MAVS | Music, Inspiration and Creative Process - Talking to Death with Payne Lindsey

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Talking to Death is released every Friday and brought to
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com or on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Talking to Death is a production of Tenderfoot TV and
iHeart Podcasts. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Welcome back to Talking to Death. It's been a few
weeks since we've put out a new episode. Apologies for
the delay. We've been hard at work on Up and Vanished,
and because of the time constraints involved in investigating a
case in real time, we just haven't had enough time
to dedicate to Talking to Death. But rest assured. We're
back to it with a new episode this week, and

(00:43):
we have a really fun guest. If you've been a
fan of Tenderfoot shows for a while, you may know
the name MAVs. It's an acronym for Makeup and Vanity Set.
MAVs is the musician who composes the Tenderfoot music across
all of our podcasts. He's an incredibly hard working guy
with an incredibly creative talent. Pain had a chance recently

(01:05):
to sit down with MAVs to talk about how they met,
how They've worked together for nearly ten years to create
some of the most beautiful music to go along with
some of the most tragic stories that Paine tells. This
is one you definitely don't want to miss, So let's
jump into it this week. Make Up in Vanity Set.

Speaker 4 (01:34):
I just want to ask you, why are you the
way that you are? In what way?

Speaker 2 (01:40):
In what way?

Speaker 4 (01:41):
I'm just fucking with you.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
You're like, Okay, this is gonna i'mbout to dig deep here.
I thought it'd be kind of fun because I mean,
all the podcasts we do at Tenderfood, I would say
ninety nine point nine percent of them have your music
in them. So it's a huge component to what we do,
and I feel like we rarely pull the curtain all

(02:05):
the way back on that particular credit process all set
the stage right back in what was it twenty seventeen,
twenty eighteen, I was making Atlanta Monster with House Stuff Works,
which I Heart eventually bought, and I was on music
bed and I was looking for songs music to score

(02:28):
the podcast. I found like five tracks that I thought
were really cool and they were SYNTHI and they had
this eighties vibe that wasn't stranger things. It was different,
it was cooler, and it just had like this consistent
feel I was really looking for. And it was all
by an artist named Makeup in Vanity said, and I

(02:48):
was like, who the hell is this person? You were
a ghost, but you did have a Twitter at the
time when it was called Twitter, and I DMed you
and then we eventually had a conversation and I convinced
House of Works to spend any money at all to
pay for a composer for a podcast, which at that

(03:12):
time they thought that was crazy, and it was a
little crazy because like no one was really doing that,
and so we scored you scored that and I think
we signed up for paying you for ten songs, But
how many do you think you ended up making?

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Uh? I don't remember how many songs. I know that
in the end it was I kept like a running
playlist in iTunes, and I think in the end it
was like three and a half hours of music, so
it was way more than ten songs. But it was
also one of those things too, where like we you know,
at that point, I was kind of a I was
in my first year of being full time music, you know,

(03:52):
I'd walked away from my day job, and I was like,
I'm gonna see if I can make this work. And
so when you came along, it was like I really didn't.
I mean the only only true crime podcasts, only podcast
really I'd ever listened to, was probably Serial And so
you laid the kind of groundwork of like this is

(04:13):
I did this show up and vanished and I went
and looked that up and listened to it, and I
was like, okay, this is like this is cool. I
dig this. And you kind of gave me the pitch
on Atlanta Monster, and I remember in the beginning it
was like it's you know, it's late seventies, eighties, so
we're thinking like synthesizers and stranger things got tossed around

(04:35):
a lot, which you know, at that point, every pitch
I heard was like stranger things, you know, and it
was great. And that's not knocking stranger things, Like I
think stranger Things opened the door for people like me
to be considered. You know, in that conversation, do you.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Feel like they that show repopularized, like repopularized that music
or kind of made it a little bit more mainstream And.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
I think so, I think I think the way Hollywood works.
I think the way entertainment works in general is you
get pigeonholed with whatever you do.

Speaker 4 (05:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
If so, if you go out and pitch yourself for
anything right now, people are going to go, oh, it's
paint Lindsay. He's the True Crime guy the podcast.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
Yeah, the guy that did that thing on the Crime
podcast one time.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
And so I think there was a general school of
thought like what a composer, what composed music for film
and TV should sound like. And I think all they
really did was they kind of opened the door for
people to consider, first of all, like artists because they
were from a band Survive. And then I think, you know,
the notion that you could have this synthesized thing. And

(05:40):
I always and we had this conversation too an Atlanta Monster.
It's like, you know, the music that you think you
hear in Stranger Things is not necessarily what you're hearing
because you're you're getting all this visual information, you know,
so you're seeing all this like you know, rabid eighties stuff,
and you in your mind you're like, oh, yeah, it's
like so eighty, but really the synthesis in that show

(06:02):
is way more like seventies kind of it's gnarlier, Like
if you go and listen to that score, it's so
much gnarlier without the visual, Like it's very it's rough
around the edges. And so when we started working it
was like, I think it's funny because with the Atlanta Monster,
Like I think the most stranger things ish thing about
that show is probably the theme, and then everything else
gets a lot darker because it was a dark story.

(06:23):
You needed to be in that space with that story.
And I don't know, it's cool because we did that
whole show via text and email.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, let's talk about that, because that sounds kind of unbelievable.
I feel like, but we literally we had we had
a phone call, we did a deal, we agreed to
work on this together, and I just started making cuts
of episodes, little segments, and I would just on my MacBook,
I message sends you a clip with no music, and

(06:57):
then I would just kind of describe what was going
on in the tone, and then you would interpret that
and do your own thing and send it back.

Speaker 4 (07:05):
And we just did.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
That for the most show. Yeah, the whole.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Show, like without even really verbally vocally expressing much.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
I think that I mean, at that point. How big
was Tenderfoot? How many people worked for Tenderfoot?

Speaker 4 (07:21):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (07:21):
Man, it was tiny, it was I mean this was
on the heels of Up and Vanish season one. So
season one of Up and Vanished ended in July of
twenty seventeen, and then immediately It's so Sworn came out
Sworn was I guess?

Speaker 4 (07:40):
Yep? Uh? During or right after that?

Speaker 1 (07:44):
And then the next question was, Okay, what what podcasts
am I hosting again?

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Is it?

Speaker 4 (07:51):
Is it up in Vantage season two? Or are we
doing this or that?

Speaker 1 (07:54):
And Dald had this idea to do to cover the
Atlanta child murders, and through like a weird series of events, Uh,
these guys who worked at Apple the podcast department at
the time, came to Atlanta Poncity Market Building where House
of Works was working out of and had a meeting
with Jason Hoak, which we know now, and somehow got

(08:18):
brought up that you know, the guys who make Up
and Vanished are upstairs, And eventually Jason emailed me and
I met with him downstairs, and then I started talking about,
you know, what we were doing next, and I loosely
pitched Atlanta Monster podcasts and kind of coincidentally, serendipitously, he

(08:42):
had a similar idea, like idea of making a podcast
on the same story, and from there we decided to
collaborate and make it, you know, make this the priority show.
So this was the second show I ever hosted, but
it was also being produced while I was on tour

(09:04):
for Updash, which was its own bizarre experience, and so
I was calling the serial killer in prison Wayne Williams
like literally before and off stage and in the weirdest
places imaginable, like I'm like, what existence is this? And

(09:26):
eventually I got I got sick of hearing that guy,
and I blocked around all numbers. But after Atlanta Monster,
we decided to keep working together. We were both at
a point I think in my career I realized the
value that original music brings to the storytelling that we're doing.

(09:51):
And I've always been somebody who is inspired by that
and uses that to kind of set my tone in
my mind in my writing and imagining a scene or
the vision as a whole. And so the next thing
we worked on was up in Vantaged season two, and
at this point we still had never met in person,

(10:12):
and so this months after Atlanta Monster, which was very
successful number one, I think for like a month, you know,
with a huge press run on it, and it was
a big hit success. And we started working on up
in Vantage season two. And this is where I want
you to pick up because we had not met yet.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
No, well, I guess worth saying at that point, like
podcasting was still pretty small, like the amount of the
amount of shows that were in existence were it was
pretty small, like because I remember that show came out
and it was sort of like, oh, okay, cool, you know,
and I remember at the time thinking like, oh that's neat,
you know, like it did it did well? Like I

(10:55):
had no I was making it up as I went along,
like I didn't know how anything worked, and you kind
of came in and were like, well, I'm doing the
show and and I think the whole that whole process.
If I learned anything through that process, right, I learned
that you and I work together really well, Like we
have a very similar kind of workflow where it's like,

(11:17):
don't overthink it, trust your gut, and we I think
almost immediately had a pretty good shorthand.

Speaker 4 (11:24):
And I agree with that.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
But for someone who doesn't really know exactly what you mean,
you know, trusting your gut, don't over think it.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
What what actions are? What do what do you like?
What actions are you taking? So I think the thing,
the thing that.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
Happens a ton in it from my perspective, is I'll
work on something and whatever the thing is, whether it's film, TV,
if it's a game, it could be anything. A lot
of times people come to the table and they say, hey,
this is my thing that I made, and I maybe
don't believe in it fully, like I'm shaky on it,

(11:59):
you know, and I need you to make music to
make it better, which is a really bad way to
start a partnership, I think, because you want to be
with somebody who has a vision, you know, who has
that vision and tru and believes in that vision. And
you know, up until that point, I had like put
out records, and I had worked on a handful of things.

(12:20):
And my first year in full time, I was like
chasing freelance work. I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go
do this. I was making I was making all these
like uh well, I was doing all these wine commercials
for a Chilean ad agency. I don't know how the
guy just found me on like Facebook and was like,
so I was, I was doing all this like like
music for it, yeah, just music music for these uh yeah.

