Unwell - Stephen Poon - Unwell Theme
Join soft-spoken ‘Unwell’ composer Stephen Poon in a gentle midwestern music composition breakdown. For fiction podcast 'Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery', Stephen’s influences ranged from Irish traditional music to the retro sound of Nintendo game cartridges. The Unwell Theme is a rollicking, foot-stomping soundtrack born of a nerve-wracking recording process with a host of live string musicians. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.TRANSCRIPT00:00 INTROThe piece of music we're listening to in the background is the Unwell closing theme. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. We break apart a song soundtrack or composition and get into the insights into how it was made. My name is Steven Poon. I'm a composer based in Chicago, USA. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 81, the Unwell closing theme by me, Steven Poon. Thanks for listening in.01:30 MennonitesUnwell is a Midwestern Gothic mystery. It's about a young woman returning to her hometown, the fictional place of Mount Absalom, Ohio, where everything is a bit more spooky than it seems at first. And this piece is the outro theme, which also plays under the ending credits. I'm from Ohio and in rural Ohio, we have a lot of Mennonites, which are like Amish people. They don't use a lot of technology. Like it's kind of anathema. When I'm driving to Columbus, or Cincinnati, there's some stops where you might actually run into a horse and buggy and there are some religious communities that don't make use of modern technology. And so it was really at the forefront of my mind going into this setting to not include a lot of synths and digitized music. There are loads of real, actual instruments in the track. I've been far more used to sequencing music, and to be able to go into the studio with half a dozen musicians was really rewarding.03:15 CharangoTake a listen to this. It's not a guitar. It's not a mandolin. It's a charango. It's one of a number of instruments that we recorded live for the Unwell theme. A charango is a Peruvian stringed instrument. It's 10-stringed. And traditionally, it was made from an armadillo shell. This was an instrument that I had found when I was in Peru for my honeymoon, and really took to it. I thought it was a beautiful sounding instrument. And the first thing that I even wrote for the track was on the charango when I was in Peru, and I found a luthier, who was making these instruments. And you could still smell the sawdust in the air of his shop. And he didn't even speak English. So I think it was his daughter who was translating for people who came into the shop and only spoke English. And so this was a melody that I had been picking around on. And it got stuck in my head so bad that I'm like this...this has to go somewhere.04:49 InfluencesI've had a lot of influence when it comes to music over the years. So here's like a few things that came to mind as this track came together. First and foremost was The Chieftans. I really like Irish session music. There's really this tone of freedom and playfulness that comes from it. I'm thinking of a rural, less populated place. I had recently been watching Deadwood. So the Deadwood soundtrack by David Schwartz. That opening theme was also in my mind. I've always had a lot of inspiration from specifically Japanese RPG soundtracks to music from the late 80s, early 90s. There's not a lot of samples going into these songs. Very simple melodies that can very easily get stuck in your head. Because you're only working especially with the original Nintendo, there are only like four different samples that you could really fit in a cartridge. And I don't really want to go too deep into this because it's not a common game. It's like literally a visual novel. TSupport the show