Right on Cue

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 boundaries between the vulgar and sublime, and this one's no different -- a Victorian-era fantasia complete with bright, presentational production design and wild costuming that fits the strangeness of Bella's world. And this strangeness bears out in Fendrix's score, his first after spending years in the London DIY pop scene. The score is punctuated by minimal voices, spare instruments, dissonant, bended notes that seem to lumber awkwardly like Bella taking her first furtive steps out into the world. Fendrix speaks with me about stepping into Yorgos' world, giving voice to a creature that evolves over the course of the score, and what it's like for such an autobiographical artist to surrender himself to a more collaborative medium like film. You can find Jerskin Fendrix's work on his official Bandcamp page. Poor Things is currently playing in theaters. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Milan Records.

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, is a beautiful look back at his eight-film partnership with filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, recontextualizing some of his most intriguing melodies from that longtime collaboration into piano-driven suites performed by virtuoso musicians, including concert pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. On the small screen, Howard recently completed a lush, yearning score for Netflix's new miniseries All the Light We Cannot See, based on the acclaimed novel by Anthony Doerr and directed by Shawn Levy. Plus, after nearly a decade away from Panem, Howard resumes his collaboration with director Francis Lawrence for the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Now, Howard is here on the pod to talk about all of these projects and more. You can find James Newton Howard at his official website here. Night After Night is currently available on vinyl or your preferred streaming service, courtesy of Sony Masterworks. Same with All the Light You Cannot See, courtesy of Netflix Music, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, care of Sony Music.

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 is, their parents are even crazier than they are, leading to a cavalcade of numbers about incest, sociopathy, not having a pussy, and spit-feeding ham to two tiny animatronic freaks called the Sewer Boys.

The duo responsible for such disgusting earworms are songwriters Karl Saint Lucy (who wrote for the original UCB show) and Grammy-winning music producer Marius de Vries of La La Land and Moulin Rouge! fame. Together, they expanded songs from the musical, made new ones out of whole cloth, and leveraged a bevy of musical influences to build the sprightly, surprising songbook featured in the film. And this week, we speak to the pair about their collaboration, the long road to release, and finding the funny in the filthy.

You can find Marius de Vries and Karl Saint Lucy at their respective official websites.

Dicks: The Musical is currently in theaters. You can also listen to the soundtrack on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of A24 Music.

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 directorial debut of music video director Grant Singer, who fills each corner of the frame with cold, calculating and precise compositions, painting an isolated, alien world of hidden motivations and untold terrors hiding within the mundane. Singer's work in Reptile closely mirrors the work of David Fincher, and it's an intriguing experience to behold -- not least because of Glotman's dissonant, visceral, textural score. Building eerie combinations of altered string compositions and textured syths, Glotman's work fills in the empty spaces left by Reptile's sparse, opaque script, echoing through the vast voids of understanding the central mystery leaves its viewers. Now, I'm pleased to have Glotman on the podcast to talk about how he got started in music and composing, his work with Singer on Reptile, and his fascination with pulling apart the sound of things to see what he can find. You can find Yair Elazar Glotman at his official website here. Reptile is currently streaming on Netflix. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Netflix Music.

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 Pyrrhic victory that nonetheless shakes the public's confidence in the film's chain-smoking leader, and damns her to the annals of infamy. The film covers the three-week period of the Yom Kippur War, in which Egyptian and Syrian forces, among others, launched a concerted attack on Israel during the holy day of Yom Kippur. The attack led to tremendous losses, and kicked off a standoff that would rope in both the US and the Soviet Union before it was done. Nattiv's approach to the material is stark and haunting, keeping close to Mirren's wearied, resolved take on Meir through claustrophobic, smoke-filled rooms. And aiding that sense of mystique is Golda's score, courtesy of Russian composer Dascha Dauenhauer, utilizing discordant violins and detuned cowbells to build a bleak, atmospheric sound for Golda's race against time. We're thrilled to have Dauenhauer on the podcast to talk about her early days as a composer, her boundless sense of experimentation, and the many themes and unusual sounds of her score for Golda. You can find Dascha Dauenhauer at her official website here. Golda is currently playing in select theaters. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of MNRK Music Group.