(12:40):
They were based in Chile, and it was like he
was like, hey, I got this wine ad and he'd
send it to me and I would have to like
make a tycho rip off or something, you know, like
do some do some kind of like sound alike. And
you know, I was doing that just purely because I
was like, this is what you do, I guess. And
you know what I realized was you wanna you want

(13:03):
to be working with people that a the thing they're
doing is like their number one thing, right, It's like
that's they're they're fully invested in it. And then be
you want to work with people that have You want
to be on the same wavelength with them creatively, right. So,
and I think that's what was great about Atlanta Monsters,
Like I think right out of the gate, we kind

(13:25):
of understood what I understood, what you wanted, and then
we just I don't know. I always say that those
kind of gigs are the gigs that feel very effortless,
and I feel like Atlanta Monster, at least from my end,
felt very easy. It was easy work to do because
I like doing it, and because I think we we

(13:45):
got along. It wasn't like i'd send you a queue
and be like, well, I think you know you want
to do this, you want to do that. You like
a lot of times I just send you stuff and
you would just text me back and go dope, and
that would be that. And then we got right right
and like you know, those gigs are the best gigs
because you're like, okay, we are in lockstep, like we
get it. I get it, I get what you need,
and so we're just riffing on it, and you know,

(14:08):
I remember, I remember exactly. It was like it was
like around Thanksgiving. You texted me and you were like
it might have been on Thanksgiving, like I think you
texted me and you were like, hey, I'm doing this.
I'm doing season two of Up in Vanish. You should
come and work on that. And I remember like it
was like a no brainer. I was like, yeah, sure,
like let's go, you know, and you you were like great.

(14:30):
And then I think sometimes shortly thereafter, you were like, Okay,
well here's the information about it. It's this case in Crestone.
Come to crestone because you just have to experience it.
And I was like okay. And up until that point,
and I'm very much like behind the scenes, like yeah,
you're in the lab. Yeah, this whole process of you
interviewing me is like deeply stressful to me because I

(14:51):
don't want to be.

Speaker 4 (14:52):
So so like you're doing me a favor, right, So, like.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
I I was like okay, And it was one of
those things where I was like, all right, I'm have
to go meet this guy, and I'm gonna have to
go meet these people, and but I knew. I knew
that like going to Crestone sounded like fantastic. It sounded
and fantastic, and not in the sense like, oh that's awesome,
like in the sense of like it sounded like some
kind of weird fantasy. It sounded like a weird like Okay,

(15:21):
that sounds amazing and dangerous and scary and all of
the things. And I just sort of was like, well,
you know, it's one of those things that you buy
the ticket, by the ticket, you have to take the ride.
I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go. I'm just gonna
do it. And I remember you bought me a ticket
to Denver and I flew out and then you were
like hey, I flew in and you're like, hey, I'm
not gonna make it, so you're gonna crash in this hotel.

(15:44):
I got your hotel room, and I remember I went
into the hotel room and I just hung out in
this weird hotel like overnight. And the next morning you're like, hey,
I'm still not gonna make it, but my brother Mason
and this guy Rob are gonna pick you up. To
people I've never met in my life are gonna pick
You're gonna pick you up, and they're gonna drive you
to Crestone. And I was like okay. And I remember

(16:08):
I got all my stuff together and I sat in
the is this okay?

Speaker 4 (16:11):
Right?

Speaker 2 (16:12):
So I just sat in the lobby and these two
guys walk up. I'll never forget it, Like Mason walks
up and he's like He's like Matt. It was just
sort of like hey, and we went to this diner
and had breakfast, and then we got in the car
and we just drove for like three hours in the
car with these two random dudes. I just met uh
to Crestone, Colorado in the middle of nowhere, at the

(16:35):
foothills of the Crestone Mountains and that was an experience
I will never forget. I mean just being there and
seeing that place and like walking around. I had like
a I took like a field recording kit that I
had like sort of put together, and I had like

(16:56):
a portable recorder. I had like a little I had
like a microphone on a boom with like a zeppelin,
and I was like walking around and and I just
recorded so much stuff there. I got so much material
just in that first few days, Like we went everywhere
we went all they had a whole road of like
these religious like you.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
Know, like Buddhist temples and stuff, Buddhist temples.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
There was a shoe Ma center. There were like all
these different places, and we went to all of them
and they were mostly empty, and we just walked in
and I would record all the drums and bells and
all these sounds, and then all of that when in
the soundtrack, like all of that, the score of that
show is just dripping with Crestone, like the actual place.
And still to this day when I hear if I

(17:41):
hear that show or hear that music, all I can
think about is just wandering around Crestone and seeing and
I mean that you know that may or may not
come through to the person listening to it, but I
mean that places is like wrapped in that soundtrack really truly,
and I remember just how creepy it was, you know,
like we stayed in this airbnb, like right in the

(18:02):
middle of town, and it was the kind of town
where you rolled up and you walked around, you could
like feel the eyes on you. Because yes, it was
such a small community, like people are like, who are you,
Like you don't belong here? And then and also like
the majority of the people that were there, I mean,
there were people there that were super friendly, and those
people are oh yeah, podcast, but but there were a

(18:23):
lot of people there who just wanted to be off
the grid. And I remember, like you'd strike up a
conversation with somebody if you ask them anything about like,
oh where are you from, like they're like they don't
want to talk to you, you know.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, they moved out there to kind of get away
from that. Yeah, a lot of people did.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
They're escaping. And so I was out there for a
few days and recorded all that, and then I think
you showed up shortly thereafter, and that was the first
time we met in person. And yeah, that was kind
of the beginning of it, like in terms of just
doing a whole bunch of shows.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
I mean, if you've never been to Colorado, it's definitely
a one of a kind place.

Speaker 4 (19:03):
And speaking of being terrified there, I like, I.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Think I've to date had one of my one of
the most terrifying nights of my life there. At some
point I had flown out there.

Speaker 4 (19:17):
I think this was.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
This was after Actually this is the first time I
had ever been there, and I went there by myself
because my uncle lives there. I never I never said
that in the podcast. It's kind of like a handshake deal,
like he didn't really want to get wrapped up in it,
but he was also kind of my ace in the hole,
and he actually is in the podcast. I just don't
ever tell you he's my uncle. He's hilarious. He's been

(19:40):
there for twenty years. He knows everybody. He's like the
truest hippie, you know, my favorite, one of my favorite uncles.

Speaker 4 (19:46):
He's amazing.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
But I went there probably right after Christmas, just to
kind of get just an assessment of this place, this town,
this missing person case. And the first night I was there,
within the first hour, I was at his house and
we were smoking weed, we were drinking IPA's, and then

(20:10):
we went to the brewery and you know, my uncle
has probably an insane THHC tolerance that I don't have.

Speaker 4 (20:21):
But I took I took a.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Gummy and you know, next thing, you know, I'm in
this bar and I'm like, oh my god, this is
the highest I've ever been. I think I'm gonna die.
And he's like, all right, man, well I'm a head out.
You know where you're going. And I was like, yeah, yeah,
I had an Airbnb. Yeah, And I was like, uh, okay,

(20:47):
do you mind like me, like like following me there?
I make sure I'm going the right way. And I
was driving down this dark gravel road and I was
so paranoid that I thought that any moment I was
gonna drive off a cliff, even though when I woke
up in the daytime, it was just a flat road
with not even a fucking bump in it.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Were you staying in the dome? Were you in that.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Yes, I was staying in that domehouse and then own.
Even though my uncle. I asked my uncle to follow me.
The next thing, you know, I see these tail lights
behind me, in these this guy's flashing his lights and
I'm like, oh my god, it's the fucking cops. And
I pulled over and my uncle's like, man, that gummy's
hitting crazy and I was like.

Speaker 4 (21:32):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
And so then I get back to this Airbnb and
I don't know if you've ever stayed in a dome house,
but the acoustics in there are just weird.

Speaker 4 (21:44):
Man.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, it was like beyond this. Yeah, it was a
geodesic dome.

Speaker 4 (21:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
It was like, yeah, like you could hear like a
whisper from like way across the room in your ear,
like you know, in a certain spot. And so I
slept with all the lights on. I was absolutely terrified.
I was like, I'm never doing this shit again. Crestone
was a welcome to crestone, baby. Crestone was like a

(22:08):
haunted place. I mean it.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
And it's funny because like all those years later, I
mean a lot of people reach out to me after that.
Doc was on HBO about that lady because we talked
to her at some point the Yeah, and you know,
I think I remember that first night, like we were
in the Airbnb and we had kind of come back
for the evening and it was dark out and went

(22:31):
dark in Crestone is not dark like anywhere else. I mean,
it's like it's pitch black, like you can't see anything.
Remember lights, Yeah, And I walked out there. There was
a light on the back of the like the stairwell
for the Airbnb. And I remember I walked out and
I had my microphone and I put my headphones on

(22:52):
and I'm standing down there and it's like, I don't know,
probably ten thirty or eleven o'clock at night, and I
would point the microphone around. It was like a shotgun
mic you know, you pointed around, and I would hear
like voices like just out in the darkness, just people
just talk like and it wasn't anything. It wasn't like

(23:13):
I could hear what they were saying, but it was
like you could definitely make out that people were there
and you could not see them and you had no
idea what was going and it was it was it
was really unnerving, No, it was. I mean it was
so I remember. I think in the recording you can
hear me say like, holy shit, like it was very
like okay, you know. And but I think all of

(23:35):
my experiences in Crestone were kind of like that. I mean,
they were very like just you know, but then I
mean the gravity. I mean, coming into it, I had
no experience with true crime other than I had written
music for Atlanta Monster, right, So standing and looking at
Crystal's apartment and realizing that we're walking around in a

(23:56):
small town where people do go missing, and where this
person went missing, and where the likelihood that the person
who made that person disappear is there is barely high,
you know, and you know, that was really it was
a lot. That was my first experience at Tenderfoot with

(24:16):
grappling with that gravity. You know, the gravity of that
is really extreme and it and and in a lot
of ways, I mean for what I do. You know,
you're you guys experience this too, but it's different because
you're sort of record You're you're getting tape, you're recording interviews,
and then you're piecing all that together to tell the story.

