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, your way.

On August 28th, 2020, actor Chadwick Boseman died. He was only 43 years old.

Unbeknownst to many, even some of his closest collaborators, he'd been battling colon cancer since 2016.

His family released his statement and in it they said,

it was the honor of his career to bring King to Chala to life in Black Panther.

After hearing the sad news, I went back and rewatched the movie. And I don't know, it was a completely different experience this time.

So I wanted to go back and share this episode from 2018 about a piece of the film's score by composer Ludwig Gorenson.

This is one of my favorite episodes and since it first aired, Ludwig went on to win the Grammy and the Oscar for the Black Panther score.

I'll be back next week with a new episode with Selena Gomez.

Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope it makes you remember how great Black Panther is and how great Chadwick Boseman is in it in a role that defined a career that was way too short.

Okay, here we go.

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 going to break some more.

The score for the film was created by Swedish composer Ludwig Gorenson. 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 Gorenson, on-song explorer.

My name is Ludwig Gorenson. 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 his classmate was my roommate.

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