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.

Marvel's Black Panther was released in theaters on February 16th, 2018, and in just a few weeks, it made over a billion dollars worldwide.

It's already broken some box office records, and it looks like it's gonna break some more.

The score for the film was created by Swedish composer Ludwig Gornsson. His film and TV credits include Creed and New Girl.

He's also a Grammy-nominated producer who's worked most often with rapper Childish Gambino.

In this episode, Ludwig takes apart one of his pieces from Black Panther. The track is called Killmonger. It's a theme for Eric Killmonger, a character played by Michael B. Jordan.

Black Panther is set in the fictional African nation of Volcanda, and coming up, Ludwig tells the story of doing research and making recordings in Africa,

and how he incorporated those into the score for the film.

In just a heads up, there are some spoilers coming up. Nothing major, but if you're someone like me who avoids trailers, and wants to go into a movie with a clean slate before you see it, this is your spoiler alert.

For everyone else, here's Ludwig Gornsson on Song Exploder.

My name is Ludwig Gornsson. The director of Black Panther is Ryan Kugler. I met Ryan at USC.

One of my roommates was in the film directing program, and one night, Ryan came over to the house because he's classmate was my roommate.

We played pool together, and then we just started talking, and one of the first things that me and Ryan was talking about, remember, was Swedish music.

He knew so much about Swedish band Swedish artists. I was like, how do you know these people? That's how we bonded.

I was 23, and Ryan was 21. He was doing his first student film. He approached me because I think I was the only film composed that he knew.

He asked me if I wanted to score his film, and he was such a cool guy. I said yes.

I scored all of his student films and all of his feature films.

With Black Panther, after Ryan had gotten the gig, I don't think he even asked me if I wanted to do it.

We were talking about the movie, like we're already doing it together.

So I went to the comic store and read up on my Black Panther and read the comics.

It was right when Tenozikoats started to write the comics, so I bought a couple of his issues and started reading it, and I was just drawn into that world.

We had a lot of conversations of what what kind it was and where it was and what countries it looked like.

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