(24:37):
And where I come in, I'm emotionally like reacting to
all of that. So my job is to sort of
and I and I think where where I maybe differ
from from other composers maybe is that I I really
I tend to just listen to stuff and just straight
up like I don't I don't know. I don't ever

(24:59):
go into thinking like, Okay, well we're going to need
like a stinger here, or we're going to need like
this thing here to punctuate that. I look at it
and I'm like, I'm going to just respond to this
candidly as emotionally as I possibly can. Like I remember
in Atlanta Monster, you know, the whole the whole bit
about Loubi being found, his body being found, and how

(25:20):
how devastating that tape was, and that queue is is
a devastating cue because I'm literally just responding to it,
you know, and I'm you know, and I feel like
all the shows share in that, you know, there's an
emotional currency there that's just really it's a lot. And
so Creston was my first real experience being on the ground,

(25:43):
like looking at a thing sort of face to face
and being like, you know, a person literally disappeared here,
and and how heavy that was, and and knowing you're
in the middle of nowhere. You're there, you don't have
a safety net, you know, you're just you're there.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
And since then, you've come along on most of the
trips we've done out in the field, right, how do
you feel like, you know, from your first experience being
being in Crestone, Colorado as a composer, how did that
inform your process and the music that you actually made,

(26:19):
and what value did you see in it too?

Speaker 4 (26:23):
You know, want to come to Montana.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
I always tell people that I came away from Crestone
absolutely like galvanized by that experience. I was like, this
is so incredible, you know, and I and I felt
like the work that came out of that was so
just felt really heavy and felt really true, you know,
and as a creative, like, that's all you could ever

(26:46):
really want. You just want to be true. You just
want to tell the true thing. And I remember the
show we did after that was Zodiac with iHeart and
you're like, hey, so we're doing Zodiac, And I think
the experience on Up and Vanish was the experience where
I was like, all right, I'm ready to pull the

(27:07):
trigger because you had sort of said come work for
Tenderfoot and I was sort of like, no, I don't
want to do that because I don't want a job.
I like left my job trying to make it.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
Yeah, You're like, I'm not doing the whole job thing
right now right.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
And then but after we're up and vanished after season two,
because we spent about a month in Denver working. You know,
I was out there for a couple of stints and
it was like about fifteen days each and I'd started
meeting more people on the team and I was like,
I'm not going to find this working relationship anywhere else,
and so I was like, Okay, let's do it. And
so I think Zodiac was the first show we did

(27:38):
where I was officially on board and I went out
to San Francisco and I remember thinking, we're going to
go to San Francisco. It's going to be the Zodiac
and I, you know, I was a huge fan of
the film, Fincher's film, and I got out there and
I got nothing because San Francisco in the seventies is
totally different than San Francisco is today.

Speaker 4 (27:58):
And yeah, I remember Detale now that that was one
of one.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Well I remember just I remember just feeling kind of
like let down about that. Like I remember going out
there and just feeling like, oh no, like I'm not
and kind of in a panic, if I'm honest, like
I kind of got out there like oh no, shit,
like I'm not getting all the stuff. You know, there's
no there's no grit here, there's no dirt, there's no
like what am I supposed to do? And what's funny

(28:24):
is I still ended up writing probably eighty percent of
the music that's in that show. I still wrote it
in San Francisco. We just had to like adapt and
be and think about it differently. And and I think
also just you know, being out there and having that experience.
You know, I think you and I are alike in

(28:46):
that there's an adaptability that has to happen where you
have to be flexible. You have to go into a
situation and say and I think this is true of
anybody who can is hopefully creatively successful as you go
out and you saw of say, okay, this may this
isn't Maybe it may not be going my way, you know,
it may not be gleaning all the stuff that I
thought I was going to glean, But it doesn't mean

(29:08):
that the work is going to go away, Like I
still have to do this and I still have to
figure it out. And you know, for me, the inn
with Zodiac was just the time period and looking at
it from an instrumental standpoint you know, I looked at
it and saw drum kit roads, you know, keyboard, bass, guitar.
I looked at it from an instrumentation, which is you know,

(29:29):
later on, later on down the road, skipping ahead a
little bit, you know, when we did Dead and Gone,
I remember you came to me and said, we're doing
a podcast about the Grateful Dead, and I thought, great,
I hate the Grateful Dead, like.

Speaker 4 (29:41):
And I was like, well, I can't even other songs.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
I don't. It was hates a strong word, but I
think at the time I was like, I have no
no inroads to that world. And you know, and again
it was the same kind of deal. It was like, okay, well,
let's limit ourselves to only instruments grateful Dad would have, right,
and and.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Let's make like suspenseful music and ariste that feels like
you want it to and like like and that's a
new challenge, right.

Speaker 4 (30:11):
Well.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
I remember, like the intro is still like that don't
don't right, And there's like gravel footsteps.

Speaker 4 (30:19):
That one of us had recorded. I think it might
have been from the tape of something, but you made
it into like a ticking metronome.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
We wound up in a cabin it was in Mount Desert.

Speaker 4 (30:32):
Oh, so that's where you got that. Okay, yeah, all
the there was gravel.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
I remember we rolled up to this cabins in the
middle of nowhere and it was right on the water
and beautiful. There was like a wreck of wood outside
and an axe and it was like because it was
like freezing cold at night, and so they had a
fire free standing fireplace in the middle of this place,
and we used to we would have that thing going
like all all the time. And I remember I took
this little table that they had and I set up

(30:56):
my stuff and I had a bass guitar and I
had like a synth, and I had some other stuff,
and but we went outside. We recorded the gravel outside
in that walkway. It was like you walking in the gravel.
And then also there's pages turning and that was like
one of the books on the bokshelf you recorded, I
recorded you turning pages and all of it. And the

(31:18):
whole idea was like, you know, thinking about the tape,
it was like that, you know, you always want to
follow the narrative, so you know they're talking about like, oh,
you know, the gravel lots or the fields where the
deadheads would all hang out and then you know, waiting
for the show or traveling to the show. And and
then also this notion that like there's an investigative journey

(31:38):
here where you're sort of out there following the story
and following the narrative and talking to these people and
trying to get you know. And it's weird because at
the time we did all that, and then we had
all that stuff, and I don't think you had gone
out to meet that guy, you know. I think that
stuff came later where you went out to approach him
and it was like terrifying and you had you had

(31:59):
to like, you know, bolt out of there.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yes, that came afterwards. That right, that came months later.
But we but we made almost all the other episodes
and the music kind of before then, and then the
last few we were doing a real time well.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
I think it was, yeah, and I think it was
you know, I remember being out there and I remember
distinctly thinking about how terrifying, like you're talking telling that
story about Crestone and the gummy right, like, how but
how terrifying it would have been. You're out there, you're
following the grateful dead, the Grateful Dead. Is this jam band.
It's like a happy existence. You know, they're just chasing

(32:40):
Nirvana basically, like they're just looking for looking to to
feel good, you know, and how the the sort of
underbelly of that is is a lot gnarlier. You know,
the drugs, the highs, the high highs and the low lows,
you know. And you know, we went out there and
we talked to people, and people would be very candid

(33:01):
about drugs. And I remember sitting those interviews with you
and being like I would be in the back taking
notes and writing down the names of all these drugs,
and then I would go on YouTube and just you know,
I shout out to Hamilton's Pharmacopeia from Vice. I watched
that whole series and it was essentially like, you know,
learning about all these crazy psychedelic drugs that people were

(33:22):
doing that I had never heard of, and that kind
of terrifying nature of that stuff. And so, you know,
I came at it from a standpoint of like, all right,
I'm gonna really lean into that. I'm going to lean
into the scariness of you know. And it's funny because
like in that soundtrack, there's a lot of it's probably

(33:42):
way more experimental I think in places total than any
other show we'd done. It was just really spaced out,
and but spaced out in a scary way.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
Like do you like giving yourself guidelines or parameters, like
example being I'm gonna try to strictly use instruments that
were around that the Grateful Dead would have used and
had that kind of be a starting point for me.
And then almost in a way, that's a creative challenge

(34:14):
to make something work.

Speaker 4 (34:15):
Do you do you look at it like that too.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Totally, I think. I mean, before I went to school
to study music, I really wanted to go to film school.
And you know when I was in I graduated high
school in two thousand and at the time, you know,
I was really into indie films, Like independent filmmaking was
a big deal at that point, and you had kind

(34:40):
of the higher eschelon, like you know, the Tarantinos of
the world. You know, he had he had just put
out pulp fiction, and but then there were all these
other people that were operating in Europe that were incredible,
like uh, you know, the Lars Venturers and you know,
all the guys that got folded into the And I
was really obsessed with the whole Dogma ninety five thing

(35:01):
where it was like, we're going to make these movies
and you have to adhere to the strict set of rules, right,
and those rules you can only you know, all the
cameras have to be handheld, all the titles have to
be done in camera. You know. There were all these
like strict rules that they made, and they made a
ton of movies using this this sort of guideline, and

(35:22):
they're all fascinating, you know, they're all really interesting. And
I always found, like I always found the place where
I was at my worst in college was I would
go into these studio sessions. We'd book time, and I'd
go in and I'd sit in this million dollar studio,
you know, the really fancy studio, tons of stuff.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
The one where you're like, I don't know what half
this shit does or if I even need this shit.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Well, it's like it's like all the school yeah, all
the outboard gear, a giant fancy console, and you sit
in there and you feel like, man, I feel like
my hands are tied behind my back. I don't it's
almost stif what's stifling creatively when you have everything at
your disposal, you know.

