Song Exploder - Ludwig Göransson - Black Panther

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

 Marvel’s Black Panther was released in theaters on February 16, 2018, and in just a few weeks, it made over a billion dollars worldwide. It’s already broken some box office records and it looks like it’s going to break some more. The score for the film was created by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson. His film and tv credits include Creed and New Girl. He’s also a Grammy-nominated producer, who’s worked most often with rapper Childish Gambino. In this episode, Ludwig takes apart one of his pieces from Black Panther. The track is called "Killmonger," and it’s the theme for Erik Killmonger, a character played by Michael B. Jordan. Black Panther is set in the fictional African nation of Wakanda, and coming up, Ludwig tells the story of doing research and making recordings in Africa, and how he incorporated that into the score for the film.For more, visit songexploder.net/black-panther

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. On August 28, 2020, actor Chadwick Bozeman died. He was only 43 years old. Unbeknownst to many, even some of his closest collaborators, he'd been battling colon cancer since 2016. His family released a statement, and in it, they said, it was the honor of his career to bring King Tchala to life in Black Panther. After hearing the sad news, I went back and re-watched the movie, and I don't know, it was a completely different experience this time. So I wanted to go back and share this episode from 2018 about a piece of the film's score by composer Ludwig Gorinson.

This is one of my favorite episodes, and since it first aired, Ludwig went on to win the Grammy and the Oscar for the Black Panther score. I'll be back next week with a new episode with Selena Gomez. Until then, I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope it makes you. you remember how great Black Panther is and how great Chadwick Bozeman is in it, in a role that defined a career that was way too short. Okay, here we go. Marvel's Black Panther was released in theaters on February 16th, 2018, and in just a few weeks, it made over a billion dollars worldwide.

It's already broken some box office records, and it looks like it's going to break some more. The score for the film was created by Swedish composer Ludwig Gorensen. His film and TV credits include Creed and New Girl. He's also a Grammy-nominated producer who's worked most often with rapper Childish Gambino. In this episode, Ludwig takes apart one of his pieces from Black Panther. The track is called Killmonger. It's the theme for Eric Kilmonger, a character played by Michael B. Jordan. Black Panther is set in the fictional African nation of Wakanda.

And coming up, Ludwig tells the story of doing research and making recordings in Africa and how he incorporated those into the score for the film. And just a heads up, there are some spoilers coming up. Nothing major, but if you're someone like me who avoids trailers and wants to go into a movie with a clean slate before you see it, this is your spoiler alert. For everyone else, here's Ludwig Gorensen on Song Exploder. My name is Ludwig Gorensen. The director of Black Panther is Ryan Coogler. I met Ryan at USC.

One of my roommates was in the film directing program. And one night, Ryan came over to the house because his classmate was my roommate. So we played pool together, and then we just started talking. And one of the first things that me and Ryan was talking about, I remember, was Swedish music. Like, he knew so much about Swedish bands, Swedish artists. I was like, how do you know all these people? And that's how we bonded. I was 23 and Ryan was 21.

He was doing his first student film. And he approached me because I think I was the only film composer that he knew. So he asked me if I wanted to score his film And he was such a cool guy So obviously I said yes I scored all of his student films And all his feature films With Black Panther

After Ryan had gotten the gig I don't even think he asked me if I wanted to do it Like we were talking about the movie Like we were already doing it together So I went to the comic store And read up on my Black Panther And I read the comics It was right when Tenahasi Coats

Started to write the comics so I bought a couple of his issues and started reading it and I was just drawn into that world. We had a lot of conversations of what Wakanda was and where it was and what countries it looked like. Ryan went to Africa and he did research. He showed me a bunch of his videos from his journey and he sent me all the pictures and sent me his inspiration and music that he loved. He came back and started to write the script and he sent me a first draft very early on. right after I read it, I called up Ryan and told them my impressions of the script how much I loved it. And the only way for me to be able to do this was for me also to do the same kind of research in Africa and get that experience.

And then I booked my trip to go there. I went to Senegal for three weeks. I called a Swedish friend of mine who's worked with Baba Mal, one of Africa's biggest artist. He has had a career for 45, 50 years. He's done collaborations. We had so many different artists all over the world. So I got Bob Mal's telephone number, and I called him, and he was just about to leave on tour.

But he was like, just come with me, and then we'll take it from there. So they picked us up at the airport, and we were going to go to a show, and I had no idea what to expect. We drive it to the stage. It's like a small stage built up in this tiny little village, And behind the stage there's like a hundred donkeys and like their donkey carts. So people traveled from like surrounding villages. We see probably a thousand people sitting around the stage and just been waiting for this concert.

And the anticipation is very high and it's so charged, everyone's so happy. That four in the morning the show starts. The energy is insane. He starts singing and people go up to him and put money in his pockets. And it's basically just like a party for three hours until the sun comes up. So the end result of all of this was after touring with him for about a week, I got to borrow his studio. I had seen all these fantastic instrumentalists, which are called grios.

And griot is a word in Africa for storyteller. So if you're a musician, you're a storyteller. I met so many different grios, and I invited them to come and record with me. The first thing I did, first day, was to record. It was a family of sub-bar drum players. We recorded for five hours and they played a bunch of different rhythms. After that, my second day, I had the Cora player come and recorded Cora. Majoro, who's Bob Malt's assistant and who helped me ensemble the musicians together.

We sat for a night and just talked about all the different instruments that would be available. And he told me about the Fula flute. Fula flute is from a tribe called Fulani, a Fula tribe. and they have their own type of flute. It's like a wooden flute. It's a very specific sound. And he knew a Fula flute player. So we took the car and we picked up this player

and his name is Amadou Ba. As soon as we got back to the studio, he started playing. And I was just shocked by the sound of it. I was like, this sounds like killmonger to me. Having read the script, they just connected to me with this character. So I pulled the flute player aside. And I used my translator to tell him about Kilmonger. Eric Kilmonger.

