You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

There's a Netflix original series called Dark that debuted in December 2017.

It's a German show and I'm constantly recommending it to anyone who likes science fiction.

It's a really mysterious, mind-bending series with a tone that feels unique to me.

And a big part of that tone is announced every episode with the music in the show's opening title sequence.

It's the song Good Bye by German Electronic Artist, Aparat.

Aparat is the solo project of Sasha Ring, and this song actually came out years ago on his 2011 album The Devil's Walk.

Before it was used as a theme song for Dark, it's been featured in a bunch of films and commercials.

The thing that really put it on the map was when the song was featured in the season 4 finale of Breaking Bad.

Vince Gilligan, who's the showrunner in the creator of Breaking Bad,

he described it as one of his favorite music moments in Breaking Bad up to that point.

That's Thomas Gullibitch.

I'm the music supervisor for Breaking Bad.

He's the person who placed the song in a crucial scene near the very end of the finale.

We knew that we wanted something that had a grand quality to it and an epic quality to it.

Something that was really powerful and the song Goodbye really struck me.

When Vince heard that song, he responded incredibly powerfully and just said there it is, like that is the one.

The final season of Dark just came out last week at the end of June 2020.

So I wanted to find out how the show's theme song was made.

It features vocals from Anya Plashk, an Austrian artist who makes music under the name Soap and Skin.

Coming up later, she'll tell her part of the story.

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