Speaker 1 (35:59):
Like you wanted to be more binary and more just fundamental.
And I'm I mean, I my whole existence. You know,
I wear I wear black every day. I eat the
same thing at the restaurant that I know. I like,
you know there's a there is there's a true habit. Yeah,
well there's a there's a decision fatigue. And that's by
design in a way. It's like you kind of are like,

(36:20):
this is the this is the way that I this
is the way I keep myself in a lane so
that when I'm working creatively, I know exactly what I
want to do. And my my whole studio, my space
in here is like that where you know, everything is
kind of designed in a way where it's all hooked in,
it's all ready to go. I don't want to patch
or unpatched things. I just want to work, you know.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
And when we work together, like if you're in the
studio with me, I find that's that's how we've always worked.
You know, we kind of just chase an idea, Like
if there's a threat, it's like, okay, pull that and
do that and see where it goes. And you know,
I don't think that that I don't think that process

(37:02):
has ever led us astray, no matter how weird it is.
You know. I remember coming up with uh, you know
the sound of bow in the Dead and gone? You
know that that crazy noise. You know. It's like once
we had that, we were like, Okay, this is it.
This is the like crazy sound.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
And it was like a It was like a reversed
uh whoosh or something that or what was it again?

Speaker 4 (37:30):
It was like this whoo.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
I think it was like it was a combination of
a couple sounds. And then I had run it through
a plug in. This company called Slate Nash makes something
called Cycles and it's a It has a big granular
engine in it, which means it takes the sound and
splinters it into it a thousand tiny pieces and it
what's nice about a granular synthesis is that it you

(37:55):
can take a sound and stretch it way out and
get these really crazy bizarre but you get all these
nice little artifacts and things like that. And I remember
I was just screwing around with it. I think I
had just gotten it. I was like mess around with it,
and like as soon as that sound happened, I think
we were it was like you me and maybe Rooney
was there and we were all like, Okay, that's the sound.

Speaker 4 (38:13):
You know.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
It was like this is it? Yeah? And because it
was so, it was terrifying, you know, it was like
a really startling But again that's the whole thing. It
wasn't like we sat down and went, well, you know
what would be good for that guys if we had
it. It was like no, we just we stumbled into it.
And I feel like my process musically is as like that.
I don't ever want to be the guy that sits
down and goes okay. So it needs to start at

(38:35):
this tempo, and it needs to be in this key
because this key equals this emotion. I just sort of
I'll find a sound and I'll follow it, and then
the work will sort of tell me what it needs
to be, and I'll just trust that process because to me,
that's the most genuine way to do it and it
always yields the most interesting results.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
So and then I go on the podcast. There was
a Boogeyman. His name was bo and he kept coming
up slowly but surely throughout the podcast, and you learn
more and more about this individual, and he's a mystery.

Speaker 4 (39:13):
Is he real? Where is he? Is he? Alive, did
he have any part in these murders?

Speaker 1 (39:19):
And so I wanted to have some sort of signifying
sound that you would kind of eventually subconsciously associate with
this person without having to say anything. And that's kind
of and you made the perfect sound. And then once

(39:39):
we at the end of the show, when I actually
find this guy, we take that little sound you've been
hearing and it becomes this really full blown almost like
if you subconsciously forgot about it. It feels familiar, and
it feels like it's coming and it's running at you
right now, right behind you.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Yeah, I mean podcasting it's weird because likedcast, scoring a
podcast is not like scoring anything else, in my opinion,
I think because largely, first and foremost you're really scoring
for like an audience of one. People don't get together
and listen to podcasts in groups. I mean, if they do, maybe,
I guess great, But most people are driving in the car. Yeah,

(40:20):
most people are driving in the car, or a lot
of people are listening to it in headphones. And what's
unique about headphones is, like, think about it, like, even
if you're sitting and watching a movie at home, the
chances that you would be watching that movie and headphones
are pretty slim, Like you're probably watching it on a
TV in your living room, and headphones do this thing.
It's like there's a level of intimacy, there's a proximity

(40:41):
there that you don't get anywhere else. And so, you know,
I learned early on making music for podcasts, like there's
certain things that, yeah, you don't really want to do,
Like you don't want to have weird stereo effects, and
you don't want to do stuff that's going to take
away from the narrative and the tape, because that's the
most important thing. But also I think what's different between

(41:02):
what we do at Tenderfoot and what maybe someone else
would do is instead of it just being wallpaper, you know,
we wanted to always be useful and used in like
a cinematic way. And I think that was something I
appreciated about the process that you had early on, because
it was like you came from film, so you look
at everything and go, let's how can we make this

(41:23):
as cinematic as possible and as interesting as possible? And
you know, I just I feel like my job as
the composer is always just keeping up with that, trying
to trying to stay in that zone and support that.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
I mean, for me, the music in a podcast should
never be the thing that makes it good.

Speaker 4 (41:45):
It should be the thing that makes it better.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
And even down to my process, when I'm making an
episode without the music yet, I build it in these
sort of segment blocks.

Speaker 4 (41:59):
Right, and I'll send them like I'll send them to.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
You throughout and we'll kind of end up stitching them together,
and sometimes we might rearrange them entirely, but they're usually
their complete thought bubbles or their story building blocks. And
when I put an episode together and there's no music
in it, and it's in the right order and there's
no vo, my goal is to be able to play

(42:25):
that and for you to pretty much have a good
idea of.

Speaker 4 (42:30):
What happened or what's going on totally.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
So therefore, now when I come in and say anything,
it's technically adding to it. It's building upon it, it's
connecting the tissue, it's adding another layer or you know,
level of personability or insight description. And then the music

(42:54):
starts to bring to life the way some of this
stuff really feels.

Speaker 4 (43:01):
And then it becomes a.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
More organic experience, and like you know, people get writer's block,
you know. I'm sure there's days where you're like, fuck,
I don't know what to make today. And I feel
like we've, you know, we've done some weird things sometimes
to jumpstart our brains when it comes to what should
this sound like it?

Speaker 4 (43:22):
And I think it all started in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
When we had lost our minds out there being in
this weird airbnb and I went downstairs in the basement
and I just recorded some weird noises on my voice
notes on my phone and I just texted them to you. Yeah,
and then you just started messing with it, and then
it became this haunting and it became sort of like

(43:53):
one of them. It became one of the main themes
in Zodiac. And we've to this day we've still done that.
We we've done it with radio rental, with buying an
actual reel to reel and playing with those tapes, or
I'll sends you like I just found this one, like
like I'll I'll send you stuff like this, right, And

(44:27):
so yeah, I recorded that on my phone, Like that's
the original audio, not in a like, not in a
nice microphone, right, So it's got its own weird feel.
And then that became something really weird, and I remember
just sitting there because you just put it through. I
don't know what that plugin was, but you just dropped
it into something pretty quickly and it just went bit

(44:51):
bit bu upupup, bit bit bit. I was like, and
I feel like it was not even like you weren't
even fully done.

Speaker 4 (44:58):
With the next step you're going to do.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
But I was like, let's just save that real quick,
right then I a happy accident, right.

Speaker 4 (45:06):
Yeah, and then what do we do with that or something?
Right yeah?

Speaker 2 (45:10):
I mean my my musical background, you know, when I
went to school, I went to school for production, for
basically recording, and growing up like I was always really
into I just I mean, up until the point I
discovered electronic music, I was very much like just into
punk rock and skateboarding with my friends and like screwing

(45:31):
around and you know, not you're just being a kid.
And I remember I remember distinctly definitely not being a badass.
But when I uh, when I stumbled into electronic music,
I remember finding I remember really keying into types of

(45:54):
music that where I would hear a sound and I'd
be like, that's an organic sound, Like that's a natural sound,
but it's doing unnatural things and being really fascinated by
that and like, Okay, well how did they do that?
I know what that is, but it's like doing all
these crazy things, and I had no idea how that worked.
So it wasn't necessarily like oh, well, here's a drum

(46:15):
machine or here's a synthesizer. It was like, no, I
was really into the sort of strange application of sound
and editing and sound design, and so when I went
to college, I was like on a mission to do that.
And I was at a school where there were a
bunch of other kids who were kind of there to
you know, be engineers and studios or work on a

(46:36):
tour or make pop records or whatever, and so I
was I was kind of always I was a little
bit of the odd man out in that way where
I was like I looked at college and said, I'm
here for four years to make music every day and
just and I did that, and I think it, you know,
in it it built in me a work ethic but

(46:57):
also like a bit of a workflow. And I've always
but I've always really really held on to that, you know,
I've always really held on to the idea that like,
you know, and and really the stuff with you recording
memos into your phone and then taking those things and
applying them into sound. I mean, there's so many tracks
in Zodiac where there's stuf hidden in the things where
you would never even know. But right, but that, to me,

(47:21):
in my mind, that's no different than what we did
in Crestone. You know. I'm like, yeah, exactly right, I'm
gonna record it in a way it's almost like you're
trying to sample something, like you're sampling, uh, like a
location or a thing or a feeling, you know, because
there's been plenty of recordings where it's like, you know,
you you thought the door latch in your house had
a weird sound, Let's record that, you know, and then

(47:41):
how can we turn that into like an impact sound
or like a you know, a thud. I mean, we
we have a queue where it's like your cat meowing,
you know, right, right, and so like how do we
you know? And I think I just think that stuff's interesting.
I think it's cool because it's, first of all, there's
no instrument on earth that's gonna make that sounds. It's

(48:03):
literally one, it can't, yeah, right, so you can mirror it.
You can mimic it, but like that is from that thing,
right And at the end of the day too, also
it's about discernment, like you're looking at it, going does
this serve the story you're trying to tell? Is this
haunting in a way that it makes sense to use this,
you know, And all shows are different, like Crestone, you know,
we had the experience were in Crestone. When I went

(48:25):
to Montana, Montana for me was like totally different because
to me, Montana was just expressly depressing.

