. That was kind of my sense of that. Let me ask, okay, while we're just talking about things. What do you think is going to become of Cyril? I believe it is Cyril's Corpo Blaster that Melchie currently has. Have you thought about this? I don't think that's Cyril's blaster. I think that's one of the blasters from the two dead cops in an episode in the very

first episode. Okay, so it's one or the other. I rewatch the scene where he catches Cyril. Cyril's got a gun and he ties him up, but they don't show him picking it up, but it's a little unclear, I guess. It's one or the other. It's definitely a pre-more gun fundamentally. Yes, and they show it so many times, and then they show him give it to Melchie, so I'm very curious what's going to become of it. Wait, was that not Clemsgun? No, Clems' gun's gun. Clems' gun is the other gun. Yes. Oh, right, right, right, right, right.

It's what Andrew still uses. So you're suggesting that perhaps Melchie goes and kills someone, and they trace back the gun, and it's Cyril Karn registered to. Right. Could you imagine? Melchie shoots Cyril with that gun. Right. She asks him, is there any left out of the port? and the thing he left out of that report was oh yeah, I got held up a gun point

by them and told them how many dudes they were. Yeah, and like immediately gave up his men. Like immediately. And was like, yeah, there's 12, no, 14 of us, two officers and did he try to lie. Didn't he even try to be like, I will just say them. He's just like, you want me to draw your map?

So it's rewatching this show. Have all of you watched this show more than once? I've watched it twice now. Just one time through twice. Rewatching it is that wire experience of watching the wire the second time and you know what's coming. There's a lot of stuff like that. Just, you know, even things like Mon Mothma being from Shandrela, which wasn't something that

I knew going in the first time. Like, I just didn't really know what that meant. But they mentioned it from the beginning, and it's a plot point from the beginning. So I'm sure if you know what that is, you know, but if you don't, it takes a minute. So that kind of thing is cool. But there's a lot of stuff like that that the pistol reminds me of the pistol from the wire where they lose a pistol for a whole season is that in season three and they're trying to find it and it becomes this whole thing and the pistol winds up leading to some you know kind

of shakespearean tragic outcome i just i i have to wonder about the pistol it's one of it's it's an open it's an open thread are there other open threads that we haven't like wrap back around to there's the sister yeah there's what's going to happen to cyril which i'm still not really sure about at this point so he's It's going to die and humiliating death. Can I ask where were you on Cyril and Dedra? Because we asked Adam Surr, last episode. Oh, yes.

Very much enjoyed that episode. So listening to Sirwer talk about how basically Cyril gets to live out the in-cell fantasy, which he's completely right about, the fact that it worked out for him. And I heard that. Several of you described it in terms of, well, it's really worked out for him super well. Like, wow, it actually is the fantasy where you save the girl and she notices you and it's great. But I think this couldn't have gone worse for Cyril. That's my sense, is that now he's in with Dedra.

He thinks that, okay, finally, like, I'm going to make it. But I'd think it's just going to be a world of shit for Cyril in season two. And he's probably going to die horribly in some way. Do you think he'll have his heartbroken by the realization that the good guys kind of suck? I think maybe he will. It's always been kind of ambiguous. And he's the most interesting character because he's such a wild card. and I could totally see him becoming either, you know, an unwitting, a rebel agent or, you know, asset at least, or actually changing sides because for any of a variety of reasons.

I mean, he's such a ball of insecurity. He's not, you know, he's not a man of strong conviction. And he's not worldly. Like, he craved, like, he, ideologically, he's a fascist and, like, craves the authority and respect to think the empire can confer on him. but he's never actually seen it work very clearly. Like from the beginning, you know, when I was rewatching the, you know, first episode, you know, right from the beginning where his boss is basically like, I know what happened here because I know who we are.

And Cyril really doesn't. He doesn't know that like when two cops like turn up dead in a situation like this, it's because they were shaking someone down. It's because they were like, they're corrupt. That doesn't really like cross his mind in that way. And so there is a degree of, like, he looks at the empire and sees an extension of his little clone, his little clone troop reaction figures. And he wants to, like, lead them and be part of it. But he's never actually seen at work.

Like, I, you know, Cyril's like a little fuck. But I don't know what he, like, I'm not sure I get to a point where he'd be like, yeah, play the genocide scream music and torture those people. Like, I'm not sure that is him. It is DEDRA. And, like, that's the other thing where, like, this dude feels like he can bounce in so many weird, random ways, which is, in part, what makes him so mesmerizing. Babe, don't you think that was a little harsh? Hey, you know, I support you. Make him worse.

Yeah, that's what you're dreaming. You want her to corrupt him. Yes. Beauty and justice exists The universe now It happens to be a torture Judgea did not say I can fix him

Degra said I can make him work I can use him I can use them I mean Cyril is just a coward no matter what Like in any He will not I mean even his like bravery

quote unquote in that He didn't have to confront anyone he just like slithered in there and like grabbed her and her right that's what i mean that's not a brave thing to do no no no it was like the little slittiest wormiest little maneuver he could have done um but that that was his night the problem is i think cyril thinks he is on the on the cusp of nirvana is like about to enter his absolute peak era

married to a girl boss ready to just take on the world or Dedra the funniest outcome would be that Dedra just starts ignoring him again and like

she says I should say thank you but there is an unspoken but I can't because you're too repulsive I should say thank you and yet I just can't I can't get How could I? I could see him becoming a sort of off the book's asset for her and getting more involved in the spy side of things where she's not really acknowledging him and he's, you know, trying to find and war and trying to do spy stuff and getting his hands dirtier and dirtier and then eventually like, you know, there's some sort of rift between them. That seems like a place that the character could go.

She is going to have to hand like Partagaz, like some information and he can be like, how could you possibly? have this and she is going to have to reveal at some point that it's Cyril Karn that gave her that information and and she will feel the humiliation that Cyril Karn has felt all his life she's going to get sneaking around by Edie let's be real oh yeah that's true edie is going to report them both to the police that that could definitely happen that can't hate dead oh yeah 100% oh my god I really can't wait for that scene I uh I I This is giving me an opportunity to correct something that we got wrong this season, which is there's that early episode where someone reports that there's been lots of like power usage or transportation of stuff to Scariff. And we were kind of like, oh, that must mean that like the ISB higher ups know about the Death Star, but at this tier they don't.

