The Music Episode

0:28I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

0:46Hello, Casey. Hi, Kevin. We're going to do something weird today. I'm excited about it. So excited about this. So today, instead of our normal show where we talk about the tech news, we have got a very special episode. This is one we've been wanting to do for months now, and we have finally gotten our act together to do it. We're going to tell you how to talk to your kids about drugs. No, so this episode is the Hard Fork music episode, and it is a direct response to one of the questions that we get asked the most, which is, where can I find the amazing music that plays in your episodes? Yes, every week we give you the email address for this show, and every week you email us saying, where can we listen to that?

1:24The verdict is in people don't like the talking, but they do like the music. They said, what if these two guys just didn't talk at all? Would the show maybe be better? And we're going to find out this week. And I think something that people don't realize is that we actually have at the New York Times a team of in-house composers who make custom music for every podcast, including ours. This is not the norm in the podcast industry. Usually people, you know, go onto music libraries or they find songs that are sort of out there on the internet and they pull those into their podcast. But not us. We are artisanal and we make our music from scratch.

1:55Yeah, and you know, as somebody who does not work at the New York Times, when I joined to make this show and they said that they had a team of composers, I mean, it was like they told me that they had a team of astronomers. I was like, wait, what do you mean? But it was true. There was a whole team of people and they are insanely talented. They work on incredibly short deadlines. And I'm not exaggerating when I say truly, everything they've ever made for the show, I'm in love with. It's so good. And so today we are going to give you the very special Hard Fork music episode. We will be back next week with the regular episodes where we talk about the news.

2:27But this week, I thought we should just grant our listeners most frequent requests and just play for them all of the music on this show. That's right. This show wants to be in service of its listeners. And so look, if there's something you want, ask for it, maybe we'll do it. So we're going to do this in two ways. We'll do an interview with two of the composers, Dan Powell and Alicia Baetup, who help make the music that goes on our show. And then we'll just play what they have essentially termed a hard fork mega mix, which is all of the music that they've made just sort of blended together in a seamless or DJ style mega mix.

2:59If you just want to hear the music, you can also find all of the songs we're about to play on a special playlist on our YouTube channel. And you can find that at youtube.com slash hard fork. So if you just wish hard fork was essentially chill lo-fi beats to study to, it is now there available for you on youtube.com. All right, let's bring in Dan and Alicia Beth.

3:26Dan Powell, Alicia YouTube. Welcome to Hard Fork. Hey, thank you for having us. Hey, guys. Where are you right now? I'm just looking. You've got like instruments behind you. It looks very cool and musical. Yeah, I'm in my home studio in Brooklyn, New York. So behind me is the Moog that I've used on a lot of Hard Fork cues and then various guitars and acoustic panels. I call it the home studio, but it's a bedroom. Home studio is a state of mind. You two and your team of composers at the New York Times are some of my favorite parts about making this podcast. And frankly, you don't get enough love for the work that you do.

4:10And I would include myself in that. Sometimes we just have amazing sound that plays on the show. And I'm like, where did that come from? Who made that? And the answer is always that you and your team have put together just some amazing original compositions for us. So I want to start by just thanking you, because I think a large part of what we hear from listeners is that they just love the music of this show. It's so true. You know, I feel like when people listen to a podcast like ours, which is essentially, you know, people talking about the news, maybe the last thing that they expect is they're going to hear incredible music.

4:42And yet on Hard Fork, they've been hearing it since the beginning. So we owe that to you and your team. And thank you so much. No, thank you. It's so much fun to make. This is, we do a lot at the times. Hard Fork is a show we work on that's like, I don't know, it's just like joy constantly. It's constant joy. It's so much fun to make things for Hard Fork. So one thing I do know about how the music gets made for New York Times podcasts is that every show kind of has a sound or a vocabulary of sounds. Like when I made Rabbit Hole, which is a podcast I did a few years ago, Dan, you and I and our production team spent a bunch of time talking about what the sound of that show should be.

