Song Exploder - Jeff Beal - House of Cards (Main Title Theme)

Episode Date: April 1, 2014

Composer Jeff Beal deconstructs the main title theme music to the Netflix original series House of Cards. The show has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Original Main Title Theme and Outstanding Music Composition. The show was adapted from a British series of the same name by writer Beau Willimon, and director and executive producer David Fincher. Jeff talks about his collaborative process with Fincher, and how they found the mood and musical palette for the show and its theme, and how it changed from season one to season two. A word of warning: if you haven’t watched the first season, there are spoilers about how that season ends.

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 Hirway. In this episode, composer Jeff Beale deconstructs the main title theme music to the Netflix original series, House of Cards. The show has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Original Main Title Theme and Outstanding Music Composition. The show is adapted from a British series of the same name by writer Bo Willemann and director and executive producer David Fincher. Coming up, Jeff talks about his collaborative process with Fincher and how they found the mood and musical palette for the show and its theme and how it changed from season one to season two. By the way, right now you're hearing the season one version. I interviewed Jeff at his home where he produces every part of the score, including a 16-piece orchestra that he records in his cavernous living room.

A brief word of warning, if you haven't watched the first season, there's a spoiler about how that season ends. And now, here's the main title theme to House of Cards on Song Exploder. I'm Jeff Beale, composer. I do the music for House of Cards. I had worked with David Fincher on a commercial probably about six or seven years ago. And this was around the time I had been working on Rome series for HBO.

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

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

and the way he sort of created this world that inspired some of the early work. The thing that I liked about the British show is this sort of dark humor to it. And I said, yeah, the music's definitely going to have to find a way to sort of give the audience permission to sort of laugh at the sardonic darkness. Of course, once he

called me in, you know, he gave me some of his thoughts on it, which were interesting and some of them surprising to me. There was one song he really liked, the Super Tramp Crime of the Century. Great. song and a section of that song towards the end where it just becomes a sort of driving piece. They had this sense of sort of operatic sort of classicism and sort of bravitas, but it also had a

very gritty, earthy and almost jazzy or bluesy kind of instrumentation of rock and roll. You know, we dissected that together and sort of thought about why that spoke to him. That's the show. The show is it's all about the underbendium. belly of Washington, the dark corners of what you don't see and what really happens, as opposed to sort of the West Wing, you know, heroic, more aspirational, the sort of hail to the chief, you know, Washington, your typical sort of film score gestures about the Capitol and politics. I wrote about four sketches for David. One of the things we talked about in our first meeting

was he said, was we kind of need a call to arms. And when you listen to it, it has a lot of the elements that became the main title theme. It's got that baseline. It's got that sort of cloud. of dark electronics that sort of preceded like a fog or something. And the tune is there, although in this case it was just played by the piano, very simple orchestration. And then the second time it goes around, the snare drum comes in. Very simple. But there's a tune in there, there's a little sequence of chords and melody.

Part of the reason sketching is useful is because it's like the bones of something. If the structure of the skeleton has integrity, it should be able to stand without an embunding of sort of instrumental embellishment. And so by sketching and by doing simple versions of themes, you were able to sort of make sure that you have an idea. I always thought of this is sort of the puppet master theme, the idea that like Kevin Spacey's character is just a sort of manipulator who's a virtuoso

at pulling the strings on people and getting them to do what he wants them to do. But the reason I'm sharing this one in the context of the main title is when we got around to finally doing the arrangement, David said he would be cool if the main title for felt like this sort of stew of a lot of different elements from the score, which would then be deconstructed into its individual parts. So you'll hear this sort of descending chromatic line

on the high piano that became one of the signature of the main title sequence. As the sketch grows, the electric bass comes in. So it's this sort of minimalist piano motif. But by putting that bass under it, it sort of gave it a tension of something that's pushing against it. David and I talked about the piano a little bit because that was in the Super Tramp queue and it's an instrument I like a lot and It felt like a good instrument for Kevin's character because it can be very precise and very sort of mechanical in a way

Which I love about it. The sort of called arms things that was dropped into the main title sequence and it never left once it was in there That was what we're gonna do and I started you know a few passes through I started to work on the arrangement the story of the main title sequence is visually lyrical and flowing, but I remember this came straight from sort of Beau's original scripting of the main title. It's basically the whole idea of the sun going down in Washington. You know, you started in really broad daylight, and as the sequence progresses, you end up in night. So there was a way in which you went from something very open and airy and light to like the darkness falling, you know. So that was a little bit of a visual storytelling thing I tried to play off of.

