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.

Avengers Age of Ultron is the second movie featuring the Avengers, a supergroup of comic book heroes.

The other character in the title, Ultron, is the villain in this story.

If you haven't seen the film, that's all the background you need to know for this episode.

Composer Brian Tyler disassembles the cue he wrote to accompany the film's title card.

It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the London Philharmonic, with Brian himself conducting.

Hi, I'm Brian Tyler, a composer of the film Avengers Age of Ultron.

The piece that we're listening to here is the title card, where it says Avengers Age of Ultron over the screen,

and the scene that precedes that, I was actually thinking it would be some big Avengers fanfare for the good guys, you know, for our heroes.

But Josh said, that's Joss Whedon who wrote and directed the film.

Josh said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's gonna say Avengers in big letters, you'll see Ultron and smaller letters, but you're gonna be feeling Ultron.

This movie is about our team not having control.

It was kind of fun to do a villainous title card for a Marvel movie, and it was at first.

Let's find a vibe for Ultron was really the first of the marching orders in terms of composition.

Originally the Ultron theme I wrote away from picture.

It was something that Joss and I had a lot of discussion about, and I wrote many versions.

At one point I called his theme like the broken clock representing his character, which it has to have some logic to it.

Well, he thinks he's doing right by hitting the restart button on humanity.

He thinks that's the best thing for humanity, which is ironic.

How do we write a theme that sounds almost heroic because he in his own mind is justified, but dissonant and tweaky enough to say, no, he doesn't quite have it right, he is a villain still.

So it was a tricky one.

...