Speaker 4 (48:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
I left Montana just I had like two weeks where
I just couldn't do much because the the you know,
being in a place that's that big and expansive and empty,
and then going to the reservation and seeing the way
that Native Americans were treated and having all that happen
on the backdrop of like Black Lives Matter, what was

(48:55):
going on in the States, or what was going on
you know in Atlanta at that time.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
There was a moment I remember that really kind of
stuck out to all of us and and you specifically.
It was at some diner we were at do you
remember this.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
Right, right? Yeah, we were interviewing somebody at the diner.
It was a woman, she had a bunch of kids.
They were all Native American, and there were like some
older people in a booth who were just white people.
And there was a guy there who owned the place
who was also white. And it was like they were
making like derogatory comments like it with an earshot of
this woman and her kids, and they like didn't flinch,

(49:31):
like they were just it was like they you could
tell it was so normalized, and it was remember, yeah,
I remember just being shocked.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
I remember like, what the fuck, Who's gonna do something
about this? But it was just like it went unnoticed, dude.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
It just it zapped me. And I remember I came
back and I was like, oh man, and then I
but then I remember as I started really working on
that show and that music, that was a show where
most shows, I mean, the material is hard. And I
think this is kind of an under talked about thing
in true crime circles. It's like there's an emotional toll

(50:06):
man that comes with working on this stuff, and like,
you know, I remember working on those things and really
just I in my mind it was like Ashley was
like in the room. You know, It's like I could
feel that. I mean that sounds really kind of airy
fairy or something, but like it's it's true. Like I
really had this sense of like there was a real
responsibility there to tell that story in a way that

(50:31):
was gonna you know, hopefully honor her, but also really
key into that place because you know, that place is
it was so wild. It was such a wild place
to go to and the experience of being there. But
also like and it wasn't just me being a white
guy walking around a reservation. It was like everybody we
talked to, man, they were just like, you don't understand,

(50:52):
Like you don't get it, you know, and you can't
get it, and.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
And they're right, yeah, it's like I also have never
seen this before. You know, you might hear about MMI
W and the news or something, but unless you've ever
seen things in real life.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
It puts a different perspective.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
On on the way some people are being treated in
the country.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
And it was it was kind of wild because like
you know, years later, you know, with like Lily Gladstone
was nominated for the Scorsese film and was you know,
and she's from there, She's from that reservation. It was like,
so it was so wild. But it was like she
would do all this press and talk about it. I
was and it was like, yeah, I know, I know
exactly what she's talking about. Like and I mean all

(51:36):
the shows, all shows are different, you know, and with
every show it's it's the same thing. Like I I
will be sort of brought into the loop on what
it's supposed to be mm hm, and then I will
go kind of scurry off and I will just do
a lot of research on my own. I'll scour you know,
the Internet for images and videos and anything I can

(51:59):
get my hands on that's going to really help me
dial in to what it is and who it's about
and that and sometimes, you know, I always tell people
like it's funny, like we did High Strange, and High
Strange was like this reprieve it was like, oh man,
there's no dead people in this one. Like it's like, right,
we can tell this story. Yeah, no, it was.

Speaker 4 (52:18):
It was.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
It was like a breath of fresh air in a
lot of ways in that way. And and you know,
but all those shows, it's like that you just want
to do the best possible job that you can do
to you know, be respectful to the people that you're
telling the story about and trying to sort of shine
a light on this thing. And you know, the music
is always for me, it's always that way. It's about

(52:40):
I'm trying to be as emotionally true as I possibly
can when I'm writing that music. It's never about like
we've got to ramp up into this moment or we
really got to sell this this dialogue. It's like it's
and you know, for me, it's always about just responding
emotionally to what's going on and being true to that.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
Yeah, every season of Up and Vanished tonally has a
different feel to it in the music, and there is
there's obviously some through lines. There's a couple of different
sounds that you've even named, like right pain piano or.

Speaker 4 (53:19):
What what are some of them.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
There's one sound in particular that I've always woven into
Up and Vanished and it's sort of this chimy like
bell piano kind of sound that's really haunting and it's
kind of you know, coming into that show, what was interesting,
like you had an established theme for that show, You
had a callback that is very distinctive, and people as

(53:41):
soon as people hear it, they're like up and vanished,
and so my goal coming into season two was how
can I sort of match that energy? But for because
what's interesting about scoring anything is especially a podcast, especially podcast,
is that you are a huge component of that show.

(54:04):
And so to me, I'm trying to honor the material
and I'm trying to respect the material, but I'm also
trying to support your place inside of it, right, And
so like High Strange is a great example, Like High
Strange has all these flavors to that music that we
would never do in a different in another show, but
we did it because to me, to me, High Strange

(54:26):
is like the the embodiment of you as a podcast.
It's like all of your curiosities and all of your
like you know, And it was like, because you know,
you're talking about a material that is a curiosity, It's like,
I'm really interested in UFOs and I kind of want
to pursue this and see what's up. And I think
we proved a lot of people wrong with that show,
because I think when it came out, it was like

(54:46):
a lot of people were like, what's this It's about UFO.
But I think people listen to it and we're like, oh,
this is actually pretty awesome, you know, because.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
It's a fun topic right right, And I think having
fun with it is just makes it a fun experience
for the listener or the viewer.

Speaker 4 (55:00):
It doesn't have to be so serious, like.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah, I think I think both High Strange and Radio
Rental are that. I think it's like those are two
shows where it's like, this is a this is like
a really it's a it's a curiosity and I want
to like pull on this thread and see where it goes.
I mean, for the longest time, scoring Radio Rental was
like one of my favorite things because it was like, Okay,
this is like your unsolved mysteries. You know, it's like
your sort of we're gonna get these people to tell

(55:25):
their story and it's going to be creepy, and it's
a and the whole thing is an anthology. It's not
a it's not a like, uh, you know, every episode
isn't deeply connected to the next one. It's like you
can jump into it wherever you want and you know,
have kind of a creepy experience. And it was so
much fun writing that music because you could key into
it and have fun in that way. And High Strange

(55:46):
was was definitely that way. You know, when we went
to Nome, you know, for season four of Up and Vanished.
You know that is not that you know, going to
Nome is uh is, It's it's a whole other animal.
You're going into a place that is literally on the
edge of the world, and you're there and you're you know,

(56:07):
the at least for me, I'm looking at it the
whole time, and I'm going, you know, there's no there's
not a like mischievous curiosity here. This is like I'm
trying to document something that happened, and I'm trying to
document a place, and I'm trying to key into it's
not only an indigenous population and indigenous people, it's also

(56:31):
a group of people in general who have just gone
who are okay, living on the edge of the world,
on the edge of this continent, you know where you
just you would stand there and look out and there's nothing,
you know.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
And there's sure that we took I mean yeah, like
we had just got there and you and I walked
off the main road, front street, just to the edge
where the water was, and I think you, I think
you took a picture of me in that exact point
that I'm talking about but we were just both steering
at often you could see nothing, and right if you
looked at Google maps where you were, you're literally on the.

Speaker 4 (57:08):
Edge of the world.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
If there is ever a description that, there's not a
better description for that place than that, And you really
do feel it when you're sitting out there.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
It's hard to it's it's really hard, I think, to
get across to people without having gone there and experience it.
But you know, you're looking out at that water, and
a bunch of things go through your head. You're like,
I'm first of all, how far north you are is
really intense, like you realize because the sun doesn't go down,
so are you're up there? And then you're looking out

(57:42):
across this water and it's frigid, it's like very cold.
So it's like, not only are you so far removed?
And I remember in my own sort of I was naive,
and I remember you're like, we're going to fly into
an anchorage and I was like great, And I was like,
so how long does it take to drive to Nome?
And you're like, no, no, you don't drive in Nome, have
to fly. There's no roads. A lot of it's like

(58:04):
protected you know Land and indigenous lands, so there's no
highways you fly there, and so you get on a
smaller plane and you just fly to home. And that
I think was the first sort of inkling I had
of like, Okay, this is different, this is different than
anything else we'd done. And yeah, standing out there, it's

(58:25):
like you feel the cold, you feel the location. You
feel you know not not only the location being far away,
but also the like geography of it, how how far
north you are, and and then you know that that
not only is the landscape unforgiving, a lot of the
people there are very unforgiving too. I mean people go there.

(58:46):
I remember having conversations with peopeople. You know, same kind
of thing as as Crestone, but also different, like the
p I had a friend who spent a lot of
time living in Anchorage and he hit me up. He's like, hey,
I heard you're going to Alaska. And I was like, yeah,
I was going to Anchorage and he's like, you're just
gonna be an Anchorage and I said, no, I'm going
to Nome and he said he told me, He's like
be careful and Gnome. He's like, Gnome is a has

(59:08):
a reputation being a hard drinking, hard living city in
a hard drinking, hard living state. You know, he was like,
he did not mince words about it. He's like, it's
it's it can be very you know, it can be
a very oppressive location. And you know, walking around there,
you definitely felt that. You know, you definitely felt that.
And so to me, it was like coming being up there,

(59:33):
wandering around and you don't have cell service anywhere, so
it's not like you can just take your phone out
and be like, hey, I need to call somebody. You're
not calling anybody. You're on your own, buddy. You're you're
back in the in the in the late eighties, you know, I.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
Mean digesting that stuff, like taking all that in because
this is like what you've done with every season right right,
You've been able. You've plopped yourself right in the middle
of a of an environment that is unfamiliar, often terrifying, scary, different,
loving all these different things. This season of Up and

(01:00:08):
Vanished in the Midnight Sun, Joseph Balderas Florence lar Pialla
nom Alaska. All the factors here musically, sonically, as you've
built the soundtrack of this show thus far, what to
You has stood out as something new and strong and

(01:00:31):
different that you feel has propelled this show or has
become part of its identity. The first thing I'm thinking
of a few months ago, you were at my house
and you were talking about this thing called Shepherd's tone,
right and for and I didn't I thought you. I
thought you meant Shepherd's Pie, which is also very delicious.

(01:00:53):
But uh, just for those who don't know, because I
didn't either, what is Shepherd's tone?

