0:05

Hello, this is Chris Porter, creator of

0:07

Solar. If you've listened through the show's credits,

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you might have noticed that I composed all of the music

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for the show as well. On the behind

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the scenes excerpt for This week, I spoke

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with Jenni Curtis, director and producer and

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voice of Allie and executive producer

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Bill Curtis to discuss the process behind

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scoring solar here. The three

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of us are discussing the four note main title

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theme and the significant hidden meaning behind

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it.

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The theme is incredibly powerful and

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it's four notes.

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I've said this before, but in the writing

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of it, in the conception of it, the

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sun is a force to be reckoned with,

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and it was definitely not to spoil anything.

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I made a ground rule from the get go that no

0:46

one is ever allowed to control the sun. They

0:48

can fight to use its power. That could

0:50

be a thing. But no one gets to say, Oh,

0:53

I'm just going to take the sun's core. Like, No,

0:55

the sun is an entity that we have

0:57

to cope with. So in the music,

0:59

I wanted there to be that same sense of

1:02

neither good nor bad, just something

1:04

massive and unfathomable.

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So as a result, the main four notes

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are a EGF, which is not

1:10

technically in major or minor. It's literally

1:13

just four notes in a modal sentence.

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And I can make it sound major. Minor if I had

1:17

it in the C or C-sharp. The theme itself

1:19

is just those four notes, and it exists kind

1:21

of outside of any sort

1:24

of modal rationale that we would need to

1:26

think about. And in the scoring

1:28

of it, I just wanted it to keep repeating and

1:30

just get bigger and bigger with the bass

1:32

getting louder and louder until it just

1:35

cut off and drifted out into space, which

1:37

was as much as I thought about the composing.

1:40

And a lot of that came through in the orchestration

1:42

of it where I was like, Oh no, this is the sound

1:44

that I'm hearing and this is the distortion

1:46

that I'm hearing on it and this is the feeling of it

1:49

spiralling out into nothingness. And

1:51

that's where that came from.

1:52

How long did the theme take you?

1:54

Well, it's not like a continuous like I

1:56

sat down and was like, We're going to do this today.

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I would go over to my piano to do something and I'd

2:00

be like, I want this combination of

2:03

notes. And I knew I wanted to be simple. I didn't know it's going to be four

2:05

notes, but I was like, I just need something simple. And

2:07

I would just try some stuff and I'd be like, I'm not

2:09

really hearing that. And then I'd go shower

2:11

and then I'd come back and try a couple more notes. So it

2:13

wasn't like four days of intensive labour,

2:15

but it definitely took about four days until I

2:17

found that combination of notes. And then I

2:19

was like, We're going to sit with that for a while. After

2:21

a few days I came back and I was like, I think

2:23

that's it. That feels really good to me. We're going to

2:25

go with that.

2:26

I want to talk about all of the various

2:28

ways you think of these themes and how

2:31

you come to them. But I especially my

2:33

absolute favorite cue in

2:35

the entire show, which we hear a couple of times,

2:37

is the human theme, which. If

2:41

you go back and listen to.

2:44

We first hear it in three three with Jessa.

2:46

Yeah, and then we hear it in five.

2:49

I want to know what you're calling a human theme.

2:52

I wasn't interested in writing like, Jamal's

2:55

song or like Wren's

2:58

theme.

2:58

Can you explain what the theme is?

3:00

Yeah. Like, a great example,

3:02

obviously, is Star Wars, right? Where

3:04

you hear the bum, bum, bum,

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bum bum. The da da da da da.

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That is the Luke Skywalker

3:11

Jedi theme. It's called the Motif,

3:13

oftentimes. And it's something that John Williams

3:16

just mind blowing.

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He's the best at it. I

3:20

just took the route of I don't

3:22

want characters to have themes.

3:24

I want my thematic material to have

3:26

themes. So I wanted there to be like a distressed

3:29

theme or programming a theme,

3:31

different little tiny motifs. And they all had to be

3:33

real simple and just spread out

3:35

like Simsek did get kind of a theme with the bum,

3:38

bum, bum, bum, bum bum

3:40

that you hear a few times.

3:41

So the human theme, which

3:43

is my favorite piece of music

3:46

in this show, and it's probably because I

3:49

lean into the emotion of things. And to

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me that is the most emotionally gut

3:53

wrenching piece that comes under

3:55

some of the most emotionally gut wrenching

3:57

moments. But this was not

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something Chris composed originally

4:03

for this show. So I want to hear

4:05

the story of where the song came from.