Because Scarf is the planet from the end of Rogue One, where the Death Star is being built. It's actually Lonnie, I think. It is Lonnie. It's the spy. It's the spy. Krenick, who is building the Death Star, is not ISB. He's Imperial Intelligence, which is a different intelligence organization than the ISB. They are competing, in the same way there is the FBI and the CIA and the NSA.

Like the NSA. Exactly. There's Imperial Intelligence, which is a separate organization. Then it's clear the ISB doesn't know what the fuck they're doing, because what they're doing is building a giant, is building the Death Star. And I'm really curious. Which is a weird turn for an intelligence agency to take. I guess we have to track down Like how involved was I'm the

Yes it is a weird turn You ever wish you just get rid of all these spies and analysts And just have a really big gun Big gun yes Wouldn't that be easier? So what I've been thinking about with this show I want to ask what you all think is about the intersection of Andor and logistics And the logistics of this show

Because watching it I have found myself saying I love logistics, and I feel like that's something, that is a thing that is expressed more commonly maybe by people that it used to be, but maybe not. But I really love a show that shows its work. It's a reason that Better Call Saul was so satisfying was because that was a show all about people making plans and executing them, and you like watched the plan come together. And Andor is very much the same way. The score is that way.

I mean, the whole score feels like this big, this tapestry that's being woven in front of you. And by the end, you realize, oh, I watched them. put every thread of this in place. The story feels the same way. Well, that's not always been the case for Star Wars. No. And it's one of our big complaints about clone wars, to be honest. Right, is that so often, people just wind up where they need to be.

And then the answer, the unspoken answer a lot of time is just like, well, the force just, you know, I don't know. Don't worry about it. Which the force is really just the person writing the screenplay, just needed these characters to be in the room. There's this quote from Tony Gilroy. There's an interview with him in script magazine that any of you... I think we mentioned it and maybe one of our Q&A episodes, but please, Go ahead. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm behind on this. But he says he's talking about how hard it is to get people into the same room to have a conversation. And how, like on the Bourne movies, he's like, it's a nightmare. The thing he says is it's a tricky thing. Why people want to be there is a lot easier than how people know where to go. And the fact that he's constantly wrestling with that question is so cool to me watching this show because they have to show the work. And then sometimes he talks about having mosque call Cyril and how they had to make. it fun because it was such an obvious bit of engineering.

You're setting the stage. You're setting the board. But it better be at least funny when it happens. Right. So if you're going to do it, make it a bad call, make Moss ridiculous, like make the whole thing sort of entertaining. But so much of the show works that way. And so much of it is about communication. We just recorded on Triple Click, my video game podcast. We did a bonus episode about shoutouts. We did a bonus episode about Andor because I basically forced Jason and that to watch it so that I could yell at them. And Maddie pointed out something interesting. It's a really true thing about Star Wars that I hadn't really heard articulated before,

which is that these are a people in the galaxy far away who fully invested in interstellar travel and moving things from place to place and put no thought into communication. So there isn't an internet. It's not easy to get in touch with people. And that makes for such a great world for storytelling because you have to do logistics. And it actually kind of strikes me as a missed opportunity that Star Wars was so not interested in logistics before because the nature of the world really lends itself to these logistical problems that if you're creative about it, you can come up with all these

interesting solutions the way they did on the show. Rob, we were having this conversation today with, you were having this conversation today with Will Smith of not that Will Smith fame. Yeah. No, the other one. The Will Smith that I actually know. Yeah, the Will Smith. Yes. Yeah, Will brought up a really good point, which is, like, and or snap something into focus for him, which is like, there's, like, that longstanding question in Star Wars fandom is like, why is the Thai fighter such a piece of crap compared to the X-wing, right? The X-wing has shields, it has a hyperdrive, like, it's why the rebel pilots can just, like, shred through entire squadrons. Like, you know, and the argument's always been, well, you know, the empire is trying to do, like, economies of scale and is, like, it's the lowest-bitter type stuff, but, uh, Like, Will sort of pointed out that, like, Andor kind of shows the Empire doesn't think it's going to be in spaceship battles. It really doesn't.

It thinks it needs cheap fighters that can be, like, doing low, slow flyovers of tons of little villages all around the galaxy. And if it's going to be engaging anybody, it's going to be a bunch of people with, like, blasters on the ground that can't really shoot back. And that's kind of what they've, like, kind of spacked out their military for. And it's sort of more satisfying, more fun answer to, like, why doesn't the Empire have good starfighters to go up against the rebellion? Because they did not think they would be fighting starfighters. They built this entire thing out because they have not fought a peer adversary in 20 years. And it's been terrorized villages and, like, gun-down insurgents for decades, and the entire thing is built around that. Well, then, Rob, you point out this other thing, right, which is that the wheel sets up in this conversation we were having that, like, they have faster than light travel, but they don't have great computers.

They don't have search engines, right? There's that scene of Dedra going to the guy in the ISB and being like, search this database for me. And he's like, it's going to take me all night to search all that. And it's like, that is not how our computers work. We got to search. No, it's computing in 1950s, 1960s. Exactly. And so, Rob, the thing that you end up saying is that they have sentient robots.

that do the processing in a way that's, that is more efficient than going to a computer database. Having C3Pio be able to check his own mind is quicker than going to a database. And that even ties into the logistics thing. It's easier to, we don't have the ability to call Corrassant and do a data lookup directly, but we could just send you C3Pio. We could send you a droid. Droid's a number of tests, but they're hyper-limited. Exactly.

Where it's like, okay, so aren't you special? because, like, for plot reasons, R2 is a Swiss Army knife. Sure. But all astropectroids can calculate hyperjump stuff. And they're effectively the only ones who can. Right. And you need one. Or you need a ship built with that built in, like, the Blumen Falcon, which we'll get to.