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 project than he's used to: Documentary. For Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Davis Guggenheim's Apple TV+ original exploring the actor's rise to Hollywood fame and subsequent struggle with Parkinson's, Powell spent a whopping five months working on a score that balanced Fox's unique struggles while emphasizing the joy and energy that animates the actor's decades-long career. Powell was also kind enough to join us to talk for a bit about the arduous process of building the score, how scoring for documentary requires an entirely different musical vocabulary, and how Guggenheim pulled him through his toughest moments as a composer. You can find John Powell at his official website here. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is currently streaming on Apple TV+. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Lakeshore Records.

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 since birth by his overprotective parents in Oakland. But when he escapes and finally sees the real world for what it is, he's both amazed and aghast at the joys and horrors it contains. Sure, he finally gets to try fast-food burgers, and falls in love with a charming woman named Flora (Olivia Washington) who has her own sort of superpower. But he also faces the increased commodification of his size and self by a world that views him as an object... or, in the case of real-life superhero The Hero (Walton Goggins), a "thug" that needs to be taken out. Aiding Riley's beautifully maximalist project is indie duo Tune-Yards, aka Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, who adapt their signature frenetic hooks, and limber vocalizations to a soundscape as riveting as it is unconventional. And now, Garbus and Brenner join me on the show to talk about working with Boots' exacting creative vision, adapting to the world of composing, and what it's like for musicians out there in a world where unionization is on the minds of everyone in the wake of the SAG and WGA strikes. You can find Tune-Yards at their official website here. I'm a Virgo is currently streaming on Prime Video. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Lakeshore Records.

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, orchestral sound personified the original series, composer Ian Hultquist sought a newer, more electronic sound, one more reminiscent of John Carpenter's work on Escape from New York (another thriller about characters trying to survive in a walled-off Manhattan). In addition to those ominous synths, Hultquist also made use of a suite of organic sounds of unique provenance, including recruiting friends to travel to the Maine wilderness to collect all manner of sounds. Together, we talk about that sense of sonic experimentation, how Hultquist wanted to move the franchise's sound forward, and the importance of building a sonic palette to work from when composing electronic scores. You can find Ian Hultquist at his official website. The Walking Dead: Dead City is currently airing on AMC and AMC+. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Milan Records.

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 scoring video games like Redfall and shows like Godfather of Harlem, he's found himself with his highest-profile work yet: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Building off his childhood love for the robots in disguise and the groundwork that composer Steve Jablonsky had laid for him in the Michael Bay films before that, JB worked with Rise of the Beasts director (and longtime collaborator) Steven Caple Jr. to assemble a suitably robust, muscular, and era-appropriate score for the '90s-set throwback blockbusters. Together, JB and I talk about all of this -- his winding path to film composing, the value of building a team and working with valued collaborators, and using music to mark Rise of the Beasts' distinct globe-trotting adventure and '90s aesthetics. You can find Jongnic Bontemps at his official website. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is currently playing in theaters, and you can listen to the score on your preferred platform courtesy of Milan Records.

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 fundamental component for keeping the film's multiversal craziness in line is the score by Oscar-nominated composer Daniel Pemberton (who returns to the pod after talking with us about Being the Ricardos). Together, we talk about finding the sound for this film, discovering the right punk sound for Gwen Stacy (whose journey runs parallel to Miles'), and juggling familiar motifs while layering new sonic textures to allow the different universes to invade each other. What's more, we also chat about his intensely personal working style, the value of doing just about everything yourself, and how rare that is in a film music landscape where most big composers hire huge teams to get the work done. You can find Daniel Pemberton at his official website. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is currently playing in select theaters. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Sony Music.