4:08

So this is actually a video you can if you dig around

4:10

on Facebook and if you can find this video. My

4:12

parents had moved down to Solomon's

4:15

in Maryland, and in

4:17

their time of finding a place there to live,

4:19

they had come across this beautiful

4:21

art sculpture and garden park

4:23

called Anne-Marie Gardens. It's just a gorgeous

4:26

place to walk around because in the middle of

4:28

the forest and the trees, they've just put

4:30

artwork from different people. And sometimes

4:32

it's massive sculptures and sometimes it's just little paintings

4:35

that they've painted into the knots of the trees.

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And so it has this completely otherworldly

4:39

feel of just walking into some kind

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of fairy wonderland where there's art everywhere.

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And like, sometimes it's an upside down astronaut on

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a rock, and sometimes it's like this gorgeous

4:48

sculpture with these completely abstract

4:50

figures. And at one point

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they had put a green upright piano

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in the middle of the forest, and it was not

4:57

very well in tune because it was out in the woods for

5:00

four months, but it was in tune enough

5:02

that people could play it. And so I was there with

5:04

my family and they were like, you know, you should sit

5:06

down and play something, come up with something. So

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I was like, Well, give me a couple of minutes, because I'm not a very good

5:11

improviser. I just kind of know the feel.

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And so I started just playing the one note over

5:15

and over again, which again is both meant

5:18

to be internally retrospective,

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but also the ticking of the clock in this

5:22

particular moment, because like pianos are nothing but

5:24

mechanical. To me, that's just the way that I feel about them.

5:27

And I so I came

5:29

up with this theme and I just

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played it and it's it's not very

5:33

complicated, it's very simple, but it just had this

5:35

nice, lilting quality. And

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at this point, this was very early on

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in the stages of even dreaming up somewhere. And

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my mom was like, That

5:44

should be a theme. And so, like, it sounds like someone floating

5:46

in space. And I was like, Well, we'll see,

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Mom. We'll see if that happens. Sure

5:51

enough, when I started working

5:53

on Jess's spiel about

5:56

her other self, I was like, What

5:58

was that video? What did I play? And I actually had to like,

6:00

dig it up on Facebook because my father shared

6:02

it to Anne Marie Garden's Facebook page and

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I transcribed it for myself and I was

6:06

like, This actually would work really well here. But

6:09

then I was like, What? What is the theme? What

6:11

is the what is the theme representing? And

6:13

it kind of became this thing of

6:15

when someone. Finally

6:18

breaks apart enough to show their inside

6:20

self to someone else. It became that

6:22

and what I called the human theme. But how

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do you get over it?

6:27

I had to try.

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Really hard. I

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wish there was some words of wisdom or some

6:37

catchy thing that inspired me. But

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there's not. There's

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only the simple decision that

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every time I wake up. I

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do the best I can.

6:51

Look, I haven't been through

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any kind of trauma like you've experienced.

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So I hope not. Now,

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I hope you never will. But

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here's the thing to remember Every

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time your life changes, for

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better or worse, you

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lose the other version of yourself.

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There's always the other you. The

7:15

one that said yes. The one that said

7:17

no. The one that wasn't

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hit by a drunk driver.

7:21

So you, like, create a voice for

7:23

the music and then you just start attacking

7:25

your keyboard to try to see what comes up

7:27

the way that it works for me. Especially

7:31

because I wrote it as I would have a vibe in mind

7:33

where I'm like, This moment needs to sound

7:35

tense and hollow, and I can't really explain

7:38

to you what a hollow sounds like to me, but

7:40

I know it when I hear it. Not this moment

7:42

that I just played, but like there are some moments

7:44

with Margaret where I was like, This needs to feel

7:46

like something's ramping up, but it's unclear

7:48

what I feel a hollow sound here. And

7:50

so then I would figure out musically

7:53

what's going on to get to that point,

7:55

and then I would go back and re orchestrate

7:57

it and try to find the sounds that captured

7:59

the vibe that I have in my brain. That's

8:03

only a short clip of all the things we discussed

8:05

in the solar panel. In the extended interview,

8:07

we discuss the technicalities of music creation,

8:10

using music as sound design, and even

8:12

more behind the scenes stories about the creation

8:14

of solar. Check out our Apple Podcast

8:16

Premium channel to hear more.