Song Exploder - Wonderly - The Daily (Theme)

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

The Daily is a hit podcast from The New York Times, hosted by Michael Barbaro. Every weekday, over 1.7 million people download the show. It launched in February 2017, and in honor of its two-year anniversary, we’re publishing a bonus episode about the show’s theme song, which was composed by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. It was originally published on the New York Times website, in 2018. songexploder.net/the-daily

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. My name is Tao Wyn. The Daily is a hit podcast from the New York Times, hosted by Michael Barbaro. Every weekday, over 1.7 million people download the show. It launched in February 2017, and in honor of its two-year anniversary, we're publishing a bonus episode about the show's theme song. It was originally published on the New York Times website in 2018. Here's Song Exploder producer Rishi Kesh Hereway. The theme song for a show, whether it's on TV or on the radio or on a podcast, faces a lot of pressure.

Often before anything else, it's the theme that tells you something about the personality of a show and its point of view. And while the content of every episode changes, a theme has to stay the same while still setting the stage appropriately for what's to come. And ultimately, it becomes an indelible part of the show itself. So when the team from the New York Times was getting the daily podcast started, they were thinking about all of these challenges. Here's Michael Barbaro. There are some really unique needs on a show like this. You have to listen to it every morning. It needs to announce the world to you.

And it has to make you feel like you're excited to get through the next 20 minutes. And it needs energy, but not too much energy, because a lot of people are consuming this in the morning and you don't want to throw too much at them, but you don't want to put them back to sleep because they just woke up. So it's this really complicated and tricky audio math that I do believe they got quite right. When he says they, Michael's referring to Jim Brunberg

and Ben Lansverk of the composing duo Wonderly. Coming up, Ben and Jim break down how the Daily's theme music was created. They got the audio math right, but it wasn't a straightforward journey. Let's start from the beginning. I'm Michael Barbaro, and I'm the managing editor and host of The Daily

from the New York Times. The Daily is a five-day-a-week show. It's about 20 minutes long. We try to make sense of the world in one or two segments. that approach news in a narrative or explanatory way. We needed music that was going to hold up and compliment the editorial content of the show.

Lisa Tobin, who is the executive producer for all of New York Times Audio, has had a longstanding relationship with a group of musicians, Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. This is Jim Brunberg. I'm Ben Landsberg, and we are Wonderly. We were quite surprised and honored when we got the call.

When they called us, it was right after the new year. And we were about to kind of take a break. Jim was about to go out of town. I was about to start working on a different project. So we essentially just said, here's our SoundCloud page. We said, well, look at our library and see if any of the types of music that we already have are what you're looking for. And I did, and I played as many of them as I could. And I would kind of keep a log of which ones I liked.

And that's where things started. We were surprised that when we got back, they said, yes, we love this one. The song that they chose, it's sort of a punk. Russian rock and roll song. Not anything that I would necessarily associate with news. It had this crazy scrunky guitar. Little Elvis Costello

organ. Kind of almost like a circusy feel sometimes. It was the last thing in the world that we thought the New York Times would like. We were kind of shocked when they chose that piece. So we started this process of trying to tweak it, make it into something that would suit all of their needs. We would start with a

phone call, and then they'd go off and come back, and we would have a marathon conversation about how it made us feel and what worked. It went through maybe a dozen permutations, but it went from being this thing with a lot of attitude to sort of getting smoothed out along all the edges. We kept going back and forth and getting iterations, but we all felt it wasn't quite right. It was too melancholy. It was too slow. It was. It was too slow. It was. It was. was a little too moody. All of the work we had done, it was completely tossed out the window,

which is fine, that's a normal thing when you're making music. So we asked him what he wanted to hear. We sort of got personal with it. I was in love with the theme music for Westworld, the really popular HBO drama. The sound is sort of like, da-na-na-na-na-a.

Michael sang to us this piece of music. I had never heard Westworld. The thing that really got us going wasn't listening to Westworld it was listening to Michael Barbaro sing the theme from Westworld that's what all of a sudden made sense suddenly something clicked

it was like oh that's what we're going for strident dramatic but a very rational overtone I ran over to the piano Ben picked up his viola and we just threw that theme out there that is now still the melody of the piece All of the strings on this are violas.

That whale sound effect is an effect that you can get by just lightly running your finger up and down the string while you're bowing it, so it catches all of the natural harmonics on the string. The guitar's stating a similar type of dissonant discomfort. I have this analog delay pedal that I use, just turning the knob slowly down until it grinds to a halt. And so you end up with really spiky stuff sometimes. We exist in this extremely polarized time. When we're asked to write a piece of music that supports the emotional landscape of the news,

it's going to have elements that are jarring. So there's a sweeping melody, and there's some ugliness supporting it from time to time. Then we recorded the drums. They wanted a big open, you know, some big hits and then a drop-down where Michael would talk. So there's all sorts of room to talk about the day's top story. There's a double bass that I play.

The direction we've been going with this piece is that we don't want it to ever land and give you that comfortable feeling of authority because it's not the news authority, it's the news contemplation. So I remember before you did the bass part, it's like, okay, whenever possible, don't play the tonic. Right. Play inversions of the chords.

So if it's a C minor chord, don't play a C note, play... an E flat or a G, so that it's never going to really land. The bass part by itself, it might not even sound like the song, because it's sort of a constant series of inversions. Kind of at the last minute, we got some direction from Andy Mills, who's one of the producers, and he sent us this beautiful piece of Cliff Martinez music from the Nick, the score to that series. There's arpeggiation and some electronica, but still very, very simple and kind of contemplative.

And we were like, let's try something like that. I describe it as a siren. It's this pulsating sound that's kind of going up and down. When you think about why a siren made sense for this show, it's because we launched the Daily on February 1st. We had just had an excruciatingly partisan, angry presidential election. The country was deeply riven. And a couple weeks into this new presidency,

the country was convulsing. from a series of changes, challenges to our healthcare system, to our immigration system. And it's a little bit that siren like a police car going by and just kind of throttling you and making you think about what is going on here. And the whole point of the show was to disentangle and to explain this extraordinarily consequential

and incredibly difficult to understand moment in our history. And that siren to me is both the audio DNA of the show and kind of a metaphor for the show itself. As opposed to having a conclusion, the unresolved aspects of it still are bubbling under the surface. That's kind of how we feel after we hear the way Michael sums up

and discusses the news. It's not resolved. So the little whorlitzer, the upward da-da-da, keeps asking a question all the way to the end. And that's the last thing you hear. And now, here's the theme to the Daily by Wonderly in its entirety.

For more information on Wonderly and the daily, visit songexploder.net. This episode was produced and edited by Rishi Kesh Hirway and Christian Coons. Carlos Lerma made the artwork, which you can see on the Song Exploder website. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn about all of our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder, and you can find me at Tao Get Stay Down. My name is Tao Wyn.

Thanks for listening.