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.

In this episode, composer Jeff Beale deconstructs the main title theme music to the Netflix original series, House of Cards.

The show has been nominated for multiple Emmy awards, including outstanding original main title theme and outstanding music composition.

The show is adapted from a British series of the same name by writer Bo Willemann and director and executive producer David Fincher.

Coming up, Jeff talks about his collaborative process with Fincher, and how they found the mood and musical palette for the show and its theme, and how it changed from season 1 to season 2.

By the way, right now you're hearing the season 1 version.

I interviewed Jeff at his home where he produces every part of the score, including a 16 piece orchestra that he records in his cavernous living room.

A brief word of warning, if you haven't watched the first season, there's a spoiler about how that season ends.

And now, here's the main title theme to House of Cards on Song Exploder.

I'm Jeff Beale, composer. I do the music for House of Cards.

I had worked with David Fincher on a commercial, probably about six or seven years ago, and this was around the time I had been working on Rome series for HBO.

So I saw on the trades, you know, this show was happening with David's name attached, and I kept in touch, and we'd never worked together since, and I thought this might be a good match for us, you know.

I'd watched a little bit of the British show, and I think there was part of my pitch to David, because I sort of used the Rome thing, and I said, well, I said, you know, even though Rome was a period of Rome, it was very much about politics and sort of operatic scale cast and storytelling.

After I first met with David to sort of talk about the project, and got his initial thoughts about music, and we sort of put our heads together, based on his sort of way of thinking about music, and how much music informs his choices.

He actually asked me to write some sketches before he started shooting, and of course, before we had the meeting, and before I wrote these sketches, they shared with me, I think about four or five scripts, early drafts of what became season one.

So it was very much Bose, Bose sense of language, and the way he sort of created this world that inspired some of the early, early work.

The thing that I liked about the British show is this sort of dark humor to it, and I said, yeah, the music's definitely going to have to find a way to sort of give the audience permission to sort of laugh, the sardonic darkness.

Of course, once he called me in, you know, he gave me some of his thoughts on it, which we're interesting, and some of them surprising to me, it's there was one song he really liked, the super tramp crime of the century.

Now the planning, the crime of the century.

It's a great song, a section of that song towards the end, where it just becomes a sort of driving piece.

And the sense of sort of operatic sort of classicism and sort of gravitas, but it also had a very gritty, earthy, almost jazzy, or bluesy kind of imagination, a rock and roll.

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