You see the size of, like, ship. Like, you see the size of these computers and you realize, okay, so, like, you need capital ships. Like, they can roam independently without these, like, like space lanes because they can plant a giant computer in it but like if you want to go anywhere else you need and this is kind of the leap that star was makes is like droids have this like little spark of life imbued in them and you know they're talked about like the like the robots they talk about like my programming and such but like there is nothing in star wars that suggest these people can program like advanced computer processors they're

It can somehow build droids who can learn stuff and develop skills in a hyper-specialized way. And that is their solution to all of this. Like all their computing power runs through these droids. There's no Google Translate. There is, I hope you sprung for the good protocol droid. There's my boy, 3PO, and that's it. Right, right. And also, you own him, by the way, because Star Wars.

I like what Will is saying about the Thai fighters and the way that Andor reframed them for him. I think this show did that for a lot of things in Star Wars, and that is an important distinction when talking about something that people say isn't Star Wars. When comparing Andor to the Last Jedi,

I think Andor is less threatening in a way because Andor actually enhances Star Wars. I saw there was a recent article on Vox, I can't remember who wrote it, that was basically Andor made the Empire scary again. Something you all have talked about is how Stormtroopers had ceased being scary. They were kind of silly watching this show. When the stormtroopers start shooting

at innocent civilians on Rick's Road, it is terrifying. And it just, they seem scarier than they've ever seen. And I think that's a really cool thing that this show did, is that it made Star Wars feel different. It changed the way that I appreciate Star Wars, even if I'm watching an original trilogy movie or whatever. Like, this will now be in my head, this story, these characters, this truth about the empire. And that's a hard. thing to do, especially because the Last Jedi kind of challenged Star Wars a little bit more. It was more explicitly saying, well, you know, maybe this isn't, maybe the Force isn't great. Maybe the Jedi aren't great. And people really reacted negatively to that

because that's a kind of thornier thing to engage with. So, I don't know, it's something that I've been thinking about with Android just in that by drilling down and really getting into the nitty-gritty of how does this work, they wind up doing things like making Will realize, oh, well, that's why they have tie fighters because this is how the empire works and they didn't think this and that and you can draw all these conclusions well I think so and I think that makes it easier to buy narrative stakes in a lot of stories because we've hit it sometimes with clone wars I do think for all the things I like about the last Jedi it is also the movie where you have the strongest sense of space distance it does not matter time doesn't matter like things will it's true yeah yeah

Like, the last Jedi, characters leave the middle of a spaceship chase that's like slowly, like, crawling across space. They leave and go to a part of the galaxy we've never seen before. They go to Canto Bight. Hang out there for like a day and then come back in time for the big end of the spaceship chase on a completely different planet. And like, all that works from the standpoint of like this is, the film is not interested in this kind of friction. such but the minute you say like distance doesn't matter anything will like happen or show up at exactly the moment uh you know it needs to then you don't really ever like the thing that gets much harder to justify is like oh we're too far for help to reach us in time or something like that

like what's what's cool about stuff in in and or is you you have stuff like under last jedi rules the aldani heist doesn't really work because the empire could just materialize anywhere if the story demands it. Like, they just, like, get on the radio and, like, we're being robbed. And immediately, like, the executor appears and, like, kills everyone. But what you lose in that is the sense of, like, communication, technology, distance. All these things are interesting obstacles and how institutions try to overcome them or come to grips with them, like, create interesting. Like, the heist movie always hinges on what's the response time.

What's the response time for the police in this area? And like, because that's an awesome hook where it's like, you know three minutes is going to pass before like shit gets real with this plan. And Andor reintroduces a ton of that stuff where like, okay, people can't be ever at once. There is this sense of, they'll fudge occasionally where after the Aldani robbery, like, oh yeah, we can quickly fly to the planet with the doctor on it. Sure, it'll do that. but they will make the point of like we had this contingency yeah right we had already planned that out in that case i mean i think a lot about when i was younger and really desperately wanted an answer for what the right way was to make a thing um was it to care about these details or was it not to care about those types of physical logistical details and the answer of course is like as you tell more and more stories um they all offer you affordances and they all come with baggage and and a really great storyteller in any medium understands what those are and then leverages them and accounts for them where necessary. So things like Gilroy saying, the mosque call is so clearly me forcing something that it better be funny.

Is someone understanding what the baggage of being so logistics heavy is, is that suddenly when you have an audience that has been thinking in this grounded way, they might sniff out something being a little too convenient. because you've primed them for that. If this show had been working the way Clone Wars is, we would have written off caring about that forever ago. I think that when we watch Clone Wars, we generally go, all right, this show doesn't care about logistics. It needs characters to show up because it's going to do something melodramatic when it gets there. That's the main course.

And if we happen to get a little appetizer about how there's not enough fuel or how whatever, Like, that's fine, that's nice, but we're not going to hold them to account if they fail to do that. And I think that that is such an important part of recognizing what a work is trying to do. So, like, The Last Jedi, I think, fumbles this because it's trying to serve both of those audiences, right? It's trying to tell you timing doesn't matter. What's really what this movie is about is about the nature of the force, the legacy of the Jedi, the limited nature of binary thinking, the relationship between Kylo Ren and Ray. will Finn, you know, be able to gain the courage to blah, blah, all that stuff. Will Poe shut up and listen to Laura Dern, I guess, et cetera, which I would do, frankly.

Shout out to Lord Dern. But it also wants to be, you know, that's a movie that does start with the disastrous space battle that puts them into the tough situation to begin with, right? We're like, there's this great sacrifice. and you're, can they get to the bomb switch? And all of that stuff is logistics. All of that stuff is the physical and temporal constraints of the situation. And oh, my God, they're closing in on us. And those are two very different modes of storytelling that get intermingled and caught up with

each other. And it's a really difficult juggling act to bring an audience smoothly from one to the other. And so you're going to have expectations feel like they weren't met from one set of, from some people in the audience. I think that's a big part of what happened in Last Jedi, Which, again, we will get to you in 2026 or 7 or whatever. You can imagine Ryan Johnson making a film that is just about a Star Destroyer and a rebel ship. Right.

