Song Exploder - Apparat - Goodbye (Theme from "Dark")

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

The Netflix original series Dark debuted in December 2017. It’s a really mysterious, mind-bending German science fiction show with a unique tone. A big part of that tone is announced every episode with the music in the show’s opening title sequence. It’s the song “Goodbye,” by German electronic artist Apparat, the solo project of Sascha Ring. This song actually came out years ago, on the 2011 Apparat album The Devil’s Walk. Since then, before it was used as the theme song for Dark, it’s been featured in a bunch of films and commercials, and notably, in the Season 4 finale of Breaking Bad. The final season of Dark just came out last week, so I wanted to find out how the show’s theme music was made. “Goodbye” features vocals from Anja Plaschg, an Austrian artist who makes music under the name Soap&Skin. In this episode, Sascha and Anja break down how the song was created. songexploder.net/apparat

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. There's a Netflix original series called Dark that debuted in December 2017. It's a German show, and I'm constantly recommending it to anyone who likes science fiction. It's a really mysterious, mind-bending series with a tone that feels unique to me. And a big part of that tone is announced every episode with the music in the show's opening title sequence. It's the song Goodbye by German electronic artist Aparat.

Apparat is the solo project of Sasha Ring, and this song actually came out years ago on his 2011 album, The Devil's Walk. Before it was used as the theme song for Dark, it's been featured in a bunch of films and commercials. The thing that really put it on the map was when the song was featured in the season four finale of Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan, who's the showrunner and the creator of Breaking Bad, he described it as one of his favorite music moments in Breaking Bad up to that

point. That's Thomas Golubic. I'm the music supervisor for Breaking Bad. He's the person who placed the song in a crucial scene near the very end of the finale. We knew that we wanted something that had a grand quality to it and an epic quality to it, something that was really powerful. And the song Goodbye really struck me. When Vince heard that song, he responded incredibly powerfully and just said, there it is. Like, that is the one. The final season of Dark just came out last week at the end of June 2020, so I wanted to find out how the show's theme song was made. It features vocals from Anya Plashk,

an Austrian artist who makes music under the name Soap and Skin. Coming up later, she'll tell her part of the story. But the story starts with Sasha Ring, trying to write and feeling stuck. This is Sasha Ring. I make music under the name Apparat. Goodbye is quite an old song. I started working on it, maybe.

in 2009, 2010. And it was a bit of a difficult period because I just finished the first chapter of Moderat, the band project I have. And we kept on touring and touring. And at some point, I wanted to work on my own music again. But I found it very hard just because it was so easy for me to collaborate with someone in the studio

and rely on a second and third opinion. it made making music for me so much nicer that I kind of lost the ability to make music on my own after that. So when it was time to make a new appurat record, there was this huge void in front of me at first, and I didn't really know how to do that. And I played around in my studio and didn't go anywhere. And at some point, I just realized that maybe I should just go somewhere else. I'll just take a few people with me, try making a record that way. way. And I invited a few friends and we ended up going to Mexico. So basically we isolated ourselves

in a little house on top of a little hill watching the sea. And we set up all this recording gear in quite a big room. And we were just jamming out with electronic sins the whole time. Goodbye was one of the songs that originated in Mexico during one of these sessions. This song just started with some synth chords. I just looped. And the early version already had some sorts of drums. And at some point, I tried to come up with a few words. And I did have a simple idea.

I wanted it to be some sort of like a final lullaby you'd sing to someone who will never see you again when he wakes up. Like bringing him to bed, saying goodbye, and sneaking out the back door, you know, before the person even. even notices what happened. Fold your head. The lines were,

Fold your hands, crack me a smile. Fold your hands, kiss me goodbye. That's basically it. I tried to come up with more and have like a traditional structure, verse, chorus, whatever, but yeah, it was always just the chord loop and like four vocal lines on top.

