You are listening to the Next Best Series podcast, and these are Will Mavity's interviews with the composer for Severance,

Fyodor Shapiro, production designers Jeremy Hindle and Nick Francone, and cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagne.

Hello, my name is Mark S, and I have, of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure known as severance.

Obviously, one of the standouts is your amazing music in general.

I think you've mentioned before that like you started with that and then just kind of built the entire score around.

Yeah, we, you know i i sent ben this idea and um i i sent it to him and i thought i had something and he didn't

respond for like weeks and i was like oh man too bad he bad. I thought he might go for that. But then he

called one day and he was like, oh, I'm listening to this piece. This is amazing. This, you know,

I'm really excited about this. So at that point, and at that point, it was during the pandemic when

everything was shut down. So it was actually this, this strange gift where we had time to really explore.

And so at that point, I really started shifting my focus towards really expanding on that theme.

And I developed, you know, a whole library in a sense of music developed around that thematic material.

And, you know, as we got into working on the show, it was just this thing where it just kept feeling right over and over again.

You know, it just kept feeling like the sound of the show.

And so we really stayed true to the theme and focused, you know, rather than on having different themes,

we focused on just seeing how much we could pull it apart and vary it and put it into different contexts.

So we just squeezed as much juice out of it as possible.

So the underlying theme, what instruments are we hearing there besides obviously piano?

Yeah.

So there's, you know, in the main title music, there's piano.

And then the piano is sort of subtly doubled by an electric piano that's got this

wobble on it that just sort of gives it this weird instability.

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