In 2013, Warpaint starting working on their sophomore album. They retreated away from their home in Los Angeles to the nearby desert oasis of Joshua Tree, California. There, they wrote the song “Love Is to Die,” and it was decided that it would be the single from the record. Now, with over 6 million plays on Spotify and nearly 3 million more on YouTube, “Love Is to Die” is by some measures their most popular song. Designating it as the single was a decision that was easy to make early on, but it was also carried unforeseen consequences for the band. In this episode, three of the four members break down the sounds in the song, and weigh in on some of the difficulty they faced getting this track from the initial idea to the finished recording.

Buy “Love Is to Die” on iTunes.

For a transcript of this episode, click here.

In 2005, Nickelodeon premiered an animated series called Avatar: The Last Airbender, about a young boy and his friends who have to keep peace and balance in the world. It combined fantasy and martial arts, and ran for four seasons, won an Emmy and a Peabody, and in 2012, spawned a sequel called The Legend of Korra. This time, the story was about a girl, Korra, a teenager, and just as the characters were older and the world they inhabited was older, the themes of the show matured as well. In December 2014, after 4 seasons of its own, the series and franchise aired its finale. It made headlines for the final shot of the very last scene.
Composer Jeremy Zuckerman used a mix of Chinese and western instruments for the series. Coming up, he deconstructs the music he wrote, reflects on the significance of that scene, and also what it felt like to close the curtain on a franchise he’d been working on over the course of twelve years of his life.

You can hear more cues from Jeremy’s score from The Legend of Korra, via his SoundCloud page:

For more, I recommend this Vanity Fair article, “How a Nickelodeon Cartoon Became One of the Most Powerful, Subversive Shows of 2014,” by Joanna Robinson. And it’s pretty fun to watch this YouTube compilation of fan reactions to the finale.

For a transcript of this episode, click here.

footnotes
The music in the Incredible Hulk end credits is “The Lonely Man Theme” by Joe Harnell.

Because of music rights restrictions, this episode is no longer available.

The Imitation Game is a biographical film about Alan Turing, a mathematician who pioneered computer science and helped the British government break Nazi codes, but was then later prosecuted by the British government for being gay. Composer Alexandre Desplat created the score, which was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar — his eighth Oscar nomination. In this episode, he breaks down the orchestration of the main theme from the film, which plays during the title sequence.

Here’s Alexandre Desplat conducting the London symphony Orchestra performing The Imitation Game Suite:

Buy “The Imitation Game” on iTunes.