There wasn't much substance, but it wasn't just but it wasn't bad enough to throw away. So I kept working on it, but it also never really made real progress while we were in Mexico. It never became a real song. At some point, we had to pack our bags. We went home to Berlin,

and I was a little depressed about the results, not because we didn't get anything done, but maybe I had different expectations, maybe I thought we were going to return home with a whole record, and that's not what we had. And also, it was not really what I wanted to do because somehow I wanted to make a more acoustic and human record. And for some reason, we ended up all behind our laptops

and it was very electronic in the end. I remember being frustrated for a while after I returned to Berlin and at some point I talked to my manager, Daniel, who's also my friend, he understood that my problem was that I really couldn't do stuff on my own anymore. So he connected me with PC, a friend of his, from Berlin. And he became my co-producer in Berlin, actually. And he's not like a traditional recalling engineer, but he's someone who really likes acoustic instruments.

And that's what I wanted. And when I showed him the idea that turned into goodbye later on, he suggested that we step by step try to exchange electronic parts with real instruments. The first thing he suggested was that we should just start with a piano. It's always a great thing to do. But our problem at that point was that I just moved into a new studio and it was in the top floor of a building and it was around Christmas.

My piano was not in my studio at that time. It was still in my apartment at home. eventually at some point we found someone and I had them pick up the piano at my apartment they brought it to the studio just to realize that the staircase is to narrow so they couldn't really bring it up and the only option to do that

was to use the fire escalator on the back of the building and the staircase was like super icy and slippery I mean I thought there's no way to get the piano up to the studio but these guys were just kind of It seemed like they see it as a challenge. So they carried that crazy old big piano up the icy fire escalator. And I thought someone was going to die that day, but they really managed to get it up.

PC instantly started playing these chords. Just those four chords originating from the Sint line. Very, very soon I realized that this is the way to go because my piano also is just a the right atmosphere for it. It's a very old muffled sounding one and it has a lot of unwanted sounds in it like the pedal noises that normal piano players would probably not like but I'm a fan of those. And they kind of really inspired us and since the piano was there, you know, knowing how hard it was to get it into the studio, we just had to use the piano a lot. And actually in the end, a lot of the sounds you hear in Goodbye, those sounds are piano-based. For example, the slow marching

drum thing is me banging the side of the piano. The kind of reverb on it is no reverb. It's just really the strings acting like a spring reverb. For the first time in my life, I had a recording room, which I really enjoyed and it was really playful, I would say. Most of the recording really happened during one night. And we went pretty crazy. We were just jumping around in the studio and we were banging the piano or rubbing it or just clapping hands. And we would just put microphones very far away from us so we would have a lot of room sound. That was like a whole night of just piano fun. So in the end, it was really worth it getting the piano up in the studio. At that point, I was still not really ready to completely abandon the synth chord. But,

But PC wanted to convince me to try something else. So at some point he would just grab an acoustic guitar and he would play these like flageolet sounds, harmonic plucks through a delay, basically. And I like that a lot because it did blend with the rhythm section very well. And it gave that whole song, that a moving and marching feel that I really wanted to achieve. Since I'm from such an electronic background,

Usually my songs were very loop-based, and they didn't develop much. So we wanted to have a second part, and that's where that melaton thing comes in. It was supposed to open up and go a bit into a different direction. And I thought, now this is enough to sit down and think about lyrics and a vocal performance again, because I was quite inspired by our sudden encounter

and the creativity that happened. I really wanted to use that drive to write more lyrics and to finish that song. This is when I ran into a wall and I got really depressed. I was there in the studio for like a whole day and I was trying different parts, different things, different words and it would never really go somewhere where I would really saw it as a song or something. The only thing I liked about it really was the instrumental. By that time, I was really, really close to just throw away the whole thing, put it in a fold

and just never open it again, which I do quite often with song ideas. I mean, I have photos with lots of, lots of old song ideas that I still can't listen to because all the frustration comes up again. So goodbye was really, really close to end up at the graveyard. I remember the evening of that whole day when I was struggling with the lyrics.

I was tired and I just wanted to go home and I had this little idea that would turn out very important. I was like, okay, if I can't really get anywhere with this, why don't I try to get help again? And the person that came to my mind right away was Anya from Soap and Skin. Because somehow that goodbye song idea had that feeling that soap and skin songs have as well. Slow, morbid, melancholy. I knew Anya a few years already because I used to run a record label called Shit Catapult.

