When last we spoke to composer Jay Wadley, he'd just finished scoring the mercurial Charlie Kaufman film I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Four years and a million projects later, the Charles Ives Award-winning composer (and co-founder of music production house Found Objects, with previous guest Trevor Gureckis) has been keeping busy, from films like Fire Island, Swan Song and the upcoming We Grown Now to shows like Apple TV+'s Franklin . Set in the eight years Benjamin Franklin spent in France dru...
Apr 19, 2024•41 min
This week, I talk to legendary TV composer Mike Post about everything from the Law and Order dun-dun to his original album of musical suites. If you've had a TV turned to a network station anytime in the last forty years, you've heard Mike Post's music. A stalwart in the TV scoring game, he is the voice of so many police and law procedurals, from The Rockford Files to LA Law to his Emmy-winning theme for Murder One . But most know him best as the voice of the long-running Law & Order franchi...
Apr 12, 2024•40 min
This week's guest is RTS winning and BAFTA-nominated composer Vince Pope, a London-based composer who cut his teeth on scores ranging from Misfits to episodes of Black Mirror. But his most exciting collaborations of late have been those with filmmaker Issa Lopez, starting with her 2017 magical-realist horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid . Now, the pair reteam to put a supernatural spin on HBO's seminal crime thriller series True Detective . Inherited from Nic Pizzolatto's three-season anthology se...
Feb 24, 2024•30 min
Grammy- and two-time Emmy-winning composer Carlos Rafael Rivera has spent the last decade building moody, complex musical worlds around complicated characters. His earliest prominent work was with regular collaborator Scott Frank on films like A Walk Among the Tombstones , and the Netflix miniseries Godless . But it was his mercurial work on Frank's miniseries The Queen's Gambit that earned Rivera breakout status. Since then, he's worked on a host of films and series both with Frank and elsewher...
Feb 09, 2024•42 min
This week, we're catching up with one of the Oscar-shortlisted Best Score nominees -- Anthony Willis' score to Emerald Fennell's lavish, mysterious thriller Saltburn . Fennell's second directorial feature, after Promising Young Woman , is a kind of Brideshead Revisited by way of Tom Ripley and mid-2000s party culture: A mysterious young bloke named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) follows his irrepressible attraction to fellow Oxford pretty-boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) all the way to Felix's palatial ma...
Jan 26, 2024•35 min
For nearly fifteen years, composer Dave Porter has been the musical voice of the Breaking Bad universe -- having scored every season of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and the film El Camino for good measure. Now, he plies his penchant for atmospheric, guitar-driven thrills to the MCU, with the new Disney+ series, Echo. A spinoff of Hawkeye , Echo hearkens back to the grittier, more violent climes of the Netflix Marvel shows, centering on deaf Choctaw assassin Maya, played by Alacqua Cox. Last s...
Jan 19, 2024•32 min
This podcast has had a long and fruitful relationship with composer Paul Leonard-Morgan, the man behind the scores of films like Dredd and Limitless , among countless others. But two commonalities have permeated the scores he's discussed with me: Errol Morris and Philip Glass. For the former, he teamed up to score Amazon's Tales from the Loop ; for the latter, he's scored A Psychedelic Love Story among many other Morris docs, many of them alongside Glass. Now, both have teamed up for yet another...
Jan 12, 2024•36 min
This week, we're joined by Ivor Novello and BIFA-nominated composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, a Paris-born artist who has made quite the name for herself in the last few years. Getting her start building scores for friends in film school who needed music for their short films, Emilie quickly cut her teeth on films like 2018's Only You and 2019's Rocks , before breaking out big in 2021 with her devilish score to Prano Bailey-Bond's British horror film Censor , and 2022's Living , for which she ...
Jan 05, 2024•27 min
As we've seen this year, and my interview with the songwriters behind Dicks: The Musical some weeks back, 2023 has been a surprisingly solid year for original musicals. But as the year draws to a close, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite films I saw this year, all the way back at Sundance: Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman's Theater Camp . Set in a struggling theater camp in upstate New York called AdirondACTS, Theater Camp takes the form of a mockumentary that follows the camp's kids, couns...
Dec 29, 2023•46 min
This week, we talk to composer Mac Quayle, who burst onto the scene in 2015 with his Emmy-winning score to Sam Esmail's mysterious, genre-bending series Mr. Robot . Since then, he's enjoyed healthy collaborations with Esmail and fellow showrunner Ryan Murphy, for whom he's scored everything from American Horror Story and Pose to 9-1-1 . For his latest score, Quayle reunites with Esmail for a film this time -- Netflix's eerie adaptation of Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel Leave the World Behind . Followi...
