Song Exploder - Theodore Shapiro - Severance (Main Title Theme)

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

The TV show Severance debuted on Apple TV+ in February 2022. It was created by writer Dan Erickson, and developed into a series by director and executive producer Ben Stiller. He directed the pilot and most of the episodes. After the first season came out, Severance was nominated for 14 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series, and it won two Emmys: for Main Title Design and for Musical Composition. I love this show, and the main title sequence is incredible. I was so excited to get to talk to the composer, Theodore Shapiro, about how he made the main title theme music. In this episode, you’ll hear how that theme first came into existence in a totally different form, and then, how Teddy re-imagined it to become the final version. For more, visit songexploder.net/severance.

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 TV show Severance debuted on Apple TV Plus in February 2022. It was created by writer Dan Erickson and developed into a series by director and executive producer Ben Stiller. He directed the pilot and most of the episodes. After the first season came out, Severance was nominated for 14 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama, and it won two Emmys, for main title. design and for musical composition. I love this show, so I was really excited to talk to the composer Theodore Shapiro about how he came up with the show's theme music. In this episode, you'll hear how

the theme music first came into existence in a totally different form, and then how Teddy reimagined it to become the final version. But first, here's a little background on what the show is about. This is Adam Scott. In Severance, I play Mark Scout, an employee at a company called Lumen Industries. He leads a team whose employees have undergone a severance procedure that surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. When they go to work, they know nothing about their lives in the outside world, and in the outside world, they have no knowledge of their lives at work. Mark has chosen to undergo the severance procedure after the death of his wife, so he can go to work free from the overwhelming grief he feels every day. but Lumen Industries is a mysterious company. When Mark and his team start pulling at the threads,

things start to unravel in ways no one expects. Here's Rishi and Severance composer Theodore Shapiro. I know you've been the composer on a lot of Ben Stiller's films. What are the projects that you two have done together? I worked on Dodgeball, which he produced. He didn't direct it, but he was a very involved producer. I worked on Tropic Thunder, The Secret Life of Walter Middy, Zoolander 2, and then Severance. Okay, yeah, so you've got a bunch of experience together.

Yeah. And do you remember the first time you ever heard about Severance? What the first conversation was that you had about the show? The first conversation I had about it was at a Halloween party because Adam Scott's son and my son have been in the same class since kindergarten. I was in a backyard in the valley talking with Adam, and we were just catching up, and he told me about this project, and I was immediately hooked by it. Like, it just sounded like such a great, simple, brilliant idea. And I just thought I really hope Ben calls me about that project.

And then what happened? I waited and then Ben called me out of the blue one day and told me they were making this show and would I be interested? And of course, the answer was yes. Did you say, oh, I've been waiting. Here are my many ideas that I've already written about it. No, I might have mentioned that Adam had told me about it and I thought it was a great idea. Did he give you a sense of like what the tone of the show was going to be? He knew that there would be humor and drama.

and strangeness. Yeah. He referenced a film that uses Bobby McFerrin's music. It's really strange and effective. And so I started off wondering whether falsetto male voices might be an interesting sound. And the other thing that we talked about at that time was I said, you know, my first instinct here

is that maybe we should have two different sound patterns. one for the world inside Lumen and one for the world outside Lumen. And he was like, yeah, that sounds right. Did you two talk about the idea of you sending music before they started shooting? Yes. I had pitched to him from the beginning that I would create a library of music and that there would be a rule, which was you can only temp in music that's original for the show. Huh. And why did you want to set that rule?

So in film, there is a thing called a temp track. That is when the director or the editor or the music editor takes music from other films or other sources and cuts it into the film as a placeholder. And the problem with a temp track is that everybody gets used to the temp track. Right. That is often true for the director,

but it's also true for the composer. It just starts coloring your judgment. Even when you desperately don't want to be thinking that way, it just enters your creative process in a way that closes off doors for what you might do. And so I always relish the idea of starting as early as possible on a project. Yeah. So my first thought was,

what if we do something really cold and electronic inside the world of Lumen? And on the outside, we'll do something really organic, and maybe that would be where these falsetto voices would come in, and it would be a palette that dealt more with Mark's grief in the show. And I pretty quickly got to work. I started just playing around with some cold sounds,

like these computer tombs that feel aggressively electronic and some modular synth loops, just building an icy atmosphere that I thought might go with Lumen. It's interesting that those are synth sounds as you're kind of using like percussion. The tombs are digital tombs, but they're also still tombs. But then you've got these sounds, that are, I don't know.

