Join soft-spoken ‘Unwell’ composer Stephen Poon in a gentle midwestern music composition breakdown. For fiction podcast ‘Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery’, Stephen’s influences ranged from Irish traditional music to the retro sound of Nintendo game cartridges. The Unwell Theme is a rollicking, foot-stomping soundtrack born of a nerve-wracking recording process with a host of live string musicians. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.
TRANSCRIPT
INTRO
The piece of music we’re listening to in the background is the Unwell closing theme. Today, we’ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You’re listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. We break apart a song soundtrack or composition and get into the insights into how it was made. My name is Steven Poon. I’m a composer based in Chicago, USA. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 81, the Unwell closing theme by me, Steven Poon. Thanks for listening in.
MENNONITES
Unwell is a Midwestern Gothic mystery. It’s about a young woman returning to her hometown, the fictional place of Mount Absalom, Ohio, where everything is a bit more spooky than it seems at first. And this piece is the outro theme, which also plays under the ending credits. I’m from Ohio and in rural Ohio, we have a lot of Mennonites, which are like Amish people. They don’t use a lot of technology. Like it’s kind of anathema. When I’m driving to Columbus, or Cincinnati, there’s some stops where you might actually run into a horse and buggy and there are some religious communities that don’t make use of modern technology. And so it was really at the forefront of my mind going into this setting to not include a lot of synths and digitized music. There are loads of real, actual instruments in the track. I’ve been far more used to sequencing music, and to be able to go into the studio with half a dozen musicians was really rewarding.
CHARANGO
Take a listen to this. It’s not a guitar. It’s not a mandolin. It’s a charango. It’s one of a number of instruments that we recorded live for the Unwell theme. A charango is a Peruvian stringed instrument. It’s 10-stringed. And traditionally, it was made from an armadillo shell. This was an instrument that I had found when I was in Peru for my honeymoon, and really took to it. I thought it was a beautiful sounding instrument. And the first thing that I even wrote for the track was on the charango when I was in Peru, and I found a luthier, who was making these instruments. And you could still smell the sawdust in the air of his shop. And he didn’t even speak English. So I think it was his daughter who was translating for people who came into the shop and only spoke English. And so this was a melody that I had been picking around on. And it got stuck in my head so bad that I’m like this…this has to go somewhere.
INFLUENCES
I’ve had a lot of influence when it comes to music over the years. So here’s like a few things that came to mind as this track came together. First and foremost was The Chieftans. I really like Irish session music. There’s really this tone of freedom and playfulness that comes from it. I’m thinking of a rural, less populated place. I had recently been watching Deadwood. So the Deadwood soundtrack by David Schwartz. That opening theme was also in my mind. I’ve always had a lot of inspiration from specifically Japanese RPG soundtracks to music from the late 80s, early 90s. There’s not a lot of samples going into these songs. Very simple melodies that can very easily get stuck in your head. Because you’re only working especially with the original Nintendo, there are only like four different samples that you could really fit in a cartridge. And I don’t really want to go too deep into this because it’s not a common game. It’s like literally a visual novel. That’s a spin off of an RPG that was released in the 90s. We can get into that. I just feel like it might be a little obscure!
JEFFREY NILS GARDNER
Jeffrey Nils Gardner was involved with this music and really all the music of Unwell too. And when they were working on an older project, Our Fair City, there was no music. And I approached them and said, “Hey, would you like a theme song?” And that was that! They did that show for eight seasons. And then when Unwell started, it was kind of a natural progression of this collaboration. And it was really cool to finally do some work with Jeffrey that involved live music. And they could, they could record, they could produce and they could mix the song. We were recording on a college campus because that’s where Jeffrey was doing their masters at the time.