And they're in this sort of light speed. It's the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. Right. Right. Yes, the BSG post film premiere. Yeah. And it's just that story. Like, that would be a great film.

And that is very true that they have to switch. And so you lose, there's a sort of a pleasure. that comes from recognizing logistical elements snapping into place. There's a scene. You could just watch Star Wars Andor and just drop the needle wherever in any episode, and you'll see something cool. Maybe that's just a mark of how much I like the show, but I've found that to be true.

And I was doing this. I was looking around for music, I think, for the Strong Songs episode. And I just dropped on a scene where Gorn, during the heist, this is during episode six, he's like walking down the stairs. With the flashlight, with the little double flashlights. Hell yeah. Yeah. So he's walking down the stairs and it's just Goren looking cool walking down the stairs and then it cuts to Sinta who's up at the control station and she hits the buttons and all the power goes out. And then Goren is walking and it goes completely dark around him. He looks up and he looks down and he turns on a flashlight that he's already holding his hand. And it's it's one of those little moments of logistical pleasure that at least for me. It makes me so happy whenever I see something like that because you get to notice it. You get to see like I there's a whole little story. He had the flashlight in his hand already. This was his plan.

He was his plan. Yes. And he's not phased by this at all. The lights went out. Boom, turned it on. I've had the power to go out here recently. I wish I was cool enough to have a flashlight in my hand when it happened.

So there's so much stuff like that in this show. And it, I don't know, it's also, it's just pleasurable on a basic level to see that kind of stuff take place. Agreed. It's, I think it's really,

a funny thing here is that the empire strikes back. The reason everyone thinks they can get away with it is because Empire Strikes Back shreds every single rule of plausible storytelling and nobody cares. Like, you don't even notice how little that story should hold together.

Like, I didn't until I watched it like three, four times where it's like, it feels like Luke's been on Daigobot for like a month. Maybe like a year. He gets really jacked. Yeah. He gets so jacked. I just rewatched that movie.

His diet. He literally, I don't know what Yoda's feeding him, but, like, I don't know. And meanwhile, all that's in the time that, like, Chewy has, like, turned two, like, nuts on a hyperdrive. Yeah. And, like, Luke's having, like, all right, time for my dark side vision type shit happening. Or you get things where it's, like, bro, you ever have a week? Because that's how old who was just happening a week that lasted a year, you know? Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, and like, you know, that's a movie The Hinges on Oh, the Hyperdrive is broken We have to move with sublight speeds Good thing, space is small And we're just gonna zip over here to Bespin Let's just drive here Yeah, exactly

And all of it like It doesn't matter It doesn't care about distance You know, how long is it travel from point at point B Like what are the timelines happening in this film? None of it matters And it's so well made We don't really care

because it feels like the necessary frictions are in there from the start. And so, like, when these things will be obstacles, like, the movie's built around an obstacle. The hyperdrive doesn't work. The car's engine isn't working. And we just tend to ignore all the little ways. It's like, this doesn't add up.

It doesn't matter. The story holds up. It's kind of going back to the idea of suspension of disbelief. There's the difference between realism and believability. And there's also what the story's asking you to believe. And in, you know, Empire Strikes Back, you believe fully in the stakes of the story that's being told because it's being told so well. So you don't really question all the things that it's not really asking you to focus on. It's kind of a matter of focus maybe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is what I mean when I say, I don't think there's an answer. I think that there is only the, like, there is only the process and the outcome and, like, does it work? Art doesn't have the, you know, if you're a storyteller or an artist, I suspect of any medium, You don't have the luxury of the math, of the math adding up. Like, art is the thing in which one plus one sometimes equals three. And, like, being a good artist is knowing how to get there or stumble in that direction sometimes because that's how you surprise people, right? It is, it is, if you make stuff, it can be very frustrating when you watch stuff or I assume listen to stuff.

I'm not a musician where you can feel the hand of the artist. trying to color inside the lines and feel... Again, thinking about Obi-Wan, a show that we're going to talk about one day, you can so feel the constriction of the budget issues, the shooting issues,

all of the stuff that came around, how long that script had been passed from writer to writer and was a movie and then switched to show. You could feel all of that, and you can feel them trying to hit the notes and find the formula because if you had a formula,

boy, would it be easier. Boy, would it be easier to make good stuff if there was just the formula. And if the other version of this is what happens when you make Andor where you walk around your apartment and bang on stuff, where did you read the exchange about Gilroy talking about adding the Luton escape sequence, the like the sick spaceship thing? Yes, the space lasers. Yeah.

Gilroy basically says like, you know, we had a meeting about that stuff. someone pitched me that idea. We had some space in that episode. We were trying to communicate a couple of other things. And we thought, like, yeah, let's try to make that and see, like, it looked sick in the previs. And so we thought, let's go for it, basically. And, like, you have to be in a very good place, you know, any sort of creative process. But I imagine, especially something as expensive as this, to where you have the lead time to go knock something like that out.

And where you have time to explore that sort of space. and you don't feel completely weighed down by the feeling that, like, oh, my God, we have to get a fight scene in every episode, for instance, right? Or we have to get the big dramatic swell or even, you know, Gilroy was out there saying about criticism of the show. I, you know, I think Alan Sappenwald was the person who was most kind of wishy-washy on how he felt about the show in his initial, in his initial critique. And being like, Alan's big problem was like, this doesn't feel like a TV show. One of Allen's big problems was this doesn't feel like a TV show where the episodes are ending in cohesive and resolving ways. And Gilroy's response to that was like, yeah, it doesn't. That's not how it lives.