What is that? Yeah. That's what I think modular synths do so well, this organic and yet electronic sound palette that doesn't get you too deep into something that you can really identify, but yet gives you a rhythmic impulse that you might need. I have a MoG Model D, which I use all the time, and that was part of the palette.

it. The visual world of Lumen inside the building, it has such a specific aesthetic. It feels like early 1980s in terms of like the technology and the wardrobe and all of this music, all of these sounds feel like that. Were you working off of something at this point? And they hadn't actually shot anything. How did you arrive at a place that already felt like it fit the finished product? That's just serendipity. Really? Yes. We never had any conversations about that.

It just ended up fitting with the aesthetic of the show. In February 2020, Ben asked if I wanted to fly out to New York and come talk about music and see the sets and just sort of get a sense of what they were planning. And you'd already sent him some music at this point? I had sent him a bunch of music and he was really enthusiastic about it. I went to the set and saw a bunch of the sets that they were building, and he sat down and started playing a lot of the music. In front of you? In front of me, always very relaxing.

And in particular, there was a part in the middle of this piece that he kept coming back to more than anything else. And one of the things that I have learned over the years is that Ben has incredible, instincts. And if you can follow where his head is going, it will lead you to good places. And so I just was aware that there was something he was responding to in this middle section. The chords were a whorletzer through a vibrato effect. That's sort of giving it that wobble and just adding a little bit of weirdness.

Pitch wobbles are really a good friend a lot of times in making music. A lot of what is exciting about human beings making music together in a room has to do with discrepancies of pitch, and that is sort of what makes it human. So I think that having the pitch wobble back and forth there, I think, just adds this kind of uncanny human element to it. And was it specifically like, this breakdown section that Ben Stiller kept playing, or was it the whole part?

It was really where the breakbeat comes in. Okay, let me play that part. Did you say to Ben Stiller, hey, I noticed that you keep going back to this one piece of music? No. And maybe part of it was that I had landed on this other thing, the falsetto voices idea. That was what I thought was going to be the main idea.

When I got home, I sat at the piano, and I started playing the chord progression. As soon as I started playing the chords at the piano, it opened up this whole possible other world and other direction. It felt connected maybe more to 70s cinema, and pretty quickly the melody just came spilling out very fast. And I thought, this is exciting. This could be a totally different taste.

on what the score for this show could be. In that case, it wouldn't be a dichotomy of an in-e music and an outy music. In the world of this theme, this would be the big canvas of the show, and that canvas would be asking the question, what's happening here? It would present the show as one big puzzle. You'll hear how the ideas in that voice memo got turned into the final theme, when my conversation with Theodore Shapiro continues after this. 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. 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 Weinrobe. 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. So after you recorded that voice memo and had this new understanding of the piece, did you send that to Ben Stiller?

No. I sat down and I did a full rendering of this idea. I performed the piano on two different pianos. I did the chords on an upright and I did the melody on a grand piano. I thought that the idea of two pianos felt like it mirrored the Ineouty idea. That's awesome.

When Ben Stiller was playing those chords in that middle section, did you start to think, I'm definitely going to stay within these four chords. It's going to be this hypnotic, trans-like thing that I'm going to make, or did you feel any pressure? Like, is this going to be okay, that I'm just staying in this same chord progression? I did not see that coming, to be honest.

I mean, one of my favorite things about the theme is the fact that the chords don't change. Yeah. There's a real effect that comes from the repetition. It feels inexorable. You have four chords, and the first chord, C minor, is over a C in the base, as it normally would be.