RECORDING LIVE MUSICIANS
Going into recording, I didn’t I didn’t know who was going to be there. I think I remember there being a list of musicians, but it hadn’t really internalized before I got into the studio. It was my first time in this space. And so walking in, we’re setting up the studio, no one else’s there. It’s me, the recording engineer. You know, we’re wrangling cable. And I’m, I’m a little anxious, because there’s a lot of unknown, going into the studio like that. One thing that was really important for me was to make sure we got the tone of the song right, and the atmosphere of a small town and the unspoken things that you always get in that kind of small community. This was my first time meeting, recording and performing with all the instrumental performers on the Unwell theme. So I really kind of went in with a thought of like an Irish session, where you have a bunch of musicians who come together in a pub, you don’t know who’s going to show up, but they all know the song If you really want to have a lot of fun with it and have that come through and the track and so on. We walk in, and all you can really hear is the sound of cable being laid on the floor. And you know, your heartbeat. Then the others arrived and we started recording the boot stomps. So the boot stomps were really important. It’s a form of punctuation and exclamation points at the very start. I really wanted something that could maybe slightly startle the listener, like the end credits of a TV show when you see the first name of the credit and the first note of the song hits. After that, we wanted to include even more percussion, particularly a little bit of hand percussion on top of the boot stops. So we threw in an egg shakers because they just happened to be in my guitar bag to add a little bit of texture to that percussion. The next is banjo. And that’s Gunnar Jebsen. And we gave him a lot of freedom to really do whatever he wanted. On top of the melody. We also had Lauren Kelly, a multi instrumentalist. We started her on guitar. And then we went in and did some individual tracks with her playing cello to add a really nice, you know, lower piece to the track. We brought in Travis Elfers, to do viola. I really wanted to have strings on this and was glad that we’re able to have that fourth Unwell theme in the middle of the track. You hear this slightly dissonant voice come in. And that’s Betsy Palmer. You can give her anything and she will internalize it and sing it. It’s a lot of fun to work with her. I played guitar on the track, which is the first strum you hear at the start. Mel Ruder isn’t just a recording engineer on the show Mel Ruder is the recording engineer on the show, and is most often present for the episode recording.
THE CELERY FESTIVAL
So when season one of Unwell was being put together, we knew what songs we wanted to include for the entire season. including an episode with a celery festival that has a jingle writing contest. So I was writing music for groups of musicians that were playing a folk song, a punk rock song, even a kind of a barbershop quartet for a jingle. I wasn’t in a space or I was just thinking of one particular genre of music or even a kind of unifying style of music. It was all over the place. And it was really creatively satisfying. So as we were putting together all the tracks for Season One, I wanted to do a very short kind of stinger intro piece that would kick off every episode. And the closing theme would start out with this mirror of that stinger. So it opens with this simple three note ascending melody. And the stinger is a three note descending melody that really just bookends every episode as a whole. We use multiple microphones to record each instrument. And so we wanted to be able to use both of those sources. Mix them together. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s what a guitar sounds like with multiple microphones, here’s just pointed at the neck. Now, here’s the microphone on the body. So here’s what the banjo sounds like with multiple microphones. Here’s the neck. Now let’s crossfade to the body. Here’s how the charango sounds at the neck. The body.
RUSTY STANDISH
There is a moment in season one, featuring a composition by a fictional songwriter Rusty Standish. Let’s take a listen. The script originally described this song as Nick Drake, after a few cocktails and a long walk home. So that was a really fun descriptor to try to work with, especially because I’d never listened to Nick Drake before. So I took an afternoon, sat down, had a drink and just listened to like three hours of music. I wrote, played guitar and sang on the track.
SHOW NOTES
* Listen to audio drama Unwell unwellpodcast.com
* Unwell Patreon page www.patreon.com/hartlifenfp
* Stephen Poon stephenpoon.bandcamp.com/
MUSIC CREDITS
The Chieftans – Morning Dew
David Schwartz – Deadwood Main Title Theme
Miki Higashino – Withered Earth
SFX CREDITS
Charango freesound.org/people/Bmangelo/sounds/466485/
Horse cart freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/
Cables freesound.org/people/Hupguy/sounds/138246/
Manic kid laugh freesound.org/people/Huminaatio/sounds/189278/
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Discover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Headphones recommended.
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* View transcript, credits and show notes howimakemusic.com
* How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann johnbartmann.com
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