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 upc

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 h

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 spi

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

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) follow

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, mo

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 Psychedel

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

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 u

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 Es