And then each of the next three chords are also over the same. note in the bass, but the chords are changing so that they are dissonant with what's happening in the base. And that's creating this constant tension and release. I think inexorable is such a great word. There's something about the show and this music that feels like you're caught in a trap. Yeah, right. The bass is set to glide, meaning when you hit the note, it comes to the note from whatever the previous note was. Like a portamento.

Portamento. So I silently made the note that it's coming from at the very top of its range, so that when it enters, instead of just hitting on the note, it goes, boom. And I really like how it does that. The breakbeat kind of changed in its timbre as well. Yes. The beat hit harder in version 1.0. But I think I felt like it was disrupting the music in some way or trying too hard or something.

So ultimately, I made the beat a little bit more abstract and airy. Tambourine has little bits chopped out of it, which is kind of a fun little small detail. I just wanted to be abstracted in some way. You know, I didn't want it to sound like a person in a room shaking a tambourine. give it some strangeness. We recorded live strings. Rob Moose and Gabriel Cabezus, they work together. A lot of the elements that went into the final version

are the same elements in the demo. The pianos are things that I do with sample libraries, and I'm very happy with how those sound as MIDI. Those are MIDI pianos? Yes. Yeah, they sound great. The thing that I wait for, I mean, like just my favorite thing is when you play, I don't know what the correct music theory term would be, but other than to call it the wrong note.

When you play the wrong note in the melody, chromatically just off by half a step. Show me exactly which one you're talking. It's really fun because you have a chord that clashes over the bass note. You sort of have two scales that are equally correct in that moment, and it leads to some really fun wrong note feelings, which I think are ultimately very much in concert with what the show is making you feel. And then I had come up with something that I thought was interesting, which was this reverse piano that kind of stutters and fritzes out.

I felt like it was really a strong way to end the piece. And I had a sense when I did it, that the meaning of the gesture was related to the idea of the fraying of the self. And that ended up paying a lot of dividends in the show. I sent it to Ben, and he did not respond for three weeks. But he finally one day just called out of the blue and said, oh, I love this. This is really great. That was really encouraging, but I was still hanging on to the falsetto voices idea.

And then we started talking about a main title sequence, and I did one main title with the falsetto voices and one main title with this. Because you wanted to present them with ideas or because they asked for multiple ideas? No, I'd like to present Ben multiple ideas. I just think that it's nice to be presented with options sometimes, and when you choose something, you're choosing it in relation to something else, which doesn't feel as good. Yeah, and if they say yes to one and say no to the other, they've only broken half of your heart.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you send two options. And he was like, this is great. I'm really excited about this. So at that point, I was really like, locked in, I felt. Do you remember when you first saw your music against the actual picture of the titles?

Well, I had to cut it down. I had to cut it down to 90 seconds. Right, because when you wrote the suite, you weren't thinking it would necessarily be main titles. No, I wasn't. What was it like for you when you said that you were thinking about this kind of fraying of identity with that piano sound to see how that actually manifested visually in the final

It was so exciting. Oliver Lata, the brilliant designer who created those titles, first of all to see Oliver's main titled design just come together as a finished product, but second of all to see how he responded specifically to that musical element. It really cements the idea of this fraying of the self. To whatever extent I have to have. that idea in mind when I made that sound, you know, it really comes into solidity with his visualization of it. This project is uniquely exciting in the sense that it has so many elements that have come together in a great way. Just the way in which all of the various departments have put together this extraordinary work and the cast is extraordinary. and all of that plus the way in which the creative process and my work with Ben

feels like an unusually productive version of a collaboration. I think that that makes it extraordinary. And now here's the main title theme from Severance by Theodore Shapiro in its entirety. Or visit SongExploder.net slash severance. You'll find links to buy or stream. the Severance theme, and you'll also find the videos for the main titles for season one and season two, which are both incredible, the music and the visuals. And huge thanks to Adam Scott for doing the synopsis in the intro. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith,

and Mary Dolan, with production assistants from Tiger Biscope. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can also follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram, and you can get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt.

I'm Rishi-Kesh Hereaway. Thanks for listening.