Song Exploder - Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein - Stranger Things (Main Title Theme)

Episode Date: October 26, 2017

The show Stranger Things is a Netflix original series. It was first released in July 2016. Season two’s release date: October 27, 2017. After the first season, the show was nominated for 18 Emmys, and won the Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. The theme music, along with the rest of the show’s score, was composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon of the band SURVIVE. In this episode, they break down how they made the main title theme. songexploder.net/stranger-things

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. The show Stranger Things is a Netflix original series. The first season was released in July 2016. Season 2's release date, October 27, 2017. After the first season, the show was nominated for 18 Emmys. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title theme music. The theme music, along with the rest of the show's score, was composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon.

of the band Survive. In this episode, they break down how they made that main title theme. Stranger Things was created by Matt and Ross Duffer, aka the Duffer Brothers, and the story begins with an email the Duffer Brothers sent to Michael and Kyle. My name is Michael Stein.

Hi, I'm Kyle Dixon. We are in a band called Survive, and the Duffers reached out to us because they used our music in a mop trailer when they were pitching the TV show. The Duffers used a song called Dirk. It's the closing track of our first full. length. The Duffers reached out through email. It would have been 2015. It was out of the blue. Just

a random email with some cool words in it, like Netflix. Sci-fi. Horror. Winona Ryder. And are you interested in scoring it? Of course we were interested because it's like, oh, this looks perfect. They pitched to a lot of different networks for a while with this mop trailer. And I'm really glad it got picked up by Netflix. Just because of the kind of freedom and control, they gave a new set of directors to go pick out a new set of composers and just be like, just do your thing. I think it was a Friday night and the email came and I saw it and I was just, okay, I'm not doing anything tonight. I'm going through the library and finding stuff to send over to them. Yeah, I think it was that evening. We've collected about 50 things from our little library that we were

like, okay, from this small bit of criteria, this is what we're going to send them. And we're like, what do you think of this stuff? They were very excited to get that much music, like, almost immediately. So we made a good impact by doing that. Kyle and Michael started their work on the show by scoring individual episodes, making tracks like this one for specific scenes. We didn't start working on pitching ideas for the theme until we had maybe done two or three episodes.

And actually, we didn't even know if we were going to be doing the theme song. There's a lot of shows that will have just something completely different than the score as the main title. But they pretty much decided somewhere around halfway through or a little before that that they wanted us to do something. So we sent him a handful of ideas. We made a couple sketches for the theme. And then they're like, you know what?

What about this thing? From the 50 things we sent over on day one. It was just a random library piece that we didn't even consider. But it had the vibe that they wanted. And they were like, expand on this. We actually reworked it. Nothing was resampled. It was all remade fresh.

One of the most important things for the theme was to have kind of a mysterious aspect, a little bit ominous. And then there is a little piano line. It's just a little really mellow piano sound on a Prophet 5. The Prophet 5 is an old synthesizer from the 70s. That was one of the most commonly used in Pops. pop music. And lots of movie scores too. John Carpenter used it, and that stab sound is a melaton.

This is the fundamental bedding of the track, and there's two chords basically. And those are the chords that the bass line followed. Baseline is this roll in SH2. The roll in SH2 is a great go-to for a big epic bass line. The bass becomes one of the most dynamic parts of that composition because you open the filter a lot, you want something to get energy and you open it, so it lets more harmonics through. So it sounds like someone's playing harder. If you're playing a guitar and you're about to switch into another part of song, you can actually

start strumming harder and it kind of adds a little bit of momentum to get you into the next part. There's ways you can do that with acoustic instruments that are not as easy to do with synthesizers, so you have to make up for that by doing other things. So the filter opens and opens more and more. We had the bass line and We had the sequence, and it just felt like it needed something to propel it forward a little more. That's a sequential circuit's Pro 1, and it's just the filter kind of opens and closes, and it sounds like a heartbeat. It's not a four on the floor, like, doop, do. If you double up and you get the heartbeat, it kind of sets the tone, and it doesn't feel as straightforward, and it alludes to suspense or fear.

So I think it was a really appropriate way to get percussion. into the theme. The hardest part I think was definitely doing all the edits to make it fit with the picture. So the company Imaginary Forces did the title sequence. And they actually had the video done before they finalized the audio. So they're like, you need to make the music to the final changes. There are some interesting timings because of the title cards. And that's kind of where sound effects come in for us.

So most of those happen every time they change a card. So whenever someone's name is revealed, there's like these little accent stabs. It would have said like One On a Rider. And then Matthew Modine. All the sound effects are in tune with the music and basically mimicking harmony. You want them to sound like music too. At the very beginning, there's this arpeggiae that's really high octaves. It kind of does this sparkling.

Yeah, it has some noise in it and it kind of, we call it the spiders, because it kind of sounds like a spider scurrying. Yeah. There's a climactic moment. Weird stuff slowly combining and building with sound effects and swooshes. Filter closes. Sound effects come up. And then it hits this big melaton stab.

And that's the biggest moment when they dropped the actual title. Stranger Things. It's hard to say how long it took to make the theme because we did most of the work in a day or two, but to finish it and get it lined up with all the sound effects right and everything like that took, I don't even know. We were doing it up until the very end. I still haven't watched it.

When you're working on something for a while, you kind of get a little desensitized to the quality of it. I mean, I tried to watch. I waited a few months, and I was like, I'll watch the show. And I started to watch the first episode, and it was all so familiar. I'm like, why am I doing this?

I know this so well. I did watch it, but it was still, I wasn't far enough removed from it. I was thinking about the mix, and I can't really hear that one. I was like, what cue is that? And I was like, I can't enjoy this the way I should be able to. But it didn't take very long to realize

that the show was doing well. The show came out on Friday, and then basically everybody that we knew was getting in contact and telling us, oh my God. People were telling us it was huge. Everybody was very surprised when they were like, I saw your name on this TV show,

is that actually you? And I'm like, yep, that's us. And now here's the main title theme to Stranger Things by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon in its entirety. For more information on Michael Stein, Kyle Dixon, survive and Stranger Things, visit SongExploder.net. There's a great feature about the making of the visuals

for the opening titles on the site Art of the Title and I've posted a link to that on the website too. 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, Rishi Kesh 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 the music. 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 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, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploader is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by listeners like you. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. You can find every episode of SongExploder at SongExploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. You can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Let me know what you think of this episode. My name is Rishi Kesh Your Way.

Thanks for listening.