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 Rishi Kesh Hirwe.

Marvel's Black Panther was released in theaters on February 16, 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 going to break some more. The score for the film was created by Swedish composer Ludwig Gorensen. 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 the theme for

Eric Kilmonger, a character played by Michael B. Jordan. Black Panther is set in the fictional

African nation of Wakanda. 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.

And 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 Gorenson on Song Exploder. My name is Ludwig Gorensen.

The director of Black Panther is Ryan Coogler.

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 his classmate was my roommate. So we played pool together. And then we just started talking. And one of the first things that me and Ryan was talking about, I remember, was Swedish music.

Like, he knew so much about Swedish bands, Swedish artists.

I was like, how do you know all these people?

And that's how we bonded.

I was 23 and Ryan was 21.

He was doing his first student film.

And he approached me because I think I was the only film composer that he knew

So he asked me if I wanted to score his film

And he was such a cool guy, so obviously I said yes

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

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