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
So shepherd'stone is like an auditory illusion where the perception
is that the sound is rising in pitch forever, like
it just keeps going up and up and up and
up and up. It's been around for a very long
time and it was kind of popularized. I think it

(01:01:18):
really got popularized after Dunkirk. The movie Dunkirk, Hanszimmer used
it as like an effect essentially, But the whole notion
is that there's essentially three sounds happening at once. There's
the highest octave goes up, the center sound stays steady,

(01:01:39):
and the bottom sound goes up, and the top two
are sort of cross fading in volume, and the middle
one stays stays consistent. So you get this effect where
the sounds are just endlessly cycling through each other, and
it gives this perception that sound is constantly rising. It's
just going up and up and up and up and up.
But it never achieves that payoff. It never gets to

(01:01:59):
where it's supposed to be going and.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Like a real ascension would go and then it was
good there. Yeah, but it's it's an auditory illusion.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
It is. It's it's sort of like a weird I mean,
it's like an auditory like mc esure drawing or something like.
It doesn't it doesn't make sense. But I would say
if there was ever a sound that you would that
I would want to associate to a place like Gnome,
it would be something like that, because there is a

(01:02:33):
definite sense of all at once. You're experiencing similar things
to what we experienced when we were in Browning, Like
you're you're in an indigenous you're in an area, but
it's not a reservation, but everything about it is fairly
you know, if you want to live in Gnome, you
have to want to live innme like no one people

(01:02:57):
that go there. It's like the homes are are stick framed,
they're designed to withstand the elements everybody there drives a
truck or an ATV. You know, everything's covered in mud.
You're not there trying to have like a nice yard.
You know, you're you're there because you do. And it's
one of those places too, where you're if you're gonna

(01:03:18):
live there, you are like a skilled tradesman. Like you
you make something or you do something, because in order
for you to survive there, you have to provide for
the community. And it's it's not a huge community. And
but then you know, also Cooper and I we drove
up in the We took the truck one day and
drove up a mountain and we're on top of this
mountain and there's like pieces, there's like remnants of a glacier,

(01:03:42):
and you look out and you see the majesty of
like where you are so so on the backdrop of
this place that is so utilitarian and cold and unflinching.
You also look out and you're like, this is one
of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, you know,
So you wind up in this weird uh. It's like

(01:04:05):
this strange duality of like, Okay, everything about this place
looks so picturesque. It looks like a painting. But then
when you go into it, it's it's sort of like
in the beginning of Blue Velvet, you know, it's like
the sort of beautiful neighborhood. Everything's perfect white picket fence,
and then they zoom into the grass and you go
beneath the blades and there's all these insects and things

(01:04:27):
that are like, you know, crows. It's like, you know
there's something going on under the surface that maybe is
not so good, and you know that there's people here
that are struggling, that are trying to escape, struggling with addiction,
you know.

Speaker 5 (01:04:41):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
And it's a darkness, like there's a there's a long
shadow to that place, and I feel like, you know,
musically for this season, that's what I really tried to
key into. It's like the wind of the place, the
sound of that eeriness about it. You know, there's a
big graveyard that sort of overlooks all of the downtown

(01:05:03):
Nome and you get up there, it's all these like
white crosses, you know, that are been stuck into the
ground to mark these graves. So you just look out.
It's a giant hillside of white crosses, and it's it's
haunting man, it's a haunting experience to be up there
and see that. It just it really rattles you.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
That first fifteen to twenty minutes of the second installment
this season, we wanted to come back hit you in
the face with this intensity.

Speaker 4 (01:05:31):
That we're talking about, right. We wanted it to be intense,
and I wanted it to be ever ascending, And so
we took this shepherd's pie. Shepherd's pie.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
Yeah, we took this.

Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
We took this shepherd's tone concept. Uh, walk me through, Like,
how'd you even start that?

Speaker 4 (01:05:52):
So?

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
I was trying to achieve that with strings, and it
was you know, because I think with a with a synth,
I mean, you could do it probably pretty easily with
a synth. I was trying to achieve it in a
way that it felt. I mean, season three and season
four especially have been heavy. I've I've kind of made

(01:06:13):
it my mission with Tenderfoot over the past, you know, however,
many years to avoid all the tropes of true crime music. Right,
So I'm looking at I'm going, Okay, I don't want
to harp, I don't want any marimba, I don't want
any true crime piano with echo on it or reverb.
I don't want any drunk like, no drones like I've read.
So for me, when we walked into season four, the

(01:06:36):
first thing we started thinking about was strings, and so
we ended up recording you know, we went and we
had the theme music from Up and Vanished. I worked
with my buddy Jordan Lenning in Nashville. We did arrangements
for a string quartet and recorded a string quartet just
to do it. Why not, you know, And and then
out of that, I think a lot of the sounds

(01:06:57):
ended up being really organic, you know, lots of strings,
lots of and so when we started talking about the
Shepherd Stone, I was like, okay, well, how can we
do this in a way that feels like this organic
thing you know, feels like this, you know, the grit
and the texture of the place of gnome you know,

(01:07:19):
as an as an actual played instrument. And so for
me it was like, how do we take a stringed
instrument and create this effect where again a natural sound
made unnatural where you know, a cello, you know, there's
a cello behind me here, It's like a cello is
only going to go so high, you know, how how
do you how do you do that? And you know, thankfully,

(01:07:39):
you know, thanks to the shepherd Stone. It's like we
created a sound where it just continuously keeps rising, and
there's something uneasy about that. I think, even if you're
not a musician, your brain goes, wait a minute, this
shouldn't be happening, you know, and it kind of throws
you for a loop a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
You know, it's uneasy. I wanted the audience to consciously
think when is this going to end? Or or like
like it keeps your attention and then there's a reprieve
and you go, holy shit, and then we can kind of,
you know, recalibrate as a listener, you know, the listener

(01:08:17):
can now recalibrate. Speak like the strings that you recorded
for Up and vanished this season, there's a whole like
there's different renditions of the theme song and a bunch
of cues that we've used throughout.

Speaker 4 (01:08:32):
In the Midnight Sun and there.

Speaker 1 (01:08:34):
There's a little there's those there's a part in one
of the new cues you made the bit bit bump
up up up that one and it there's this really
rough sounding cello and it's like, yeah, what is that from?

Speaker 4 (01:08:52):
And like and I'll pull it out and show you
but you know what it is like. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:57):
So one of the things we did we we base
We booked a session. It was like an all day
session in Nashville, and my buddy Jordan came in and
engineered the session and we did all the renditions of
the theme and recorded all that and then and that

(01:09:17):
was kind of the first half of the session, and
then the second half of the session we kind of
earmarked for just try and stuff. And I told Jordan
going into it, I said, you know, we talked about
what kind of players we wanted to get for the session,
and I said, you know, who do you know that's
going to be? Like who I can go in and

(01:09:38):
talk to and say, hey, what's that what's the weirdest
like articulation that you can think of, or what's a
weird sound you can make with your viola that no
one ever asked you to make, but you think it's
kind of interesting. And so we went into that session
kind of the second half of it just playing around
and just you know, going because we had them isolated

(01:09:59):
and we had them in the booth and we were like,
just let's make weird sounds. And what I ended up
with was essentially a folder, like a library of just
odd sounds. And uh, you know though again talking about sampling,
it's kind of that's kind of the way I look
at it, like I always lay I've laid those sounds

(01:10:20):
into so many things, so many shows, so many episodes
of radio rental, so many Uh, you know, I have
worked that stuff in to a lot of places. You know,
we're talking about the tape machine that we had in
I think we had that. We bought that a Maine.
It was like an old little reel and like we
went in and recorded all the mechanics, you know, all
the weird because those are such clunky switches and they

(01:10:42):
sound really cool. So Cooper went in and record him
on and those have been in I can't tell you
how many shows we've used those in, But it's like
they just show up everywhere, and it's kind of cool
because in a way, they kind of become like this
audible fingerprint right where there's a memory there. But also
there's this sort of distinctiveness. Again, those sounds are one
of one. You know, it's like you you just get

(01:11:02):
them and you're they're weird, and you get to use
them in a weird way. And you know, I can't
think of a better place to lay those sounds into
than Nome because Nome Gnome is one of one like
that's there's there's nowhere else like that. So, you know
it it really served the story to represent that place

(01:11:24):
sonically in such a weird way. And yeah, I I
think four Season four has been really interesting in that
way because it's been a lot of uh it's I
think it stretched us creatively in terms of how we
tell the story and how we tell the story sonically,
and you know, and and really trying to and again

(01:11:46):
it goes back to the experience of being in a
place and just experiencing it. You know. I remember one
night I woke up and I was staying in that
there was like a hotel. We're kind of split up.
You guys were in an Airbnb and like there were
a few of us that were staying in the hotel
and the hotel was co it was like on the
other side of town. And I remember I woke up
one night, it was like three in the morning or something,

(01:12:07):
and I walked over the curtains because they have blackout
curtains everywhere because you had to. But I remember they're
saying like, oh yeah, the sun sets between such and
such time and comes back at like four. So I
got up and I saw the time, and I was like, oh,
I bet it's dark outside. And I like pull open
the curtains and it was like six o'clock. You know,
it's like not even remotely dark. It it's it messes

(01:12:29):
with you, right, And it was, I mean it was.
It was the the the Nolan's Insomnia film, you know,
when Pacino's like going through the whole thing and he
can't sleep. It's like, absolutely is that. And it's like
and it's weird because it messes with your circadian rhythm,
you know, whether you like it or not. I always
tell people, like when I was inna my Fiels, you're
not used to it. I feel like I took a

(01:12:49):
series of naps. I never really slap, you know. And
there's a frenzy. There's a frenzy that comes with that
mentally where you are walking around. I mean obviously Pacino's
like sort of you know, plays that up big time
for the for the film, but like you do feel
this sort of like you're sort of like sleep walking.

(01:13:10):
You know, there's like a strange experience that comes with
having all of your rhythms like screwed up and and
so yeah, I think, you know, looking at the music
and thinking about the music like that's very much part
of that. And I think the Shepherd's tone plays into
that big time. I think, you know, using a lot
of weird using the strings in weird ways plays into

(01:13:34):
that big time. I think with the second half of
this season as well, we kind of shifted gears a
little bit too. There's a musical distinction I think between
the first half and the second half, dealing with Flow
and then dealing with Joseph, and you know, Joseph his situation,
you know, in terms of where he disappeared, they think,
and you know, it was more about like, Okay, now

(01:13:57):
you're in a space that's not in Gnome. You're little
further away.

