The Film Scorer Nicholas Marcus

To celebrate his first full-length tv series score, Gareth Coker joins The Film Scorer podcast! You video game fans in particular may know Gareth from his work scoring games like Ori, Ark, and Halo Infinite, but Gareth hasn't stopped there. Given that he's already scored the various Ark games, it's no surprise that he was tapped to score Ark: The Animated Series, the animated adaptation of the Ark games. As such, we spend much of our interview talking about his scores for both the show and the game series and the interaction between the two, such as shared palettes and themes (including for the Broodmother fights). Along the way, we also talk about things like the score for Shōgun (Gareth's a fan), the keys behind making great exploration music (with a shoutout to Jesper Kyd's score for Assassin's Creed 2), and plenty more.

Candidly I wasn't super familiar with Gareth's music previously, other than his work on Ori and the Blind Forest, largely because I don't really play video games, which in turn probably limits how much video game music I listen to broadly. So preparing to talk with Gareth gave me the chance/excuse to start digging into his other scores, primarily for the Ark games. With Ark: The Animated Series, Gareth is able to bring the Ark palette into tv, with a massive orchestral score that's actually packed but also heavily focused on building great character themes. The success and quality of the score is, in part, a testament to the resources given to Gareth in the scoring process, something I'd love to see every studio do!

You can find out more about Gareth on his website. Ark: The Animated Series is currently streaming on Paramount+ while Gareth's score, and much of his other music, is widely available digitally.

Five-time Grammy winner Mike Post joins The Film Scorer podcast! A lot of you will probably be familiar with Mike already, who boasts one of the most impressive tv resumes of all time. For those of you that aren't, Mike's responsible for the two-note “dun-dun” sound in Law & Order, as well as themes and scores for shows like The Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, The A-Team, Magnum P.I., NYPD Blue, L.A. Law, various Law & Order shows, and many, many more. He's also played for and with tons of classic artists, like Sonny & Cher and Kenny Rogers, and has produced albums for a number of artists, including Van Halen. Frankly, it's one heck of a career. Despite all that, Mike and I focus our conversation on something a bit different: his new album, Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta (though of course we still talk a bit about some of those other pieces too - they're too intriguing to pass up!).

Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta marks Mike's first non-tv album in something like 55 years. I assumed that would be particularly exciting, releasing music that's his, but he surprised me by saying "[t]he music I make for TV is my own music, it’s just attached to somebody else’s art.” It's a very cool mixture, with half of the album being an exploration of an orchestra and bluegrass rhythm section and the second half exploring orchestra and the blues. He's also pulled in some of the heaviest hitters in each respective genre to make up the rhythm sections - highly recommend looking up each player!

You can find out more about Mike on his website. Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta is currently available on all major platforms here.

Last year's Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey drew a pretty divisive reception, but my favorite part, Andrew Scott Bell's score, rose above all the noise and discord. With Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 about to release, Andrew joins me on The Film Scorer podcast. Unsurprisingly, Andrew and I spend a good chunk of the interview talking about his scores for both parts, including the aspect that impressed me the most: how he crafts an organic, "real" sounding score in the face of a very limited budget. Along the way, he talks about the importance of staying a bit playful, he showcases some of the weird, custom instruments used in his scores (like the "beehiveolin", a cello made out of a bear's skull, and the "glorious box"), and Andrew plays some clips from his scores for parts 1 and 2. The latter aspect was really cool: Andrew had a number of cues ready to go to give a closer view into the sound of the score.

You can find out more about Andrew on his website. Andrew's various scores are available on all major platforms, while Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 plays in theaters from March 26-28, with the score release likely to follow shortly thereafter.

Another year, another list of the ten "best" film scores, this time I'm running through 2023. These scores aren't presented in any particular order - I intended to go alphabetically, but instead ended up going by vibes instead, wherever the solo conversation took me. At the end of the day, even though these are described as the "best", they're really just favorites - the idea of something being "best" in the arts is silly, and any attempt to discover that sort of "truth" futile. Feel free to chime in with some of your favorites from the world of film and beyond!

Composer Tom Schraeder joins me for my first-ever in-person interview. Tom and I broke the ice by chatting for about an hour in my kitchen before heading downstairs and hitting record, and I think the comfort really shows up here. Tom has scored a number of horror films particularly, in addition to a long career as a folk musician, and we use both as jumping off points for our discussion, digging into more conceptual pieces rather than focusing on any single particular score or piece of music (although plenty still come up. As such, it's a pretty wide-ranging conversion, not only hitting a few of his old and upcoming scores, but also things like anxiety, finding musicians to work with, and music serving as a way to memorialize those who've passed.
 

You can find out more about Tom on his website. Tom's various scores, and much of his other music, are available on all major platforms.

Composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch joins the show! Emilie's latest score is for the film All of Us Strangers, a sort of romance-fantasy-supernatural film that I found absolutely moving. As such, we primarily talk about her score for that film, including talking about striking an emotional balance (one that feels organic but not manipulative), avoiding falling into "period" piece clichés, and more. We then meander into other topics, like the use of Michel Legrand's score from The Go-Between in May December and the freedom that horror gives composers.
You can find out more about Emilie on her website. All of Us Strangers is currently in theaters, and Emilie's score is available on all major platforms with a curated vinyl release forthcoming. You may have seem me talk about how much I love when a score release is curated, so it shouldn't be a surprise to say I'm looking forward to that!