Restructured it differently. And I'm not saying that's how all shows should be. You know, Mandalorian mostly wraps up every episode. And one of its great strengths is that sometimes that's 30 minutes and sometimes it's 52 minutes, right? Right. Especially at its best, like in season one. 100%. so I do like it what a show resolve sometimes

but I think that like it's so heartening to me that Andrew got made in a way that allowed for those sorts of explorations and non-formulic even though it clearly still had goals and stuff you know yeah there's something oh go ahead oh I was just going to say

especially in the context of Star Wars which is so obsessed with resolution like out even outside of you know just television standards and what we come to expect Star Wars specifically is obsessed to a fault with resolving itself constantly and tying up every single loose thread. I mean, I think Star Wars is at its best when, for example, like in one of the prequel episodes we did where we spent, you know, 30, 45 minutes on one line about like the Trade Federation and taxing highway lanes or whatever.

like and and that never gets really answered right in in in the kind of classic star wars way maybe in a comic or a book or something somewhere but um but at least in in the the mainstream movies and even you know throughout the tv tv shows and everything everything needs to be very neat very clean very resolved um and or i i feel like lets us play in the unknown And it's, I feel so, it's so much more rewarding than, like, having the answer. I'm, I'm so happy to not know what's up with Andor's sister. Like, I'm, and maybe we will never know. And for example, I think the best example of this is, um, what was his name?

Skeen? Yes. Skeen's brother. Skeen's brother. I agree. It's the best, like, unanswered question of the show. like I imagine like people don't talk about this but like the the like after the movie like sitting down with everybody being like so what do you actually think happened like and hearing everybody's answers that's one of those where it's like I feel like everybody who watches that show could walk away with a different opinion and we just don't get that from the prequel trilogy or really the original trilogy in that way no not at all right I mean I think it's like yeah the original trilogy is built around residents in that way, a hundred percent, right?

Like, I guess you can get it maybe a little bit. The fulfillment of a destiny. A hundred percent. You get a medal at the end. You stand up and you get a medal. Vader is so redeemed that he comes back as Anakin, as a force ghost. Like, it's not, you know what I mean? There's, it shuts down all.

And then there's CGI to be hated Christian. A different actor. Right, exactly. So obsessed with cleaning everything and resolving everything. You know, you get a little bit of it in Reventing. of the Sith, where I talk about, we talked about when we did that episode, how even rewatching it, it's like, what if it goes different this time? You've watched that movie, you're like, what if Anakin just like doesn't do the shitty stupid stuff he does? What if someone talks to him

like an adult? What if X, Y, Z? And even leaving it, you might go, like, do how much of him is still there. You get a little bit of it there. And that's, and that's, you know, that's the one, that's one of the things the prequels do, right? I guess. But the whole series is, you know, but the whole series is so built around resolution that it's so nice to have the space that's more open. And again, one of the things I would love to see. And I always come back to this, but like, that has always been in Star Wars when you zoom out even a little bit and you start going around the EU. You start reading books. You start looking at comics. You start playing games. There's been spaces for that inside of Star Wars. And I don't think it's a mistake that so much of the production design

in Andor pulls from some of those other sources where that sort of storytelling was already happening. I know that's not Gilroy because Gilroy has said that's my super nerdy production design crew that is digging into old RPG manuals. Getting Calcutern's pistol. Getting Calcutternes pistol. Exactly. But I think that they felt free to do that in a sense

because they weren't making the show where someone had to pick up fucking Luke Skywalker's lightsaber ever. They never had to point to the Luke X-wing. They get these sick black X-Wings that Saul Guerrera has instead. I think that that ends up being a very, it opens the door to a lot

of different modes of pulling from the archive instead of just needing to do like the checkbox we need to sell a bunch of toys and they're going to sell some toys I think we've come back around on that right but I want a luth an action figure man I want a black x-wing

and I want a black ex-wing yeah I love I love being in this moment Natalie that you reference where we don't know what comes in season two this is actually maybe the best time to be in because all of those unanswered questions can just be able to

save for it. And it's going to be a long time, right? I'll stop savoring it eventually and grow tired of it. But it is nice to just know there's going to be another season. Maybe it'll be disappointing. Probably not. Hopefully not. I think it'll probably be good. A lot of good people working on it, but you never know. But right now, you

just have all these questions that this show base and that is a really lovely place to be. And that's also a prestige TV thing, right? In some ways that is the iconic a mode of prestige TV is being between seasons is everyone sharing notes and theories and that has also not really been Star Wars bag like I think end of Clone War season five when the stuff that we've covered but I won't re spoil here in classic case Kirk you are going on a Clone Wars journey

at some point I want to spoil you now you should you know it's we still didn't ever put together that skip list because I'm waiting for it we Will we, or will we always fall back on, like, the journey is important and watching the dog shit episodes? I think there are, there are, there are skipp lists out there. There are. There are simple out there. I don't agree with any, I don't agree with any skip list I've ever seen with the show. It's unfortunately the problem.

Well, then I think you do have to make one. I know. We should do, like, a live editing of a skip list. That's a fun stream idea. We should do that. We should just edit the skip list ourselves. We should just do that as a Q&A for, like, maybe that should be our next Q&A because we don't have, we've already covered all the Andor stuff.

You know what I mean? So that's a fun one. We'll tell you what to watch. Yeah. Beautiful. Like one musical thing I wanted to ask about real quick. Yes. The Mamabma track feels like she is inhabiting a different soundtrack world than the other characters.

Like listening to the soundtrack, this is the one track where I was like, she's in a completely different movie than everyone else. And I don't know if that hit you, like, you know, like, if you had a similar read on it, but to me, that entire piece feels like it is less tied to some of the, like, motives that get used a lot in Andor and just the way it's constructed. It feels a lot more, like, paranoid and, like, hyperactive compared to a lot of time. Yeah, let me find it. I want to listen to it a little bit so we can think about it. I'm going to put it on. You all be able to hear it. Let's, we'll sit with it for a moment.

I'll skip ahead a little bit. Oh, yeah, it's one of these string swallows things. Can you all hear it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're being in the moment, Kirk. I suddenly feel. feel like I have the worst husband in the world. Who I hate.

But yeah, paranoid is a great descriptor. Yeah, he does this a lot. So Bertel is a great textualist, just in general. I don't know if that's a word, textualist. He's great at texture. Like, he, rather than a melodist, I suppose, I think this is the sort of Zimmer, especially the modern Zimmer School of Composing,

is that you build textures, you don't just use strong melodies, where Williams is the quintessential melodist. Every melody that guy writes is solid gold. So the textures that Bertel does, like, he'll do this thing where he's just got a string orchestra just holding two notes, and then he introduces a third one. A lot of times, you know, it's a half step away from one of the other notes, so there'll just be this dissonance introduced. He does this on Aldani as well during the Aldani heist.