Speaker 4 (01:14:01):
You got home, and then you got forty miles out
of them, right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
Right, You're in the sort of wild country, and the
wild country is like unforgiving and it will swallow you whole.
It's also beautiful, you know, It's like there's a breathtaking
beauty to that place. So it was less so it
became more about like maybe the second half of the
show is more like a suite, you know, maybe it's
more like a you know, there's a piece of music

(01:14:25):
that's written for strings, you know, for like a chamber
or you know, a small section orchestra, that kind of thing,
and then we build that out. And so for me,
you know, I leaned really into a lot of the
composer influences that I have, you know, people like John
Luther Adams and Johansen, and you know, trying to think

(01:14:48):
about how to score it in a way that is
going to lean heavier into strings than we've probably ever
done with a with a Tenderfoot show. So it's been cool, man.
I think I always tell people like that what's great
about scoring podcasts is like they're never the same. They're
always different. You know. It's like when you sign on
to be an in house composer for a production company

(01:15:11):
or something, it's like, you know, I'm sure there are
many places where it's like, yeah, you're just you're like
an assembly line and you're just churning out the same
thing over and over and over again. I never feel
that way about Tenderfoot. I feel like every show is different,
presents its own different challenges. It's different, you know, different
ways of thinking, and it always requires you to kind
of challenge yourself in cool ways creatively when you're making

(01:15:36):
the music.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
So just kind of like in conclusion here as a creator,
I mean, I can't even think of the number of
cues you've made just for Tenderfoot alone. I mean, I
want to say it's in the thousands, and I'm probably.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
I would say, like the Atlanta Monster estimate, like the
three and a half hours, it's probably in the ballpark,
Like I think every show typically winds up around that
amount generally.

Speaker 1 (01:16:09):
So you've made You've made thousands of songs, cues, atmospheric
sounds for Tenderfoot, podcasts for for Up and Vanished, I've
made hundreds of podcast episodes. These shows are about dark subjects,
sad subjects. I will send you a raw edit of

(01:16:36):
an interview where it may be the victim's family grieving,
and you're scoring this having made all these cues, done
all this work for all of these years. What is
it that keeps you going and keeps you on the

(01:16:57):
straight and narrow and inspires you to make something when
it's very easily sad and dark and can influence you
in that way and maybe even be negative. How like,
referring to this season, how are you getting up off
your ass and thinking of a new idea again and

(01:17:21):
feeling inspired and feeling like you're doing something.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
I think the thing that the thing that goes through
my mind is the process of just trying to be present. Right. So,
life is always life is full of drama. There's just
so much drama everywhere. It exists for all of us.

(01:17:47):
And these stories are dramatic stories. They're real things that happened,
and these have real ramifications for people, and those people
some of those people are gone. Some of those people
are still here and they're just reeling with the reality
of they've lost a loved one or a loved one
is committed a crime. And I think for me, what

(01:18:13):
keeps me going is just the work itself, the ability
to be able to be present in that story and
tell that story in that moment. You know, all of
these things become sort of parts of that journey of
like you carry them with you. I mean, you know,

(01:18:36):
all of the stories that you've told, all of the
people that you've covered with up and vanished, those people
are always going to be with you. It's like I
was saying about feeling like Ashley was in the room
when I was working on season three. That's never going
to leave me, you know. And I think that those feelings,

(01:18:57):
as heavy as they get, I know that those feelings
are gonna be part of a process, and that process,
for me, is going to produce truth. I'm just gonna
say the thing. And I'm a firm believer in this.
I always tell people like the work tells me what
it needs to be. I don't look I don't ever

(01:19:18):
look at this job. I don't look at anything that
I do musically and ever go well, Okay, we're gonna
do We're gonna go from point A to point B.
That whole process is going to be. It's gonna go
whichever way it's gonna go. And I don't know if
you can call that whatever you want to call it.
You can make that a spiritual thing and say, you know,
the universe is going to inform what you have to do,
and that's fine. But I think the only way you

(01:19:39):
get there is you're just present with it and you
just sit with it and say, okay, you know. And
I think I've heard some a friend of mine who's
a composer, he said once upon a time that he
doesn't believe in writer's block, that it's really just you
haven't figured out the way in yet, you know. And
I've always I've always looked at it like it it's

(01:20:00):
a bit like problem solving, you know, you're kind of
going into it and saying okay. And that counts for everything.
It counts for telling the story musically, it counts for
maybe trying to figure out to fit something into something
that it needs to do what it needs to do.
It could be having conversations with people creatively that you're
working with and collaborating with on the project, you know,

(01:20:21):
speaking the same language.

Speaker 1 (01:20:23):
Both you and I had a moment like that in
part two when we were trying to figure out a
news sound for it. You had asked me tonally, how
is this different? And I sat there and I was like,
I don't know. And then we started talking about the
differences in their cases and gnome and.

Speaker 4 (01:20:43):
The geography, like we got to the geography of.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
It, and then you mentioned, you know where Joseph's truck
was found, you know, forty plus miles outside the city,
this sort of different beast, this different unforgiving wilderness, and
you know that is just we're just talking.

Speaker 5 (01:21:02):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:21:02):
That's not a sound per se, but it's a it's
a starting point thought. And then I wanted to pull
that old silly trick out of the bag that we
use where I'll just record a voice note of my
voice and let's just mess with it and let's just
see if it could become something. And so I saying
follow me into the woods. Right, you did two things

(01:21:26):
with that. You distorted it and it becomes this. It
became this sort of choppy and then if you listen closely,
you'll hear this.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
Yeah, it becomes a melody.

Speaker 1 (01:21:38):
Yeah, but it has a human like tone to it.
Maybe it's subconscious, but it's it's almost like the the
Turing test, right, it's too real because it is real.

Speaker 2 (01:21:55):
Well, but again it goes back to the one of
one thing. It's like you when you know you know
you know, and I think, and that comes back to
trusting your gut, trusting your intuition and just sort of
following the thing and just pull.

Speaker 1 (01:22:08):
The trigger, man, Because like we could sit here and
nitpick one song that you made for one minute of
a podcast for weeks, or we could just say, ah,
let's move on. Maybe it's amazing, or maybe we just
move that queue somewhere else. But the group of people

(01:22:29):
who who are still debating that one que maybe you
and I if we didn't do that or six weeks
ahead and have have grown from that, built upon that.
Whether it worked or not, it it informed the next
thing we did, and then it informed the next thing

(01:22:49):
we did. So we don't allow ourselves to be stuck
because most things you can walk back, like I've never
met like you do it the most extreme. I've never
known anything, Like, I don't even do it this way.
You will make a song and then you'll just fucking.

Speaker 4 (01:23:05):
Delete it, right, And I'll tell and get it though.

Speaker 1 (01:23:10):
I get it though, Like I get the you're like nope,
Like you're not afraid to abandon it.

Speaker 4 (01:23:17):
You're not afraid to kill to kill your darlings, right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:20):
I think I think you have to have that mentality.
I think that in the at the end of the day,
you know it's gonna be the thing it needs to be.
And if it's a deleted session, it's a deleted session.
I think that you know it sounds extreme, but I
I believe in that. I think that you know the
music that we and not every show is like that.

(01:23:40):
You know, we we speak a shorthand it and it works.
I've worked on other shows where you know, I've been
three episodes deep into it and the creative like lead
on the show is like, hey, you know what, this
is wrong. We're going in the wrong direction and now
we got to scrap three episodes and start over. And
you know you can, you can, you know, be a

(01:24:02):
stick in the mud and be like, well, you know,
I just already made all this music and I can't
possibly do that, or you can just say okay and
roll with it. And you know the show where that happened,
I'm I'm super proud of the way that music turned
out in the end because it not only was he
right when he made that call, you know, I think
the results that it yielded were super interesting. And you know,

(01:24:28):
I don't know I look back on all that stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:24:30):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:24:30):
I it's weird. I don't really go back and listen
to stuff. And when when the shows come out, say,
I'm ashamed to say, like, I don't really listen to
the shows because I've already worked on them, what I've
been through.

Speaker 4 (01:24:39):
It I was just kidding, And I'll listen to it
one time. You yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
Will quality control kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:24:47):
No, But like the same way you delete something and
it's gone forever, I'll listen to it once it's published
and there's no takebacks. And so if I didn't like something,
I remember it right, I'm like, I'm like, I'm not.
I mean, I'm not doing that next time, or like
I liked that, I'm gonna do more of that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:05):
I don't go back and listen to records like I
think that for me, I kind of look back on
that stuff and I go, this served a purpose for
the time that it. It was the thing, and then
when it's done, I move on. And I think that,
you know, with with these podcasts and the shows and

(01:25:25):
all of the emotional currency that comes with that, it
that's how I that's how I picked myself up and
keep going because I look at it and I go,
this is it was the thing that it needed to be,
and we did it, and now there's something else and
we'll tell that story, and I'm and I'm grateful to
be able to tell that story.

Speaker 1 (01:25:43):
So you know, it's one more anecdote that I thought
of that was funny. A summer ago we were in
We were in the studio in Atlanta and I was
telling you about a new podcast idea I had about
UFO called high Strange, and I I asked you, point blank,

(01:26:07):
is this a crazy idea? And the idea was I
want to end every episode of this show with this
Metro boomin gonna trap song.

Speaker 4 (01:26:20):
And I remember you were like, what and then or
what was or what was your initial first knee jerk reaction.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):
To be totally fair, And I think I may have been.
I'm not gonna say that because I don't think that.
I don't think that I was the only one, but
I definitely no. I feel like I was on board
because I thought.

Speaker 4 (01:26:48):
You you got on board quickly.