The first thing we hear is the fog, the fog of the cloud of doom. It's just a sort of low synth drone. Shortly after that comes the baseline, which I know David affectionately referred to as the riptide. I always like that description. It's kind of like the idea of something that pulls you under, you know. Basically, it's a combination of several things. It's analog-e modeled synth things that I've designed. Some of them I've had for a long time.

There's a couple different of those base samples mixed together, but I also recorded a live bass player playing the part. It's actually my son, Henry, who is a wonderful young musician. He's actually now studying jazz bass. The bass line was so important, and the orchestration was getting big enough. I actually recorded the bass an octave above. It gives it enough mid-rate content so that when all this other stuff is happening,

that bass is still driving. One of the fun things about the composition for me was that the harmony changes a lot over that baseline. In fact, bass is always playing an A minor, but the harmony sometimes goes to A-major. And it creates this very strange dissonance in this sense of collision. It's basically a wrong note, you know? It's like the bass player's playing the wrong note,

but it doesn't sound like a wrong note because it's ingrained. It's got its own logic to it. It's almost like Frank will push through anything. He doesn't care. He's not going to stop playing those notes. My original sort of called Arm Sketch two times through, which is kind of the original demo, was almost long enough to cover the main title sequence,

but we needed some more time. And I also had this direction from David to sort of work in another theme. So what I did was I kind of extended the intro. I added a lot of percussion, but I also added the little Puppermaster riff, the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-d-d-you- know that thing. It has a slightly different cadence because this is in 4-4 and the Puppermaster theme was always in 3. Phrases are broken up a little bit, but it's still got that descending chromatic line. Another layer that was sort of one of the last things I came up with but was really useful was the trumpet.

I'm a trumpet player, and again, it's the most expected. the cliche thing you'd hear in a show about Washington would be that sort of military trumpet kind of thing. Because we're seeing the sort of iconic shots of Washington, it just felt right to have something that references that icon, because obviously the rest of the composition is telling you that this isn't the heroic version of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington monument. And there's a way in which it's sort of lonely to me, too. I like the sort of loneliness of it. One of the things David visually did was to pull out a lot of the people, and some of the time-lap shots he had.

It was much creepier seeing some of those shots with no people in them. It just made it feel like it was a ghost town or had this sort of surreal quality to it. Basically, in talking to David Fincher about the second season, I was just sort of surprising to me, but I think we were spotting the first couple episodes.

He sort of started giving notes on the main title about what he wanted different. You know, David saw the second season as even more operatic and darker, too, which was shocking to me because the first season was pretty dark. But you know who everybody is. You've seen who Frank is and what he can do.

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

So again, it's lower. Everything's sort of skewing down, skewing darker, so that it feels like this cloud has sort of come over the whole thing. The sort of lightness and sense of that type of energy is dissipated. You know, he's no longer the puppet master. He's already the vice president in season two. We know he's very much in command, so there's less of a game going on and much more of a... It's like the ascent to the throne. You know, I think so many networks, or even filmmakers are afraid of a real main title sequence. It's sort of an old-fashioned idea,

but the whole idea of a little mini-film that settles you into a world and gets you ready to experience something is a wonderful sort of a storytelling device. You know, it sort of frames a moment for you and gets you settled into what you're about to take in. And now here's the season two version of the main title theme to House of Cards.

Visit SongExploder.net for more info on Jeff Beale, and House of Cards, including a link to Jeff's website and a link to buy the season one score on iTunes. I've also included a link to the Super Tramp song that inspired David Fincher. 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, Vagabond, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. 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, Rishicaish.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at songexploder.net

or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.com. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.