We released a few songs of hers and I kept in contact with her and I occasionally would exchange a few words with her. And yeah, she came to my mind and I exported an instrumental and put it in the email. I sent it to her with just the four lines of lyrics I had. And I went home and slept through the night, not very happy. My name is Anya Plashk from Soap and Skin. I remember it was New Year's Eve 10 years ago. In that year, I released my debut and then lost my father, unfortunately, and a bit later also had a breakup.

And so it was the end of the year and I was tired. Yeah, I felt stuck. When I received his email, it was like receiving a gift. And when I listened to it for the first time, what I really loved about the instrumental was this ritualistic beat. It triggered a lot of feelings, and I had a rush of images in my head. I probably finished my recordings on goodbye early morning, around 5 or 6 a.m. after working on it the whole night.

And the next morning, I woke up, I checked my email, and I had a finished vocal recording in my inbox. The first time I read Sasha's draft for the lyrics, there was one sentence which kind of unlocked the song for me. It was Find Out. a bad dream. It resonated the feeling of being disconnected to the outside world and not to know if I'm really here or if I am even real. This feeling of being disconnected is something that I struggle with most of my life. I really admired the fact that she was able to kind of like

remix the lyrics, you know? I mean, she took the words, put him in a different order and kind of like you can still tell what it was before, but it became something completely different and it became her story. From Sasha's draft, I changed, crack me a smile to give me a sigh, to move the whole thing probably to the dark side of hopelessness. Fall down your hands Give me a sigh Put down your lies In that time

I always recorded tons of layers of my voice It was kind of a necessity To handle my own shyness Burry a doubts And fall asleep The beginning is kind of like More spoken word

And it's very minimal And that's actually something I also learned that sometimes it's good to hold back. So the effect is bigger in the end when you go for it. And I think that's what she did. She kept it minimal spoken in the beginning and then it opens up with the Melotron part. It made such a difference from imagining the one night

when I went home depressed, basically. And the next morning I woke up, I had that in my inbox. And I was like, damn, that's really what the song needed. And it just, you know, happened in it felt like it was just one second. It's crazy. And I got a tiny little piano part. She also came up with that ended up being in the end. I used it as some sort of like tale of the song.

This way of working together with someone for me, it seemed like the most natural and awesome way of collaborating. There was no like my manager calls your manager bullshit. There was no like business idea behind it, whatever. It was really just that one little spark of an idea in my mind that she might be the right one for that performance. and it worked so well because she probably had that same feeling right away. Her vocal recording completed the whole thing, basically.

So all I had to do was just a little bit of mixing. A few days later, I had Yurk, the drummer, visiting my studio, and he loved Goodbye, which I played for him. And he asked me if he can just improvise a little bit on it. And I thought the song is done. It doesn't need anything else. But yeah, I just pressed record. and he did a bit of jazzing around.

I put those drums very, very quietly in the end, but I think they give everything a nice twist as well. That was the last thing we recorded. Goodbye has done plenty of good things for me. When Breaking Bad happened, that was definitely quite a highlight because I didn't have that much success already. And the album was also quite fresh.

So we didn't really know what's going to happen with the album. And Breaking Bad was one of the first things to happen. And that was obviously a very, very exciting moment for me. And then it just appeared in more and more films and also trailers. It's probably used in like five, six, seven different films alone. Once a record is finished, I just cannot listen to it anymore. And I think it's all garbage and I could have done so much better. And that's what happened with Goodbye.

For a long time, I didn't like it. But all the feedback from the directors, probably that helped me to look at it from a new angle. And that's usually that moment at some point when you make peace with your record and you start liking what you hear, actually. And now here's Goodbye by Apparat, featuring Soap and Skin in its entirety.

For more information, visit songexploader.net. You'll find links to buy or stream this song, and you can learn more about Aparat and Soap and Skin. You can also watch the great, creepy opening title sequence for Dark. As I record this, I haven't finished the series yet, but I'm planning on binge watching as soon as I hit stop because I have so many questions. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these, incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily,

and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So, Every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishi Cage.

or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Next time on song exploder, Krungbin. Song Exploder is made by me, Rishi Keshirwe, with producer Christian Coons and production assistant Olivia Wood, illustrations by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn about all the at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to support SongExploder, you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexplloder.net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder. My name is Rishi Kesheh, your way. Thanks for listening.