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.

Transparent is an Amazon original series created by Jill Soloway. It's about a family where the father, played by actor Jeffrey Tambor, comes out to his children and to the world at large as transgender.

The first season was released in September 2014. It was critically acclaimed and won a lot of awards, including an Emmy for outstanding main title theme music.

In this episode, composer Dustin O'Hallarun breaks down how he made the transparent theme using an 80-year-old piano and channeling his own family nostalgia.

My name is Dustin O'Hallarun and I am the composer for Transparent. Jill Soloway has been a really old friend of mine. We've known each other for a pretty long time.

A couple years ago, she was on a trip to Berlin and she came here and she was telling me about this new pilot she was working on.

She said that she had been writing the script listening to the piano solos volume two record that I made.

All good collaborations, usually there's a friendship that starts and something that's more organic.

I just love that it was just her finding people that somehow she had connected with along the way to be a part of it.

She was telling me this show was sort of autobiographical because her father came out four or five years ago and that was sort of the inspiration for the whole show.

I need to talk to you about something. There's a big change going on.

I love your kids. I love your kids. I love your kids. I love your kids.

I watched the whole pilot and Jeffrey Tambor's performance was so strong and it was so fragile and open and that was really what I connected with this sensitivity.

For me, that was the part that I thought maybe I can get into this. I could see that there was so much to explore in his character and his timing is so funny but it's also these moments in his performance that are so real and fragile and I think connect on so many levels with a lot of people, not just the trans community.

It's just about finding yourself at such a late age in your life and I think that resonates with a lot of people.

This is just a special piano to me. It's a Swiss piano from the 30s and it's the piano that originally recorded the piano solos volume 2 on.

I don't know why but the sound of that record is so attached to this specific piano.

My mom was part of this Kippy Methodist Church and I was probably about six or seven and I really wanted to learn piano and my mom didn't really have much money and so she got the church organist to teach me after Sunday service.

It's ultimately the instrument I feel most connected to so that was definitely the centerpiece of the score.

The opening titles are just nostalgic because it's all these old VHS clippings of Bermitts Vaz and parties and childhood and you know it's about this family, this deep family history in all of these secrets that are sort of unlocked during the course of the year.

The story as it unfolds I began to sort of fill things in I knew that it was the opening title so I felt it should be a bit fuller and we could still keep that understated feeling that we were looking for.

The harmonium is a big part of it it just adds this really rich tone that serve hides under the piano.

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