Speaker 1 (01:26:50):
But I remember I remember initially because it sounds dumb
at first, like when I said it out loud, it
sounded silly, But then you know that you quickly went
fuck it, let's try it. And so we threw in
the instrumental and then we tried really hard to transition

(01:27:11):
this Travis Walton interview and how it ended and then
have it swell and organically ended up boom, And then
it honestly took all of thirty minutes, and we both
looked at each other and we.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
Were like, this is it.

Speaker 4 (01:27:27):
This is dope, right.

Speaker 2 (01:27:30):
Well, I think with that whole thing I mean was
what was really cool about that experience was listening to
Travis Walton, whose voice is incredible. I mean, it's like sandpaper,
it's so gritty and gravelly. Yeah, and he's telling you
about how he's abducted and he's relaying this story and
it's totally insane.

Speaker 4 (01:27:49):
It's terrifying.

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
And I remember, like before we even did that, before
we had tape on that show, I think you had
told me about it. I thought, if it's about UFOs,
we should get a theremon, and you were like, and
I remember like we talked about it and then you
were like, you sent me like a shipping notification that
a theremon was on its way to me. And so
I remember it showed up and I set it all

(01:28:11):
up and I realized right away that I can't play
a theremon. It's incredibly hard to play.

Speaker 4 (01:28:17):
It's plun to play with, but it's fun.

Speaker 2 (01:28:19):
To play with, but man, it's really hard. But when
we were in the studio in Atlanta, like what I
realized is if you take a theremon and you pit,
you take the pitch all the way down right, as
so everybody attributes Theramis to being like this high pitched
like who kind of like you know UFO sound. If
you take the pitch super low, it actually has this

(01:28:40):
like really weird, sort of gritty textural quality. But it's
also because the pitch is sort of uneven and uneasy
because it's hard to play this like yeah, you get
this really weird sort of thing. And what's great is
there's sounds during Walton talking about that that I'm like,

(01:29:01):
I'm still to this day, I'm like, I don't know
how I got those sounds, but they're great. They sound great,
and they sound so alien and weird. But those, I mean,
those sounds are all from the theremon And it's great
because the whole time working on that show, the whole
trajectory of that project, I never ever once thought anything

(01:29:23):
other than this is pain making the show that Pain
was destined to make, because it's the most you show.
In my mind, it's you pulling the thread and going
I'm curious about this and just following it. And so
when you came in, you said, what do you think
about this metro Boomin song? Maybe in the beginning, I
was like, Okay, that's weird, but immediately I was like,

(01:29:46):
that's you. That's the most you thing, and this is
the most you show. So yeah, of course it should
end this way, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:29:52):
And I also have this weird like juxtaposition right right,
you go from forty minutes of Travis Walton recounting a
terrifying story, whether you believe him or not, that's a
terrifying dream too, And it's dark and it's intense, and
then it goes to this bing in it and it's
almost like it's out of place. It almost it almost

(01:30:17):
makes fun of itself or it takes the seriousness, like
the seriousness away, and I totally I wanted to play
into that as a reminder of, hey, we can look
at this from different angles. If we can somehow pull
off going from scary intense to this song and it
feel like a a what a good listening experience it

(01:30:40):
then it becomes exciting.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
It's kind of at odds with what I was talking
about before. It's like, musically, you don't want to do
things that take away, right, You don't want to have
these panning effects that people are trying to listen to
Dialogue and like, well I can't. It's confusing, and it's
sort of the it's like a one to eighty from
that because when that moment happens, it kind of smacks
you in the face a little bit. You're like, oh,
wait a minute. But also like there's no shows. I

(01:31:03):
remember when you first hired me for Atlanta Monster going
online and being like podcast soundtracks and trying to find that,
and there weren't.

Speaker 4 (01:31:12):
There weren't turns out, there weren't none.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
There was a there was like a SoundCloud playlist by
the guys that made Cereal and they had cues from
Cereal and a SoundCloud playlist, and I remember.

Speaker 1 (01:31:22):
They were great, but they were they were the Cereal sounds.
They were just MPR sounds, right, and we were going
cinematic versus you know, it's the journalistic.

Speaker 2 (01:31:32):
It was immediately like obvious to me that this was
a very it was uncharted territory. And to me all
these years later when you came and said metro booming,
it was like, oh, this is this is that you know,
this is do the do the thing that you feel
like is the thing to do. Don't worry about you know,

(01:31:55):
don't worry about what the market says, or what the
industry is doing, just do do the thing. And it
was a wild swing. But I think it absolutely worked.
And it's like, and why would you why would that
not be our mantra? You know, you want that to
be the way to do it. You don't want to
don't do the safe thing, do the scary thing, you know.
And I don't think tenderfootg got to where it is

(01:32:16):
by doing the safe thing. I think, you know, we
try to do something that's a little bit outside of
the box. And that definitely was. It was super weird.
But I love that show because that show tells a
bunch of interesting stories, treats a bunch of interesting you know, topics,
and it's all wrapped up through this prism of you

(01:32:36):
and who you are. And I don't think people necessarily
got that through something like up and vanished, you know.
I think that this is an opportunity for you to
be like, no, no, this is like what I'm this
is what I'm about.

Speaker 1 (01:32:46):
And I like that we're all multifaceted people, right right right, yeah.
I mean the first podcast we ever made together, you
scored hundreds of songs. We dove into this really dark
Synthy Vibe in Atlanta.

Speaker 4 (01:33:00):
Monster. The podcast itself was a huge success.

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
This was a new experience for both of us, making
original music with someone we hadn't We hadn't even met
in person yet. A few months after the podcast came out,
there was a scathing article about the show, most mostly
about me and how stupid they thought I was. But

(01:33:25):
there was a line in there about the music. Right,
do you remember what it was?

Speaker 4 (01:33:33):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:33:33):
Yeah, I'll never forget it.

Speaker 4 (01:33:35):
I got it.

Speaker 2 (01:33:35):
I always say, like I got to mention in the
New Yorker, which is pretty awesome. But they referred to
my music as synthe noir plink Plink, which was which
was in my social media handles when I still had
social media. But I think that, like, you know, I
think that's great. I'm into that, Like I think, damn right,
it is no But I think I think that you

(01:33:56):
know you Again, it goes back to the thing like
if I if if you go through and I know
you're the same way. But it's like if if you
go through everything waiting for somebody to dictate to you,
like whether that thing is good or bad. First of all,
you can't hope to be true with what you're saying
right with what you're trying to do, the being genuine

(01:34:19):
about something, And I don't I don't think a show
like High Strange gets made if you're not trying to
tell the truth as it pertains to you and who
you are, right.

Speaker 1 (01:34:31):
Yes, I just hope that you get it the way
that I got it, or experienced it the way that
I wanted you, like, wanted you to experience it the
way that that I was experiencing it while making it
right like to me. That's the message. I don't want
you to like it or like me. I want you
to have the same experience that I had.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
Right, I mean one hundred percent. I think that you know,
if you if you listen to all that dialogue, you know,
you you end up like you know, like Brian, you
know from the Beach Boys. You know, you release all
your records in mono and you fill your living room
with sand, you know, because you're because you go crazy,
because you're you're just obsessed with how people perceive it

(01:35:14):
or you know whatever. And I don't know. I'm like
I said, I'm I'm just happy to be here. I'm
happy to make music. And you know, I get up
in the morning and I make coffee and I come
in here and I just make stuff and I you know,
that's a pretty cool space to be in. I'm grateful
to be in it, and I'm grateful that we get to,
you know, tell stories and and tell stories the way

(01:35:34):
we want to.

Speaker 1 (01:35:35):
I guess so you got a lot more synth, more
plink plink left in you, right.

Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
I'm just plink plinking away, and I appreciate.

Speaker 1 (01:35:42):
I mean, you, you've taught me so much as a creator.
I feel like we've both been able to learn from
each other and challenge each other. And you know, you
told me one time that every time you open your
MacBook and you're making a new song for a podcast,
there's a brief moment where it feels like you're learning
how to ride a bike again, right, And I was like,

(01:36:04):
holy shit, that resonates so well with me. I've made
hundreds of episodes. Every single time I go, I think
I forgot how to do this right, and then we
just pushed through it. And I think that you know,
to me, that's what's been special about working with you
is that we've been able to get better at what

(01:36:25):
we do and and try new things and not feel
stuck and creatively, it's kind of all you could ever
ask for to do what you're passionate about for a living,
have an outlet that you feel doesn't keep you stuck,
and the adventure is forever if you lean into it,

(01:36:47):
lean into synthe more plink plink versus being scared by it.

Speaker 4 (01:36:51):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (01:36:52):
I can't imagine what the alternative is, you know. I
just it's you, just know, you just you just keep
pulling the thread. I mean, that's if there's anything to it,
it's that it's you just you trust it, trust your
gut and just go with it. And yeah, I mean
it's it hasn't let us down yet, So no, let's
keep going.

Speaker 4 (01:37:12):
What's been fun? Man?

Speaker 1 (01:37:13):
I need to come to Nashville soon. Yeah, I'll let
you know if I'm in the area. Yeah it's been
a minute, all right, but yeah, I'll talk to you sooner, brother,
all right.

Speaker 2 (01:37:23):
Peace.

Speaker 5 (01:37:26):
Talking to Death is a production of Tenderfoot TV and
iHeart Podcasts, created and hosted by Payne Lindsay. For Tenderfoot TV,
executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Co Executive
producer is Mike Rudey for iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers are
Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with original music by Makeup

(01:37:47):
and Vanity Set. Additional production by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington,
Sean Nurney, Dayton Cole, and Gustav Wilde for Coohedo. Production
support by Tracy Kaplan, Mara Davis, and Trevor Young, Mix
and mastering by Cooper Skinner and Dayton Cole. Our cover
art was created by Rob Sheridan. Check out our website

(01:38:08):
Talking todeathpodcast dot com.

Speaker 4 (01:38:15):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Talking to Death.

Speaker 1 (01:38:18):
This series is released weekly absolutely free, but if you
want ad free listening and exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe
to tenderfoot plus on Apple Podcasts or go to tenderfootplus
dot com

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MAVS | Music, Inspiration and Creative Process

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