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You're listening to Sound Opinions and this week in honor of Spooky Season, we share some of our

favorite Spooky movie music. I'm Jim D. Wurgatis and I'm Greg Kod. But first, we revisit our

conversation with horror legend, director, and composer, John Carpenter.

That's a little bit of the theme from the classic horror film, Halloween.

Directed and co-written by our guest today, John Carpenter. In addition to being a great director

of movies like Halloween, Escape from New York, and they live, my favorite, Carpenter composed

the music to his films, and that music became iconic in its own right even when removed from

its original context. Carpenter recently released a new album, Lost Themes 3, and he's joining us

today to talk about that as well as his career as a composer and a filmmaker. What an honor.

John, welcome to Sound Opinions. Thank you very much. Nice to be here.

From the beginning of your career as a director, it's certainly an incredible list of films,

many of them that formed my life from Halloween and they live, assault on precinct 13,

et cetera, et cetera. You always did the music and I think I wasn't aware of that until the last

couple of years when you began giving interviews more about the music and touring my goodness.

From early on, what was the impetus to do your own soundtracks?

Originally, and I'll be really honest with you, originally it came out of necessity

because when you're making a low-budget film, when you have no money, you can't hire a composer

or an orchestra. So if you have to do it yourself, a synthesizer is the best way to go because you

can sound big. You can sound full with a synthesizer and so that's what that's the route I took.

Well, you grew up in a musical family and I hear it was violin originally thrust upon you.

...