Hrishikesh Hirway has put together a wonderful podcast called Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.
I learned about it from 99% Invisible: 118- Song Exploder. Another podcast I’ve only recently fallen in love with.
Open Mike Eagle is my favorite interview so far. He talks about loving with a beat and how a song evolves as his relationship with that beat grows.
For me to really, really get ready to write a song, I have to let the beat get me pregnant almost. I have to let the beat live inside of me to the point where I can recreate the beat in my head when I’m away from it over and over again.
It’s about finding a frequency and answering whatever the questions this beat is asking me.
The episodes about Bob’s Burgers and House of Cards were fun since I was very familiar with both of those themes. I hadn’t realized just how much the House of Cards theme changed between seasons. And I never knew there was so much hidden in the Bobs’ Burgers theme song.
Brian Reitzell talks about scoring a video game. He has done work for video games prior to Watch Dogs and talks about the particular challenge of video games. How do you write a modular, looping piece of music that doesn’t feel like it’s looping? Video game sounds are interesting to me since the music is often so overlooked or ignored completely. It’s an interesting challenge to score something like a game.
I could not stop giggling during the Garbage episode because they kept saying this sounds like Garbage.
If you like music, I think you’ll enjoy this podcast too. It’s short, about 20 minutes per episode with the artist talking about how they create their songs and sounds. And at the end, the entire song is played so you can hear the song they’ve talked about if you’re not familiar with it.
Subscribe to it at songexploder.net/.
Since the podcast only comes out twice a month, I subscribed to his newsletter Five Song Fridays. This week’s newsletter was all about Movie Music.
