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I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, it's the music show. The mega mix of Hard Fork songs that you've been asking for has arrived. Plus, we'll go behind the scenes and talk to some of the composers that make the music for this show.
- Hello, Casey. - Hi, Kevin. - We're gonna do something weird today. - I'm excited about it. - So excited about this. So today, instead of our normal show where we talk about the tech news, we have got a very special episode. This is one we've been wanting to do for months now, and we have finally gotten our act together to do it. - We're gonna tell you how to talk to your kids about drugs.
No. So this episode is the hard fork music episode. And it is a direct response to one of the questions that we get asked the most, which is, where can I find the amazing music that plays in your episodes? Yes. Every week we give you the email address for the show. And every week you email us saying, where can we listen to that? The verdict is in. People don't like the talking, but they do like the music. They said, what if the
these two guys just didn't talk at all. Would the show maybe be better? And we're going to find out this week. And I think something that people don't realize is that we actually have at the New York Times a team of in-house composers who make custom music for every podcast, including ours. This is not
the norm in the podcast industry. Usually people, you know, go onto music libraries or they find songs that are sort of out there on the internet and they pull those into their podcasts. But not us. We are artisanal and we make our music from scratch. Yeah. And, you know, as somebody who does not work at the New York Times, when I joined to make this show and they said that they had a team of composers, I mean, it was like they told me that they had a team of astronomers. I was like, wait, wait, what do you mean?
But it was true. There was a whole team of people, and they are insanely talented. They work on incredibly short deadlines. And I'm not exaggerating when I say, truly, everything they've ever made for the show, I'm in love with. It's so good. And so today we are going to give you the very special Hard Fork music episode. We will be back next week with the regular episodes where we talk about the news. But this week, I thought we should just grant our listeners most frequent request and just play for them.
All of the music on this show. That's right. This show wants to be in service of its listeners. And so, look, if there's something you want, ask for it. Maybe we'll do it. So we're going to do this in two ways. We'll do an interview with two of the composers, Dan Powell and Alicia Betitup, who help make the music that goes on our show. And then we'll just play what they have essentially termed a hard fork megamix, which is all of the music that they've made just sort of blended together in a seamless or DJ-style megamix.
If you just want to hear the music, you can also find all of the songs we're about to play on a special playlist on our YouTube channel. And you can find that at youtube.com slash hardfork. So if you just wish Hardfork was essentially chill lo-fi beats to study to, it is now there available for you on youtube.com. All right, let's bring in Dan and Alisha. Dan Powell, Alisha, YouTube. Welcome to Hardfork.
Hey, thanks for having us. Hey guys. Where are you right now? I'm just looking. You've got like instruments behind you. It looks very cool and musical. Yeah. I'm in my home studio in Brooklyn, New York. So behind me is the Moog that I've used on a lot of hard fork cues and then various guitars and acoustic panels. I'm in,
I call it the home studio, but it's a bedroom. Home studio is a state of mind. You two and your team of composers at the New York Times are some of my favorite parts about making this podcast. And, you know, frankly, you don't get enough love for the work that you do. And I would include myself in that. Like, sometimes we just...
have amazing sound that plays on the show. And I'm like, where did that come from? Who made that? And the answer is always that you and your team have put together just some amazing original compositions for us. So just, I want to start by just thanking you because I think a large part of what we hear from listeners is
is that they just love the music of this show. It's so true. You know, I feel like when people listen to a podcast like ours, which is essentially, you know, people talking about the news, maybe the last thing that they expect is they're going to hear incredible music. And yet on Hard Fork, they've been hearing it since the beginning. So we owe that to you and your team. And thank you so much. No, thank you. It's so much fun to make. This is...
We do a lot at the times. Hard Fork is a show we work on that's like, I don't know, it's just like joy constantly. It's constant joy. It's so much fun to make things for Hard Fork. So,
One thing I do know about how the music gets made for New York Times podcasts is that every show kind of has a sound or a vocabulary of sounds. Like when I made Rabbit Hole, which is a podcast I did a few years ago, Dan, you and I and our production team spent a bunch of time talking about what the sound of that show should be. So maybe just describe briefly what the sound of Hard Fork is to you.
Yeah, there was a great creative brief from Davis, the producer. I think one thing we really liked is he gave us a lot of great references of sounds he liked and songs he liked, but also things to avoid. And I think one reason this show is really fun to write for is although it's a tech show,
When we were developing the sound with Davis, he was very thoughtful about, let's not just do your stereotypical beep boop thing. That's obviously still a part of it, but it's not the primary thing. Yeah. I'm actually looking at it right now because it's like, what did he say? It was so inspirational. Yeah, what did he say? What did Davis say? He said the aesthetic of the show, light, smart, funny, fun, knowing but accessible, skeptical but open-minded, sitting around...
sitting around drinking White Claws with your buds, a good hang. And from there, he said some even more inspirational things. But I remember opening up that brief and being like, what? Yes. Like the New York Times is making what? So to answer your question, I think musically, we don't take things too seriously. Right.