5:28So maybe just describe briefly what the sound of Hard Fork is to you. 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. Yeah. That's obviously still a part of it, but it's not the primary thing. Yeah. I'm actually looking at it right now because it's like, what did he say?

6:07It was so inspirational. Yeah, what did he say? What did Davis say? He said the aesthetic of the show, light, smart, funny, fun, knowing but accessible, skeptical but open-minded, sitting around drinking White Claws with your buds, a good hang. And from there, he said some even more inspirational things. But I remember opening up that brief and being like, what? Yes. Like the New York Times is making what? So to answer your question, I think musically we don't take things too seriously. I think we try to embrace joy as much as possible. There's definitely like, you know, you can turn in music where we might be like, oh, it doesn't have the hard fork sound just yet.

6:53It needs a little digital something, a little glitchy something. I think glitches are very important in this world. Because of all the mistakes we make. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to really highlight it. Yeah, joyful and glitchy is how we are typically described. So I think that fits. 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 a little bit. Yes. 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.

7:35Do you feel that way because Kevin and I are freaks? No comment. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. I want to ask about what might be my favorite piece of music on Hard Fork, which is our theme song. And Dan, am I right that you took the lead on the theme song? Yeah, that's right. 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 themey enough.

8:07But yeah, it was originally written just as a idea. And then it sort of gradually became the theme. Do you remember like what you were thinking or how did the Hard Fork theme come about? the theme uh 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 i know either kevin or casey said oh i think i did say that i thought horns would be cool yeah um 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 the 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.

8:47This feels like a good work for hard work. So that just goes to show - If you had not run back to your desk, we might not have the hard fork horns. Yes. And it was worth holding it another two and a half minutes. Sorry, I don't know if that's okay to say. No, that's very okay to say. I mean, the thing that I love about it is that it conveys a sense of fun and optimism. And we always have known on the show that we are going to talk about some of the most challenging and upsetting things that happen in the world. But from the start, it was important to Kevin and I that when people listen to it, at least in some moments, they had a good time.

9:28And I feel like every week when I hear the hard fork horns, I'm like, OK, let's let's enjoy something about this life, you know. And it just anyway, from the first moment I heard it, I was in Slack saying, can this please be the theme? Oh, well, that's glad, glad to hear that. And yeah, I mean, I think the optimism and sense of, you know, okay, it's not all doom and gloom. There's, 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.

10:10You have a sort of 8080 type drum machine. And then there's some synths, but the synths also have a sort of almost, you know, 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 bop 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 tell us about the playlist that we're about to hear. 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.

10:48It starts with a selection of the earliest days where Alicia, myself, Marion, and Diane, our sort of core composition team, were 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 sound cue mix that comes in? Yeah, it then goes into a sound cue mix, which is, these are the cues, the stingers that we make for episodes. Sometimes they're recurring, sometimes they just live in the moment. But I put together a few minutes of the sound cues of the show.

11:27And then the sound cue mix is going to go into what we affectionately call the freak flag mix, which is, it's wild. It's a lot of drum and bass. Maybe Dan, if you want to talk more about that. Yeah, it's everything over 150 BPM that we couldn't make fit in the other parts of the mix. It was 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 that was left on the cutting room floor, but that we felt like, oh, this should still have a nice little last hurrah moment. And you may want to check with your doctor to make sure it's okay to listen to 150 beats per minute, because that can really get your heart going.

12:03Yeah, this is the part of the mix that will make you want to get up and dance. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts. We love working with a team of such talented composers and musicians. Yeah, it's the best. You guys are the best. Thank you. Thank you so much. When we come back, everybody report to the dance floor. It's time for the Hard Fork Megamix.

12:39Kevin, you ready to drop those beats? Let's do it. Hit it.

12:55Thank you.

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16:51I'll just bring this thing to you eventually get through this process and we'll get through this process. Thank you.

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22:31Let's catch it.