Dec 22, 2023•28 min
This week, I'm thrilled to talk to English musician and nascent film score composer Jerskin Fendrix about his score to the wacky, surreal, oddly poignant new film from Yorgos Lanthimos: Poor Things. Starring Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, the creation of Frankenstein-ian scientist Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Dafoe), the film delves into her ongoing quest to explore her humanity, sexuality, and the absurd social structures of a world careening into modernity. Lanthimos' films always push the bou...
Dec 08, 2023•30 min
This week's guest is an Emmy winner, a Grammy winner, and a nine-time Oscar nominee, whose scores have graced the big and small screens since the 1980s. James Newton Howard is the voice of many of your favorite scores, from co-scoring the Dark Knight Trilogy with Hans Zimmer to his Oscar-nominated score for Paul Greengrass' News of the World . Now, he's back with several new projects, some of which hearken back to music he has written in the past. Howard's latest solo album, Night After Night , ...
Nov 17, 2023•33 min
Sometimes, the dumbest things are the most delightful -- and that's certainly the case with A24's riotous new musical, Dicks: The Musical . A tongue-in-cheek (and other places) song-and-dance comedy, Dicks: The Musical started out as an hourlong show at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City, written by and starring Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson who play two definitely identical twins who find each other and decide to get their estranged parents back together, Parent Trap -style. Problem i...
Oct 20, 2023•31 min
This week, we speak to composer Yair Elazar Glotman about his score for the latest prestige thriller from Netflix, Reptile , a stylish neo-noir starring Benicio Del Toro as a mercurial detective looking into the murder of a real estate agent. Everyone's a suspect, from the victim's boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) to the creepy guy down the street (played by Michael Pitt), even to some of Del Toro's fellow officers (incluidng Ato Essandoh, Domenick Lombardozzi and Eric Bogosian). It's the directori...
Sep 30, 2023•29 min
Historical biopics of famous leaders are a very familiar genre at this point: Great Men (or in this case, Women) of history navigating war or struggle or controversy with the stiff-upper-lip resolve history has granted to them. Guy Nattiv's Golda is certainly no exception, though it innovates not just with its presentation, but with its subject: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, played under heavy prosthetics by Helen Mirren. More than that, it's not a tale of victory, but of defeat -- a Pyrrhi...
Sep 04, 2023•22 min
Composer John Powell has been composing film scores since 1997; whether it's How to Train Your Dragon, The Bourne Identity, or Solo: A Star Wars Story , you've likely heard and loved at least one of his scores. He earned an Academy Award nomination in 2010 for the epic, uplifting sweep of How to Train Your Dragon , and has three Grammy nominations for his scores to Happy Feet, Ferdinand , and Solo . But now, the veteran composer has an Emmy nomination under his belt, for a decidedly different pr...
Aug 25, 2023•24 min
Ever since his 2018 feature debut Sorry to Bother You , Oakland-based musician Boots Riley (of The Coup) has built a reputation as one of our most imaginative, socially-minded filmmakers, combining abject surrealism with biting commentary on the complex interweavings of race and capitalism in American life. (With a healthy dose of absurd comedy, of course.) His followup is the seven-episode Amazon series I'm a Virgo , starring Jharrel Jerome as a 13-foot-tall Black man named Cootie, hidden away ...
Aug 06, 2023•40 min
Much like the zombies that infest its world, the Walking Dead franchise simply refuses to die. With Dead City , the shambling hordes make their way to the island of Manhattan, an urban hellscape now infested with the remnants of a dead civilization. And in the middle, two of the original Walking Dead 's main characters, Maggie (Lauren Cohen) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), on a rescue mission that'll test their fractious relationship with each other. While Bear McCreary's more mournful, orchest...
Jul 07, 2023•40 min
Veteran composer Jongnic "JB" Bontemps took a long and winding road to film scoring. Despite showing an early passion for scoring (and studying music at Yale), he didn't immediately enter that world. Instead, he sought a tech career, becoming a software developer and entrepreneur. But music came calling again, and JB found himself studying film scoring and building a career as one of the industry's top composers. After years of building his bona fides working under various A-list composers and s...
Jun 30, 2023•41 min
In a relatively grim year for superhero movies, both critically and at the box office, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is blissfully bucking that trend. Building off the dizzying, kaleidoscopic animation style and storytelling of Into the Spider-Verse , Across the Spider-Verse manages to elevate what worked about the previous film and roll it into an even more exciting, heartfelt second chapter in Miles Morales' uncertain journey toward becoming a hero. As with the first, though, a fundament...