I think we try to embrace joy as much as possible. There's definitely like, you know, you can turn in music where we might be like, oh, it doesn't have the hard fork sound just yet. It needs a little digital something, a little glitchy something. I think glitches are very important in this world. Because of all the mistakes we make. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I just want to really highlight it.
Yeah, joyful and glitchy is how we are typically described. So I think that fits. I think one...
term we throw around a lot, um, is hard fork is the show you can write music for where you can let your freak flag fly a little. Um, it's the show and we love working on all the shows at the New York times equally, of course, but hard fork is if you have had an unhinged idea about doing something crazy with sound, it's generally the show that is most open to that happening on. Do you feel that way? Cause Kevin and I are freaks.
No comment. Okay, that's fair, that's fair. I wanna ask about what might be my favorite piece of music on Hard Fork, which is our theme song. And Dan, am I right that you took the lead on the theme song? Yeah, that's right. We actually did not compose that thinking this is the theme. We were kind of composing...
We sort of let themes emerge democratically when we're spinning up a new show where we'll all jam out on a bunch of ideas. And then there tends to be one cue that the team will just be like, yeah, I think this feels like the one that feels themey enough. But yeah, it was originally written just as a idea. And then it sort of gradually became the theme. Do you remember like what you were thinking or how did the hard fork theme come about?
The theme came together really, I'll be completely honest, the horn arrangement for the theme, which I think was something one of you as the hosts requested. I know either Kevin or Casey said, oh, we want horns in the theme. I think I did say that I thought horns would be cool. This is 100% true, but I was in the office on a Friday afternoon when it was totally dead and I was walking to the men's room and all of a sudden the ba-da-da-da-da popped into my head as I was walking through all the cubicles.
And I immediately was like, oh, I got to run back to my desk and get this down. This feels like it might work for hard work. So that just goes to show. So we almost lost, if you had not run back to your desk, we might not have the hard fork horns. Yes. Um, you know, uh, and it was, it was worth, it was worth holding it another two and a half minutes. Sorry. I don't know if that's okay to say. No, it's very okay to say. Um,
I mean, the thing that I love about it is that it conveys a sense of fun and optimism. And we always have known on the show that we are going to talk about some of the most challenging and upsetting things that happen in the world. But from the start, it was important to Kevin and I that when people listen to it, at least in some moments, they had a good time. And I feel like every week when I hear the hard fork horns, I'm like, okay, okay.
let's enjoy something about this life, you know? And it just, anyway, from the first moment I heard it, I was in Slack saying, can this please be the theme?
Well, that's glad to hear that. And yeah, I mean, I think the optimism and sense of, you know, okay, it's not all doom and gloom. It's not really about doom and gloom. And it's also not about, you know, totally mindless optimism either. It's more about things are changing. Things are spontaneous. I think the theme integrates a lot of different styles of music that is also intentional because you have some
electronic music tropes where there's a breakbeat in there. You have a sort of 8080 type drum machine. And then there's some synths, but the synths also have a sort of almost, you know, like 90s jock jam almost feel to them. So it's all meant to be a little bit cheeky in the way that it comes across. And it's meant to be something that's fun and you can kind of bop around to, but also, you know, there's a sense of levity there that I do think was very much informed by the two of your respective energy as hosts of the show. So, yeah.
Yeah. So tell us about the playlist that we're about to hear.
Yeah. So the playlist we're about to hear is a sort of continuous mix of most of the music that has been composed for the Hard Fork podcast. It starts with a selection of the earliest days where Alisha, myself, Marian and Diane, our sort of core composition team, were kind of finding the sound of the show. It then goes into an extended mix where when we brought in all of our colleagues from across the engineering team who also have, you know, music backgrounds of their own,
And then, Alicia, do you want to talk about the sound cue mix that comes in? Yeah, it then goes into a sound cue mix, which is... These are the cues, the stingers that we make for episodes. Sometimes they're recurring. Sometimes they just live in the moment. But I put together a few minutes of the sound cues of the show. And then the sound cue mix is going to go into what we affectionately call the freak flag mix, which is...
It's wild. It's a lot of drum and bass. Maybe Dan, if you want to talk more about that. Yeah, it's everything over 150 BPM that we couldn't make fit in the other parts of the mix. That's basically per minute. Yeah, yeah. It's everything at a very fast tempo we could not make fit in the other parts of the mix that...
was left on the cutting room floor, but that we felt like, oh, this should still have a nice little last hurrah moment. And you may want to check with your doctor to make sure it's okay to listen to 150 beats per minute, because that can really, you know, get your heart going. Yeah, this is the part of the mix that will make you want to get up and dance. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts. We love working with a team of such talented composers and musicians. Yeah, it's the best. You guys are the best. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
When we come back, everybody report to the dance floor. It's time for the Hard Fork Megamix. Support for this podcast comes from Box, the intelligent content cloud. Today, 90% of data is unstructured, which means it's hard to find and manage. We're talking about product designs, customer contracts, financial reports, critical data filled with untapped insights that's disconnected from important business processes. We help make that data useful.