Eric Kilmonger. First I told him about the concept of the movie. It's a superhero movie. Kilmonger is the bad guy. But he has good intentions. He wants to make the world better, but in the way that he sees it. He is very impulsive, but he's super smart.

He's from Africa, but he grew up in Oakland. He grew up in America, but he's coming to Africa to take the throne. And he's very unpredictable. Unpredictable. So let's start really mysterious and then go up in dynamic and go crazy crazy. And he was like, okay, I get it and close the door. And I gave him a note in the strings. And he started playing very mysteriously first, super soft.

I could just see him transform into this character. He was ramping it up, ramping up the energy. All suddenly, like boom, he just hit a high note. and then scream, Killmonger, Killmonger! I'm crazy on the flute. And I got goosebumps and it's like, okay, this is something special. After I came back from Africa, in my studio in L.A., I was trying to assemble all these tracks

and try to see what I could take this music. I had the Killmonger flute, and I had these low strings that I recorded under it, and I sent that to Michael D. Jordan as he was preparing for the role as well. Black Panther is my third movie with Ryan Cooler, but it's also my third movie with Michael B. Jordan, who's just an incredible actor. And it's such a special treat for a composer, too, to be able to be a part of someone's journey like that. And every time I see Michael B. Jordan in the scene, it just comes out of the screen and just immediately just inspires me.

I live my entire life waiting for this moment. I train, I lie, I kill just to get here. Killmonger's theme was one of the most difficult pieces to write because his character was really complex. And it took some time before I understood every layer of his character. And to me, the music is trying to play his character. In this piece of music, it's four layers. And the first layer is the piano melody. The first time you see Kilmonger in the movie, you see him with his back.

turned against you. He is at a museum in London and he is talking to this curator about these artifacts and you don't really have an idea who he is. You don't know what his intentions are. So the piece of music starts very soft. It starts mysterious and the harp is doubling the piano, which to me kind of represents his genius background, you know, and went to MIT and did some really extensive training in the military. And when that's That piano melody turns into the strings, it also kind of translates to his suffering. And then the string and the harp kind of goes together in unison. I just love the sound of strings and harp together.

It just made it a little bit more sad to me, like an old story. I listened a lot to Bach lately. Some of that inspiration of that layer came from Bach, especially the Matthew Passion. There's a couple of seconds in the scene where you kind of understand that, okay, Kilmongery is there for a reason. that reason is to take back something that doesn't belong to the museum. So the second layer is the flute, which represents his African background. All this flute is from the recording with Amadou, but I pitched it down in the beginning, and then all of the suddenly escalates into this chaos with this flute,

and these strings just going up and up an arpeggio. In the scene, the curator, she's falling down on the ground, you don't know what's wrong at her. like did she just get food poison or something worse. It escalates and goes bigger. You see the EMT's running up to her and you think, okay, they're going to take care of it. And then suddenly the claw just turns around and just shoots her. And that's where the music just cuts out and the 808 starts.

This is the first time in the movie where things just get dangerous and it comes just out of nowhere. These 808s, when you have this low bass sound just coming out in a theater blasting that you, it's just like, It's just like, okay, it feels almost like heartbeats. Like, okay, I'm sitting by the edge of my seat here. These A2A is the second section of Kilmonger's theme, and it's just establishing what is yet to come.

So the third layer is the trap, rap beat production, which represents him being from Oakland. I worked with a lot of rap artists and hip-hop artists, and I produced a bunch of albums and songs, and I think this production style is, inspired by Metro Boomin. And I was trying to come up with a beat that could sound like that. And then when it all comes together with the strings, you know, it's like Metro Booming meets Bach.

I took Amadu's flute and I took one of the yells and I pitched it down like an octave or something. And I got this really cool, weird ah sound that became a cool layer to this cue. And then the fourth layer is the punctuation of his character, which is like the... Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. The strings were recorded in London at the legendary Abbey Road Studios with a 92-piece orchestra. With a 40-piece choir. I just needed that sound to just add on to like the mystery and the drama. In the film, it's eventually revealed that Eric Kilmonger and Tachala,

who's the Black Panther and the King of Wakanda, the two of them are cousins. you know, they're cousins, so I wanted musically to intertwine their themes as well. One of the things that came from Killmonger's theme, which is the flute melody, that is basically the theme for Tachalla too, but it's played in the brass in like very royal, like big, confident way. And there's a point in the movie when you go into the ancestral plane, you have the same theme playing for the ancestors but with the strings, because they've shared ancestors. And that really translates to this is really about family. These guys are family. Kilmonger is such an interesting character. In some ways, a lot of people root for him and so many

people identify with him and can understand what he's been going through. He's had an extremely difficult life, finding his father dead, growing up without a mom, not having really any idea of his identity. To have a character like that, get a screen time in a big movie like that that so many people can understand, but still be called the villain, I think it's genius.

And now here's the killmonger cue from the Black Panther score by Ludwig Gorinson in its entirety. Visit songexplor.net to learn more about Ludwig Goranson and for links to buy or stream his score for Black Panther. 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 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 Manzukas, Josh Malina, 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, rishycage.com. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. This episode was produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. Carlos Lermott creates original illustrations for each episode of this podcast. For this episode, he did a drawing of Michael B. Jordan and Chadwick Boseman as Kilmonger and the Black Panther. You can see it on the Song Exploder site or Instagram. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of creative, independent podcasts, made possible by listeners like you. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm.

Let me know what you thought of this episode. You can find the show on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. And if you like the podcast, please leave a review or a rating on Apple Podcasts. My name is Rushi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.