Jun 26, 2023•34 min
How do you write the score to someone else's self-mythology? That's the challenge this week's guest, composer Ronen Landa, faced for one of the year's most idiosyncratic, difficult-to-describe shows, Peacock's Paul T. Goldman . A strange mix of documentary comedy and wish fulfillment, the show follows the titular man, a nebbishy middle-aged guy who turned his hellish marriage to his second ex-wife into a grand quest for justice in the form of a bestselling self-published novel (and subsequent sc...
Jun 10, 2023•45 min
When last we spoke to composer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Marx, we broke down her haunting, curious score to Hulu's miniseries Candy . But she's been as busy as ever since, bringing her signature sense of experimental sparseness to projects on both the big and small screens. Most recently, she's lent her unique musical voice to two intriguing projects about women asserting their strength and power in unconventional circumstances. The first is the National Geographic miniseries A Small Light...
May 26, 2023•38 min
The third season of Star Trek: Picard had a lot on its shoulders: It was the final season of its show, as well as a bombastic, blockbuster-level bow for the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation . For its first two seasons, Patrick Stewart and the showrunners shied away from Starfleet uniforms and shiny utopias, and Jeff Russo's score reflected that (as we've discussed with him on this very show). But showrunner Terry Matalas had a different vision in mind for Season 3: Celebrate the crew whose...
May 19, 2023•51 min
In the 1990s, Nickelodeon was a bastion of surprisingly sophisticated children's animation, and few shows demonstrated that freewheeling sense of absurdity than Rocko's Modern Life . The tale of a beleaguered wallaby surviving the wildest adventures with little more than a smile on his face and his close-knit group of friends, it was a generation-defining show thanks to its surprisingly adult jokes and unhinged tone. But a huge component of the show's success comes courtesy of its frenetic, genr...
May 12, 2023•27 min
It's morphin' time! Thirty years after Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers hit the airwaves and thrilled '90s latchkey kids the world over, the franchise has stayed strong through 29 seasons, dozens of incarnations, and more Zords than you can shake a Power Sword at. But one of the elements that made it such a mainstay was its shredding, hard-rock theme song, with its heavy power chords, driving rhythms, and catchy battle cry of "Go, go, Power Rangers!" It, and the Power Rangers sound as a whole, was ...
May 05, 2023•24 min
When last we left composer Trevor Gureckis, he was just beginning his eerie, unsettling work on M. Night Shyamalan's acclaimed Apple TV+ series Servant . But in the intervening years, he's lent his uniquely experimental grasp of both classical and electronic instruments to films like The Goldfinch, Bloodline, and Old . But his most recent project sees him dipping not just into the world of video games, but the existing soundscape of a previous composer: EA's high-def remake of the space horror c...
Apr 18, 2023•32 min
The 2023 Grammys have come and gone, and the first Grammy for Best Video Game Score has already been awarded (congratulations, Assassin's Creed Valhalla 's Stephanie Economou !). But one of her fellow nominees in that category is video game music royalty in his own right -- Austin Wintory , whose score for the acclaimed indie game Journey netted him a Grammy nomination for a video game score years before it became its own category. This time, he was nominated for his score for Aliens: Fireteam E...
Mar 31, 2023•50 min
The Star Trek universe is a franchise with decades of musical legacy, from the original Alexander Courage fanfare to Jerry Goldsmith's nautical bombast for The Motion Picture , all the way to Michael Giacchino's sweeping work on the J.J. Abrams films. But Paramount+'s animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks , which follows the bottom-rung officers on the support ship the USS Cerritos , doesn't stray from that formula to go for the laughs. Instead, composer Chris Westlake chose to lean into Trek's...
Mar 27, 2023•42 min
Today, we're talking about the latest film from director Brandon Cronenberg, Infinity Pool , another in a series of cinematic provocations from the son of acclaimed body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. While his works travel along similar roads -- the alienation of the self from the human body, how class intersects with violence -- the younger Cronenberg twists the visceral knife even further in parts, trafficking further in extremity and seeing how that further warps his film's reflections of ...
Mar 06, 2023•24 min
Earlier this month, the 2022 Grammys ran its first-ever category for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media -- a long-overdue recognition of the value of video game scores as a legitimate method of expression, and a source of some incredible music. And among an initial crop of stellar composers offering intriguing sounds to all manner of video games big and small, it was a DLC, of all things, that took home the prize: the Dawn of Ragnarok DLC for Ubisoft's Assassin's C...
Feb 24, 2023•38 min