Box is the AI-powered content platform that lets you structure your unstructured data so you can harness the full value of your content, automate everyday processes, and keep your business secure. Visit box.com slash smarter content to learn more. I'm Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at The New York Times. I try to find out what the U.S. government is keeping secret.
Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at The New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.
It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle, and that's why it requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers. If The New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.
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Wow, that was truly incredible. Casey, are you ready to go to the club? I mean, I feel like we've been at the club. I need some water and some electrolytes. Yeah. So when we come back, we're going to do a little bit more music, but we're also going to talk with our composers again about the outro to the show.
Support for this podcast comes from Box, the intelligent content cloud. Today, 90% of data is unstructured, which means it's hard to find and manage. We're talking about product designs, customer contracts, financial reports, critical data filled with untapped insights that's disconnected from important business processes. We help make that data useful.
Box is the AI-powered content platform that lets you structure your unstructured data so you can harness the full value of your content, automate everyday processes, and keep your business secure. Visit box.com slash smarter content to learn more.
So here's my question. If we gave you one year, could you do a club mix of the Hard Fork theme song? Yeah. I would say if you gave us one year, we would focus on let's actually open a club together. How's it feel like we build a light show? I think, and like pyro. I really do think we have a great team because, um,
You two have never had the pleasure of going to karaoke with Alisha, but she's the ultimate hype woman. And I feel like I believe that she and Casey could really just get a crowd in and hype up. Kevin, you're very level headed. You could, I think, keep things managed and under control. I could, you know, do the sound and DJ booth. You know, if we're if we're thinking big year long moonshot, like, let's go all the way. Let's make this an institution. But all right. Well, you heard it here at Hard Fork Club opening 2025. Get your tickets now.
All right, well, before we let you guys go, can you just tell us about the outro? This is the version of the theme song that plays at the end of the show that is slightly different than the intro.
Yeah, so the outro, here's a fun fact. The outro was written first, and the intro theme is a remix of the outro. The horns you hear in the intro theme are actually chopped up versions of the horns in the outro. You'll notice that in the outro theme, when the horns come in, they feel a little more natural, whereas in the intro theme, when the horns come in, they feel kind of clipped and jaunty. That's because it is literally just taking the audio of the horns from the outro, putting it through a sampler in Ableton, reworking it,
It's basically two variations on the same theme, just via remix. The other difference is the intro theme has drums going through a vocoder, which gives things a nice little melodic pulse. The outro theme does not have that. And as far as the do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, you know, for the longest time, I thought to be a legitimate composer, you had to play everything yourself and perform everything in real time. And I can proudly say that that melody you're referring to, Casey, I point and clicked one time.
mouse note at a time in Ableton just over and over again, just because it felt right. Or I might have been dumb and forgotten my, you know, to bring a keyboard to the office that day. I don't know what the reasoning for it was, but it just felt right to make life difficult and
point and click it to glory. That's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. You know, one of the places, again, I usually just, you know, do not weigh in on any of this at all. I just hear what you make and I think that sounds fantastic. When we were talking about the theme song, I do remember having the discussion with our producer, Davis, like, can we please put the horns in the, like the horns are the money here.
That's what gets the people going. That's what gets the people going. And so I didn't actually know that you had remixed the outro to turn it into our intro. That's very cool. Yeah, they are two, you know, both spawned from sort of the same, you know, the same cell and evolved in their own different paths. The same bathroom break. The same bathroom break. Well, thank God for you and your bathroom break. And remind us, before we play this outro to take us out of this episode, remind us what this outro is called.
this outro is called No, It's Fine. And the intro, a remix of it is called I Said It's Fine, Really. All right. So let's take this episode out by hearing No, It's Fine. And Dan and Alicia, thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you. Bye, guys. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Support for this podcast comes from Box, the intelligent content cloud. Today, 90% of data is unstructured, which means it's hard to find and manage. We're talking about product designs, customer contracts, financial reports, critical data filled with untapped insights that's disconnected from important business processes. We help make that data useful.
Box is the AI-powered content platform that lets you structure your unstructured data so you can harness the full value of your content, automate everyday processes, and keep your business secure. Visit box.com slash smarter content to learn more.
Heart Fork is produced by Davis Land, Rachel Cohn, and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyan. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Dan Powell. Original music by Alicia Baetube, Marion Lozano, Sophia Landman, Diane Wong, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nelga Logli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergeson. Go check us out on YouTube at youtube.com slash heartfork.
Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui-Wing Tam, Kate Lepresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu.