There are a lot of times where, like, these swells just come up where suddenly the strings go from a kind of constant open sound to like, there's too much going on here, this is not comfortable, it's too loud, whoa, and then it'll drop it. He's really good at working the lovers that way. This kind of sounds that way too, where you can hear it begin to evolve into that same and record progression.

But at first, it's just this keening low tone that's kind of her, it's peaceful, but then it grows increasingly uncomfortable, which is pretty... It makes me think that my gut take is it's about being in public, right? That, like, she is constantly in public. Al-Dani is in a moment where they have to step out of the shadows into perception. Maybe that doesn't hold up because maybe Narkina 5 should also therefore have similar war.

I don't know. But she is being watched as like as this very specific public figure. Like she has like a reputation and she's being watched in a way that the prisoners of Narkina. I mean, yes, they're all being watched in the same way. But everyone knows what they're, everyone believes they know what they're doing, whereas people are investigating to see if she is doing more than they think she is in. Right. And she's also just watched by, by the public itself. Like, you know, it's not just that she's being surveilled by, uh, she, she is being watched by her daughter and, and by her husband. Like she, she, that paranoia, I feel like, comes from, you, you are supposed to be someone and you are so. deeply uncomfortable with continuing to perform that role but like and and it feels like you're balancing it on a knife's edge um yeah there's something in the music where it's just there's

something wrong i mean it's it is steady and not moving it's very static but there's just something wrong and then you start to notice it a little bit more and a minute into that track uh a like new instrument comes in uh that starts to like separate from that that texture let's listen that's right where we are and then it builds into sirens like her track basically ends with like wailing sirens some of this well i wonder how much foreshadowing they're doing with mon mothma since we know well we sort of know where things are going with her and how she is eventually going to become. She ain't in the Senate for Returned to the Jedi. Yeah.

Nope. Oh, it's so good. Natalie, as you were talking about her being the public, her being watched by her daughter and by Perrin, I was just like, we need more of this fucking show. We need more of the show to exist.

What the fuck, man? Why is there only one more fucking season of this shit? Oh, there's no sirens. Oh, that's good. Just skipping around. They keep building. The end of the track is just like... So it's just that times a hundred.

I mean, this is the most uncomfortable thing. I got to fucking go. I need to get in my... Brutel's synth chops are incredible. I mean, I'm no synth head. I'm a mostly analog musician. And I've only recently kind of started to learn how synthesizers work. The synth stuff on this soundtrack is out of control.

That was... That was one of the most standard. out things to me in using that so heavily throughout the show itself and it being in feeling so distinct from other Star Wars there is not a lot of sense in in Star Wars in general and it it just it felt very yeah it just like I don't know like it gave it this very generative um uh feeling where I feel like the sense allowed us to move between into and or's, you know, into the and or melody that we, and out of it and have it reappear in like interesting ways where it doesn't feel

as, you know, expected or anticipated as I think we've come to literally expect in other Star Wars media. Like I said earlier, you see someone, you know, you see Luke on screen. you expect to hear a certain, you know, melody or whatever. And here, it doesn't matter who's on screen because what we're trying to do is tell, like, we're weaving. There's so many stories of, Andor is not just one story. It's so many stories woven into and held together by Andor himself.

But he's not, he's not like the protagonist in a way that he's the only one we should care about. Like, we care about everyone all of the time. And you feel everyone all of the time. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, synthesizers are wonderful instruments that are very flexible, but the degree to which he's pushed them, I mean, especially with the microtonal detuned stuff where you'll hear, I mean, even there, that's pretty avant-garde. You can hear the Philip Glass and whoever, like, these kind of modern composers that he was influenced by because he is a current generation composer. And that stuff, you never heard Philip Glass. or any avant-garde 20th century composers in Star Wars before.

And now you've got these, you know, very weird ascending synth tones that are just like a kind of whatever, like a total glisanda of this going behind the music. What is that? It has a really particular effect. But it's back to the idea of that sort of mixture of composition and sound design, which synth work is all of that. I mean, start working with synthesizers in pretty soon. You're basically doing sound design.

and you're booming sounds more than you're just writing music and recording them. And to have all of that, like, completely disrupted in the intro to the final episode, I think, like, that was one of the most remarkable moments of the entire musical journey of Andor, because it just comes out of left field and hits you like a fucking truck.

It's like... I was out of my chair. As a marching band nerd from... I couldn't believe what I was. That's so good. Well, because you email me, too. you were like, man, I'm really, I can't wait, talk about the music of Andor and all this. And I got, like, we watched the episode a day or two before you did.

Together. And I was like, let me tell you. Get ready. Yeah, it was funny. I went in knowing that. I had heard, I got an email from Rob that was, I'm not going to tell you anything, but wow, music is really important part of this show. And I didn't know what to expect. I knew from, you know, there's the episode 10, one way out.

Yeah. But they do the thing where, like, the music at the beginning is that beautiful orchestral remission that tells you, oh, everything's going to be okay, they're going to get out. I really like that. You know, you start to learn to judge what to expect from the opening title. Do you know we're going to see a marching band, though? Because when I heard that, I was like, okay, that's just going to be a funeral dirge

for like, it's Marva's death, it's going to be associated with that. And it wasn't until like, when I went back and listened to it again, it's like, okay, that is clearly a band like tuning and warming. I don't know about no, but I mean, it was really remarkable to me immediately. It sounded like, oh, this is an in-world diagetic band because they're out of tune. There's like a horn that misses. a note on the final chord, which is just unheard of in a Disney property, but it's just

not the kind of thing, you know, um, but very heard of in a pet band, Max Rebo, right? Like, like Max Rebo's band, those guys are actually London Philharmonic musicians. They are perfect. And so the, that music sounds perfect. This is not that mode. And so when I heard it, I was definitely, you make that point, immediately struck by how real it sounded. You make that point in the episode that is like, they sound like a band of people who go

off a do manual labor and every once in a while they have to get together to do this they have to get together to do this or some other event and they have to remind them like they know how to play but they don't play they don't practice they don't have you know weekly meetings on thursdays like they maybe get to play every month or every season um and so of course they're out of tune and of course they're emotional they're people they're like going through it that things are at a boiling point you can feel the breath so strong behind like it feels like it's like a quivering like a holding back, you know, sobs. It, like, you feel that.

