Podcast Corner: Unpacking the theme music to some of your favourite shows

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

There's something comforting about pressing play on your favourite podcast and hearing the familiar intro music playing, whether it's Corduroy by 'our friends from Pearl Jam' on The Bill Simmons Show or, closer to home and amid similarly familiar sporting soundbites, My God is the Sun by Queens of the Stone Age soundtracking Second Captains.
That's not to mention all of the original music that has been created for myriad podcasts over the last decade plus. The jingles that intro Serial and Welcome to Night Vale sound like old friends and feature on episode 429 of Switched on Pop - 'How podcasting got its sound'. A podcast about the making and meaning of popular music hosted by musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding, we've featured this show in the past and it's one of those that's always great to dip into - you always learn something.
The first half of the episode is like a history lesson, going perhaps a little too far back with the band the Grateful Dead's Truckin' ('the first audio distributed by RSS, the technology that makes podcasts possible'), before then returning to the early 2000s and a host of names piloting what would become known as podcasting.
They discuss WTF with Marc Maron and how Brooklyn DIY musician John Montagna created its intro: 'That cool strumming sound is a violin bass like the style of bass that Paul McCartney played. And he's strumming it with a pick like it's a guitar, micing it with a microphone, while also plugging it in and blending those sounds together. He's using kids' toys to create his drums. It has that anyone-can-do-it kind of quality just like the world of podcasting.'
As for the Serial theme, Sloane says: 'I thought this was totally new. Something we had never heard before. In many ways it absolutely was. But the music was part of a much longer lineage.'
If that all sounds a bit too nerdy, the second half of the episode is an interview with the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder - he hides behind a robot mask a la Daft Punk. The Switched on Pop hosts call him the 'Hans Zimmer of podcasting' as he's made over 200 podcast themes over the past decade-plus.
Ultimately the chat isn't really worth listening to. As Sloane says afterwards, it's 'truly one of the most odd interviews that I've ever attempted'. It really is - Breakmaster Cylinder just sounds like he doesn't want to be interviewed. Sloane puts to him at one point: 'I'm feeling a little bit of hesitancy of accepting that you have really heavily put your fingerprint on this sound of podcasting.'
Breakmaster's response: 'There are a lot of podcasts, man.' He's not wrong.
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