Right on Cue

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 drumming up monetary and logistical support for the Revolutionary War, Franklin stars Michael Douglas as the Founding Father himself, who must navigate dueling alliances and a host of stakeholders on both sides of the pond. What's more, he and his grandson Temple (played by Noah Jupe) find themselves at the head of a cultural clash between the French aristocracy and their budding republic that will change both their lives forever.   Wadley built the lush sound of Franklin with the help of an enormous orchestra and his background in classical composition, melding traditional instrumentation with modern orchestration and a decidedly Americana flair to Franklin's upsetting of the French social order. Now, he joins me on the podcast to discuss the musical journey of Franklin.   Franklin streams weekly on Apple TV+, and you can listen to Wadley's score on your preferred streamer courtesy of Apple. 

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 franchise, having scored almost all of its varying spinoffs since the Dick Wolf flagship series premiered in the late 1980s.   But outside of his stuff TV schedule, Post is also incredibly busy as a solo composer, having just released his first standalone album in thirty years. Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta is a two-part series of suites inspired by the blues and bluegrass music of his youth, lending an orchestral heft to the American musical traditions that have inspired his iconic career. It's a stellar series of tracks, ones that feel like an already-accomplished musical artist spreading his wings and revisiting the music that made him who he is today.   Message from the Mountains and Echoes of the Delta is currently available on your preferred music streamer, courtesy of Sony Music Masterworks.

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 series, Lopez's new season, subtitled Night Country, follows a precarious period of darkness in a small Alaskan town as the town sheriff (Jodie Foster) and her ex-partner (Kali Reis) investigate the mysterious deaths of the members of a corporate research station on the outskirts of town. The case may well be tied to the unsolved murder of a Native woman that tore their partnership asunder years prior, and sends the pair down an ominous road filled with tough moral choices and events that lie beyond their understanding.   Pope's score blends elements of horror and murder-mystery atmosphere with a deep swell of psychospiritual torment, to say nothing of the addition of Native American elements like throat singers and collaborator Tanya Tagaq to incorporate the show's exploration of those cultures. Now, Pope joins me on the podcast to talk about True Detective: Night Country.   You can find  Vince Pope at his official website here.   You can stream the entire season of True Detective: Night Country on Max, and listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of WaterTower Music.

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 elsewhere: Apple's Lessons in Chemistry, HBO's Hacks. But his two most recent scores, and some of his best, have him dealing with different ends of the prestige-crime-drama ecosystem. Take Netflix's Griselda, in which an unrecognizable Sofia Vergara climbs her way to the top of Miami's drug trade as the real-life Cocaine Godmother; scored like an opera, Rivera's sound is full of harpsichord, lone voices, big breathy melodramatic moments.   On the other side of the Atlantic lies AMC's stellar miniseries Monsieur Spade, in which Clive Owen plays an older Sam Spade solving a mystery while spending his retirement in rural France after World War II. There, the usual noir trappings are leavened by a distinct sense of melancholy, lonely guitar strains underlining the postwar fragility of its French setting.   This week, I'm thrilled to have Rivera on to talk about these shows and so much more, from his musical journey with the guitar to his philosophies on which perspective to score from. It's a brilliant chat (maybe one of the best this podcast has ever enjoyed), and I hope you enjoy.   You can find Carlos Rafael Rivera at his official website here.   Griselda is currently streaming on Netflix, and Monsieur Spade runs weekly on AMC and AMC+. You can also stream each soundtrack at your music service of choice.

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 mansion, Saltburn. There, he immerses himself in the hedonistic lifestyles of the ultra-rich, all the while hoping to catch a glimmer of Felix's attention -- or does he?   Reuniting with Fennell for his second score with her, composer Anthony Willis crafts a suitably Gothic sound for her idiosyncratic class thriller. Opening with romantic strings, transitioning into classical choir, then electric pianos and additional layers and textures, Willis draws the listener in like one of Oliver's obsessions, before disrupting the film's jagged classicism with rough modern electronic textures and a sense of sweeping orchestral doom.   Today, we talk to Willis about all of that and more, including his longtime collaboration with Fennell and his early life as a chorister at Windsor Castle.   You can find Anthony Willis at his official website.   Saltburn is currently available for rental or streaming on Prime Video. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Milan Records.