I listen to it again. Kirk, can we get the switch over to the second track when they start marching forward? Can we just, do you have that on hand? I love that you went into that in your podcast episode. That's, well, and that's the sequence. I'll find it. But that, that's also where Bix begins singing along with the music and my entire heart breaks because it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

I mean, that, like, the idea of her hearing that, this music that she's heard so many times and just connecting with it a little bit is so and against the sound of the torture right the chorus of people being killed right that was a torture remix he literally is like well we resampled the sound and mixed

together you know in Cubase he was actually a horrible psychopathic remix art right he's I was oh this is wild because earlier I was going to say with the with the when you played the bit of the sirens around the the Tie Fighters launching.

I was like, damn, I would love a story about the Imperial sound designer. Like, who is doing that in Imperial? Who is in like Imperial Design and Measures? Who is making that sound? Because someone had to do that for them. And the answer is, it's that motherfucker. It's Dr. Gorsd.

Gorsd is like, got pulled in to do this torture thing, but normally it's probably off making U-I-U-X sounds, you know? This is like how acoustic science is, like, all bound up with like, mineral extraction. and the oil industry because, like, the best jobs

in, like, being an acoustics engineer is, like, shooting soundways to the earth to find me you can, like, mine shit. I remember McMansion Howell on Twitter, like, talked about this where it's like, yeah, like, people don't want to talk about this,

but, like, you know, the field you go and you're like, I want to design the best concert venues possible. How does? And then, like, it turns into, all right, so this is a trade school for basically, like, strip mining. Wow.

Yeah. That's wild. Yeah, I'm forgetting her name, but Anne Helen Peterson interviewed a woman who has a book, I think, out now about the weaponization of music and people who use music and, like, how sound can be used in all these horrible ways. I do think that contrast between the music bringing Biggs back and the music that was used to torture her is extremely intentional. It's not a coincidence that they put headphones on her to torture her and also just amazing. That was something I didn't even notice the first time and really did the same time. Specifically, the like... Oh, God, the way those look.

That sees the darkest shit I've ever seen in Star Wars, I think. All right, we're coming to the end. Here we're going to switch it up. I can see the shot. And this is what you were saying, right? Is it like, it does work as an audio show. Yeah, it works. And I work in making audio shows.

It comes to this ascending chord progression. It's so good. We're coming up on it. There we go. God damn. And this is the horns that have been missing the whole, this is the bridge they may build, right? We get a rest before the advance, right?

Yeah, this is when they're all standing there. This is when they bring Marva's Brick out, when B2 and B-Mocke. And then they begin to March. Or they play at one time. Then they're going to go. But, yeah, that, um... I'm happy to sit with this. The March is incredible, too.

Yeah. Uh. And to see it again, I'll wait, because I think we're at that point. We are. Oh, are you kidding me. And really, I mean, if you, so playing the, I think this is, I'm going to play the audio from the show. From the show, because you get the little squeal, the little... Well, Bimo calls them to actually, this is incredible.

This is it. This is it. And they're walking. And they're walking. I lost my mind at this sequence. This is where, when they kicked it. this and they start marching on those those riot cops and be i just that's that's it right what i would see yeah just that a marching man was marching down the street to battle in a star

war show i don't know i don't even know i guess occupying riot cops again not stormtroopers riot yeah and not rebels with the shields musicians you know what i mean like this is town musicians people yeah yeah the fact that nobody beamed a stormtrooper with like a trumpet or a dunkle horn The only miss opportunity. Yeah, I mean, it was probably like someone's actual flute and they would have had to break it to do that.

But I was kind of waiting for it. I was like, everything is here except for someone like hitting a little bit of a face. You could have gotten some broken off stave of flute like under the next guard. I do want to, the sequence reminds me of

something you said in the podcast that has not left me since you said it. But that, that the theme of Andor is like light breaking through the darkness. And I feel like that is such a, like, if there is repetition in Andor, it's that sentiment, right? It's that it is that light breaks, can break through darkness that we can, like, even in the most bleak of, of, like, especially thinking of Bix in that room. and like just leaning against a window that that light can still come through

and can still reach people is like like one of the things that will sit with me about and or probably forever. I think that's like the number one thing I take away from that show that just how powerful that is. It works every time,

every time the music plays. Any scene I'm watching when that music starts playing, I find myself within 30 seconds just saying, man, the show is so good. Like, I want to just go watch it again. And it's because of, yeah, that emotional resolution. It's an F sharp. It's one note. It's like the power of resolving to an F sharp turns out it's really, really powerful. Because, yeah, it's amazing every time he does it.

And there are funniest sides, like fuel purity is a very funny track about just hating your job. Like, I'm not even sure all this made. the final cuts of the episodes, like some of these, I feel like I didn't hear these full compositions in the episodes, or maybe they got, like, lost in the mix somewhere, but I feel like I didn't get a full, three minutes of serial, like, clock watching at the Bureau of Waits and Measures and just losing this shit, including a little, like, horrible severance. Drip, drip of, like, some of the instruments that come in on that track, where it is, like, it is the sound of, like, your inbox fills up.

And time doesn't advance. You know, it's a, it's a whimsical little track against a series that's often like pretty intense. Yeah, the Niyamos Chorus Chorusinix is also pretty funny in a different way, but it's so creepy and weird sounding if you just sit and listen to it. In that scene, you can barely hear it. It's just, you can hear the baseline. I didn't know it was there all really. I really didn't know. I noticed it just because I noticed that kind of thing.

