Transcript for The Music Episode

Yeah, I'm in my home studio in Brooklyn, New York. So behind me is the mug that I've used on a lot of hard fork cues and then various guitars and acoustic panels. So

I'm studio is a state of mind.

Yeah, there was a great creative brief from Davis, the producer. I think one thing we really liked is he gave us a lot of great references of sounds he liked and songs he liked, but also things to avoid. And I think one reason this show is really fun to write for is although it's a tech show when we were developing the sound with Davis, he was very thoughtful about let's not just do your stereotypical beat boop thing. That's obviously still a part of it, but it's not the primary thing.

I think one term we throw around a lot is hard fork is the show you can write music for where you can let your freak flag fly. It's the show and we love working on all the shows at the New York Times equally of course, but hard fork is if you have had an unhinged idea about doing something crazy with sound, it's generally the show that is most open to that happening on.

No comment. Okay.

We actually did not compose that thinking this is the theme. We were kind of composing We sort of let themes emerge democratically when we're spinning up a new show where we'll all jam out on a bunch of ideas and then there tends to be one cue that the team will just be like, yeah, I think this feels like the one that feels teeny enough. But yeah, it was originally written just as an idea and then it sort of gradually became the theme.

The theme came together really, I'll be completely honest, the horn arrangement for the theme, which I think was something one of you as the hosts requested. I know either Kevin or Casey said, oh, I think I did say that I thought he had to be cool. Yeah. This is 100% true, but I was in the office on a Friday afternoon when it was totally dead. And I was walking to the men's room and all of a sudden, but I popped into my head as I was walking through all the cubicles. And I immediately was like, oh, I got to run back to my desk and get this down. This feels like a little bit for hard work.

Yes, you know, and it was worth it. It was worth holding it another two and a half minutes. Sorry. I don't know if that's okay to say.

Oh, well, let's, glad to hear that. Yeah, I mean, I think the optimism and sense of You know, okay, it's not all doom and gloom. It's not really about doom and gloom and it's also not about, you know, totally mindless optimism either. It's more about things are changing, things are spontaneous. I think the theme integrates a lot of different styles of music that is also intentional because you have some electronic music tropes where there's a breakbeat in there. You have a sort of 808 type drum machine. And then there's some synths, but the synths also have a sort of almost like 90s, jock jam, almost feel to them. So it's all meant to be a little bit cheeky in the way that it comes across. And it's meant to be something that's fun and you can kind of pop around to, but also, you know, there's a sense of levity there that I do think was very much informed by the two of your respective energy as hosts of the show. So

Yeah, so the playlist we're about to hear is a sort of continuous mix of most of the music that has been composed for the hard fork podcast. It starts with a selection of the earliest days where Alicia by myself, Marion and Diane are sort of core composition team. We're kind of finding the sound of the show. It then goes into an extended mix where when we brought in all of our colleagues from across the engineering team who also have, you know, music backgrounds of their own. And then Alicia, but do you want to talk about the The sound cue mix that comes in.

Yeah, it's everything over 150 BPM that we couldn't make fit in the other parts of the mix. It's basically per minute. Yeah. Yeah. It's everything at a very fast tempo. We could not make fit in the other parts of the mix that was left on the cutting room floor, but that we felt like this should still have a nice little last hurrah moment.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Yeah, I would say if you gave us one year, we would focus on let's actually open a club together.

YouTube never had the pleasure of going to karaoke with Alicia Boba but she's the ultimate high-pwoman and I feel like she and Casey could really just get a crowd in and hype it up Kevin your very level headed you could I think keep things managed and under control I could you know do the sound DJ booth you know if we're if we're thinking big year-long moonshot like let's go all the way let's make this an institution but all right well you heard it here at Hartford Club opening 2025 get your tickets now

Yeah, so the outro here's a fun fact. The outro is written first and the intro theme is a remix of the outro. The horns you hear in the intro theme are actually chopped up versions of the horns in the outro. You'll notice that in the outro theme when the horns come in, they feel a little more natural. Whereas in the intro theme, when the horns come in, they feel kind of clipped and jaunty. That's because it is literally just taking the audio of the horns from the outro, putting it through a sampler and able to reworking it. It's basically two variations on the same theme, just via remix. The other difference is the intro theme has drums going through a vocoder, which gives things a nice little melodic pulse. The outro theme does not have that. And as far as the longest time I thought to be a legitimate composer, you had to play everything yourself and perform everything in real time. And I can proudly say that that melody referring to KC, I point and clicked one mouse note at a time in Ableton just over. Just because it felt right. I might have been dumb and forgot to bring a keyboard to the office that day. I don't know what the reasoning for it was, but it just felt right to make life difficult and point and click it to glory. That's fascinating.

Yeah, they are, they are two, you know, both spawn from sort of the same, you know, the same cell and evolved in their own. The same bathroom break. The same bathroom break.

This outro is called No, it's fine. And the intro, a remix of it is called, I said, it's fine, really.

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

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