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As a film and television composer,

I always say you have to love film and television more than you do music. My greatest thrill is watching a scene become something even more than it already was with the right music. music. I'm I'm I'm

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I'm Hello and welcome to Slate's TV Club Insider podcast for season 4 of the Americans, where today we'll be discussing episode 10 Munchkins. I'm June Thomas, a writer and editor at Slate, and I am the host of this podcast which takes you behind the scenes of the show. Today, I'm in Slate's New York studio with Joe Weisberg, the creator of the show. Hello, Joe. Hi, June. And his co-showrunner and co-executive producer, Joel Fields. Hi, Joe. And today, we're going to be talking with Nate Barr, the wonderful composer who is responsible for the show's score. Hi, Nate. Thanks for joining us from Los Angeles. Hi, June. Thanks for having me. Oh, not at all. We are very excited.

It's a huge pleasure to talk to you today because I know you do a lot of music, but I must begin by talking about the opening theme because it's one of my absolute favorites.

And every time I think of the show, even if it's not, you know, I'm just looking at a script or something, I find myself, like, whistling or singing the tune.

And I'm just sort of wondering how you came up with it.

Absolutely.

When I first came on board, I wrote a demo for the guys, and I sort of had an idea of an approach I wanted to take that was sort of along the lines of David Shire who did some of those great 70s scores like The Conversation and Taking a Pelham 1, 2, 3.

And so when I wrote this demo, it actually had Elizabeth's theme in it and that really became the main

theme of the show and so the guys really loved that responded to that and hired me and then we

sort of took a look at things and realized that there was a beauty to that theme that lent itself

really well to Elizabeth's character on her journey. And so that felt very natural for that

to become the main theme. So are you telling me that each character has a theme because I've been

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