But yeah, it's so. It's so hidden. And then just listening to it on its own, it's truly bizarre. The idea that you would put that on at a party, it's this, like, very weird. Oh, I don't know. There's a bit of, like, music for airport. Well, at a party, though, I guess not. Well, what's the party, you know?

That's my type of party. I guess, right, right. You're at a hell party with your horrible husband. Yeah. Maybe that's the exact music that you put on. God. But, yeah, I do love that, like, also in the series, we have the sense of. cool music that people in Star Wars listen to

and are currently like really into these are the things climbing the charts the era of Max Rebo and Sice Noodles is coming to an end because I can imagine well no it hasn't happened yet it's the other way right or they're in a downturn right now

the imperial era has pushed the Sise Sneedles and Max Riebos out of the mainstream right right or does it push them It must have just been, oh, go ahead. Well, no, I mean, we're in our own A.U heads now. Yeah, because they are, I guess you'd say, well, they're playing Jabba Palace and they're, like, you know, you've got fingering down on the modal nodes at the, at the canteen.

So, are they on the margins, or is that just the, the, because I do kind of wonder if it's a bit of, you've got this cool, like, electronics club music happening, and the apparel's going to tamp that down. Right. And be like, you know what? How about lounge singers again? Let's bring that back. It's like an additive thing. Is he working for Java is like taking the Saudi check? You know what I mean?

Yeah, I think that's your Vegas era. You're on Tatooine in some bar like playing. That's, you're kind of not, you're not making the galaxy mix of neonics. It's kind of additive, right? It's that Brutel got to say, well, hey, what would it sound like if there was a hit song in Star Wars? Because no one had really envisioned that before. And just by him doing that, which is, a huge deal to people who care about Star Wars because, whoa, now suddenly there's this whole

possibility for there to be hit songs in Star Wars. We never thought about it before. And by him doing that, he just kind of threw this song out and changed the nature of the Star Wars music industry forever. Yes. A good season's work for Brutel and, uh, yeah, no kidding. I'm so glad he did this. It must, it was so much work. I'm really glad that he was up for it and, and put this kind of work in because it really elevated the whole thing. Yeah, I think we can probably wrap up there. Yeah. Kurt, I'm also, like, so glad that you're able to come through and hang out and, like, talk

through this soundtrack with us. I'm so glad I could do it. I've been sick. I'm sorry for my voice. I did a med spike before that's time. Uh-oh. I'm going to go collapse. Oh, no.

Before you do, where do you, where can people find? Strong songs, obviously. We've said strong songs over and over again. But where can people support your work? Generally, what else can they check out? Yeah, they can check out strong songs. That's my main thing, music podcast, that talks about music and explains music in a way that I think is accessible and fun.

What's an episode two? If they go listen to Andor, and then I go, wait a second, this is a huge backlog of episodes. What's the second one that they should go listen to? There's two, I'd say. One is I know there's probably a fair number of video game fans listening to this, and I did an episode on The Music, The Legend of Zelda. That was pretty cool.

I don't do a lot of video game music, That one was special. And last year I did an episode on September, Earth Wind and Fire, September. Oh, my God, amazing. That was a lot of fun and really gave me a new appreciation for that song, which I liked. But now I really, really like. But you can just scroll around and find a song you like. That's what most people do and listen to it.

But there's that. I have a co-host of Triple Click, which is a video game podcast with Maddie Myers and Jason Schreier. We have a lot of fun. And those are kind of my main two things, just writing music and stand off of Twitter. So, you know. Amazing. Clean living. It is.

It is the only way to be these days, I'd say. It's true. Patreon.com slash strong songs. We're supporting the show there. And I think, yeah, that will do it for us. And that might... That's the end of our year, probably. Yeah.

I'm so glad I got to do this. Thank you all for having me. I love your show. I loved listening to you. I will speak for all the people listening who are probably like, man, why does this guy get to go talk to these wonderful hosts about Star Wars? And I just am going to say, yeah, I don't know.

I'm really happy to be here as well. It means a lot, Kirk. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for all the, thanks for all of the podcast. They've been really wonderful. And I think I am going to go watch Clone Wars, just so I can listen to more AMCA. I need to know what you think is Sisedoodles actually now. There is a size noodles.

Oh, my God. There are no other than Sisedoodles. Yes. There's a dark behind the music. It is no idea. And also, truly, it is a little rough going at first, the show. It finds its footing. It gets into some really interesting spaces.

If you're suffering, we suffered too, is what I will say. I'm like an huge Avatar, The Last Airbender fan. I've done. It's not great, and then it gets really good things. Yeah, I'm down. But then it also, I would say there's, it's a sign wave. The thing is like, Avatar has this where there's a moment where you're just kind of. Avatar is a kind of steady upward tradition.

I would say this is like, wow, they've really, they really got it all figured out. And then they're like, and then we. had an episode order, we had to fill and so here's some stuff there's places where you identify all the budget, you ran out of budget, these episodes didn't have it, but that does mean

there's cool space battle coming. Yes. Rob will never forgive them for the droid episode. Rob will never, ever ever. If it was one episode, it would be great. It's an arc. It's four. Yeah. Well, I'll look forward to it

and that will be. The squad forever. No, oh no. All right, well, that will do it for this episode. Yeah, as Austin alluded to, that will do it for our year. We will back in the new year, returning to Clone Wars, getting into season six. Are we on six now? Yeah. Oh, my God.

You sure are. Even I know that. And then we'll be out of Clone Wars for a little bit, I think. So, yeah, Clone Wars has an unpredictable arc. uh let let us say but yeah so we are we we ironically we recorded the first episode of that season it's not edited it is before and or they're so good edited at first yeah so i remember that episode being a banger though so i feel i feel confident uh directing people to it uh but yeah that will that will conclude our year uh that would conclude the autumn of andor

and uh you know we thank everyone for listening and and watching the show along with us and we thank everyone for their support at patreon.com slash civilized. It's meant a lot to have a lot of people sort of support the show and we've gotten a lot of really positive and warm feedback just across the board about and or it's meant the world. You know, I guess until next time, until next year, please rate, review us on your podcast platform of choice and let us know what your most wished for

Niyamos theme remix. that you want to hear. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.