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 seen betraying and shooting her boss and father figure, Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin, at the tail end of Hawkeye, Maya rides home to her small town in Oklahoma to reconnect with her roots and finish the war against Wilson Fisk that she started back in New York City.   To score Maya's blood-soaked journey across Echo's five episodes, Porter made use of his signature mixture of guitar and synths to build a suitably neo-Western noir feel to the series. On top of that, the show incorporates many aspects of Native music and instrumentation, literally giving voice to the legacy of Native women Maya finds herself connecting to throughout her journey.   Dave Porter joins us on the podcast to talk about the rigors of scoring for television, the role of music in a show about a Deaf protagonist, and the careful treatment of Native musical elements in his music for Echo.   You can find Dave Porter on his official website.   All episodes of Echo are currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Marvel Music.

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 of Morris' deep probes into an intriguing figure, this time famed novelist John le Carre, the author of books like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Framed as the prototypical days-long sitdown between Morris and his subject, The Pigeon Tunnel takes us through le Carre's childhood and early days with his abusive father, to his time in the spy service, to the ways those experiences informed his legendary novels.   In so doing, Glass and Leonard-Morgan had to build a whopping eighty minutes of score, a propulsive effort that keeps the spy-thriller momentum of the doc going with cimbaloms and other features of the '60s espionage caper. And this week, we've got Paul back on the podcast to talk about his collabs with Morris and Glass, and building a score for the most mysterious man in the world.   You can find Paul Leonard-Morgan at his official website here.   The Pigeon Tunnel is currently streaming on Apple TV+, and you can listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Platoon.

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 won a Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Original Score in an Independent Film.   Now, she turns those two instincts for exploring death and longing to the latest film from Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers, in which a gay man approaching middle age (Andrew Scott) finds himself with the opportunity to spend time with his long-lost parents, who died in a car crash when he was little. Still as young as the day they died, Adam clings to this newfound chance to spend time with his parents, as he navigates an uncertain new relationship with a boy in his apartment building (played by Paul Mescal).   Leviennaise-Farrouch's work here is stripped down, bare, as spectral as the ghosts who make up at least half of the film's cast. She combines electronic with acoustic instruments, flitting between analog synths and deep, warm strings to sell Scott's alienation from the world around him and the deep loneliness he feels. Now, Emilie joins me on the podcast to talk about the process behind scoring All of Us Strangers.   You can find Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch at her official website.   All of Us Strangers is currently playing in theaters. You can also listen to the score on your preferred service courtesy of 20th Century Studios.   Support us on Patreon   Follow us on Twitter/X at @rightoncuepod

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, counselors, and owners as they try to get through another season of shows with their sanity and friendships intact. It's a shot straight across the bow for a lot of theater kids' experiences, from the competing egos to the petty jealousies, to the moment you set all of those conflicts aside to, as one character puts it, turn cardboard into gold.   To do that, Gordon and Lieberman enlisted the help of Emmy and Drama Desk-nominated writer Mark Sonnenblick, who's written songs for Spirited, Lyle Lyle Crocodile, and others. Composer James McAlister, who has enjoyed collaborations with everyone from Sufjan Stevens to the National,  came in to help with the songs and provide the charming series of acoustic and vocal sounds that serve as the film's underscore. Together with the writing/directing duo and writers/stars Ben Platt and Noah Galvin, the songwriting team built the camp's showstopping original musical that closes the film -- Joan, Still.   You can find Mark Sonnenblick on his official website and James McAlister on his Bandcamp page.   Theater Camp is currently streaming on Hulu. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Interscope Records.   Support us on Patreon   Follow us on Twitter/X at @rightoncuepod

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. Following a well-off couple (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) on a vacation to a remote Airbnb with their two children, the film takes a bizarre turn when the home's owner, G.H. (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter (Myha'la) return and insist on staying there. Meanwhile, the power goes out, deer start behaving strangely, and one gets the sense the world is coming to an end.   That sense is borne out in Quayle's approach, constructed from a custom library of sounds he built specifically for the movie. And now, Quayle talks to us about building a score to suit the end of the world.   You can find Mac Quayle at his official website.   Leave the World Behind is currently streaming on Netflix, and you can hear the score on your preferred streamer courtesy of Netflix Music.   Support us on Patreon   Follow us on Twitter/X at @rightoncuepod