The Music Episode

"I feel like we've been at the club. I need some water and some electrolytes."

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:48Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 0:50Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 0:53Casey Newton?

  This week, it's the music show. The mega mix of Hard Fork songs that you've been asking for has arrived. Plus, we'll go behind the scenes and talk to some of the composers that make the music for this show.

• 1:20Kevin Roose?

  Hello, Casey.

• 1:21Casey Newton?

  Hi, Kevin.

• 1:22Kevin Roose?

  We're going to do something weird today.

• 1:23Casey Newton?

  I'm excited about it.

• 1:24Kevin Roose?

  So excited about this. So today, instead of our normal show where we talk about the tech news, we have got a very special episode. This is one we've been wanting to do for months now, and we have finally gotten our act together to do it.

• 1:37Casey Newton?

  We're going to tell you how to talk to your kids about drugs.

• 1:41Kevin Roose?

  No, so this, this episode is the Hard Fork Music episode, and it is a direct response to one of the questions that we get asked the most, which is, where can I find the amazing music that plays in your episode?

• 1:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah, every week, we give you the email address for the show, and every week you email us saying, where can we listen to that?

• 1:59Kevin Roose?

  The verdict is in. People don't like the talking, but they do like the music.

• 2:02Casey Newton?

  They said, what if these two guys just didn't talk at all? Would the show maybe be better? And we're going to find out this week.

• 2:06Kevin Roose?

  And I think something that people don't realize is that we actually have, at The New York Times, a team of in-house composers who make custom music for every podcast, including ours. This is not the norm in the podcast industry. Usually, people go onto music libraries, or they find songs that are sort of out there on the internet, and they pull those into their podcasts. But not us. We are artisanal, and we make our music from scratch.

• 2:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and you know, as somebody who does not work at The New York Times, when I joined to make this show, and they said that they had a team of composer, I mean, it was like they told me that they had a team of astronomers. I was like, wait, what do you, what do you mean? But it was true. There was a whole team of people, and they are insanely talented. They work on incredibly short deadlines. And I'm not exaggerating when I say truly, everything they've ever made for the show, I'm in love with.

• 2:50Kevin Roose?

  It's so good.

• 2:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Kevin Roose?

  And so today, we are going to give you the very special Hard Fork Music episode. We will be back next week with the regular episodes where we talk about the news. But this week, I thought we should just grant our listeners most frequent request and just play for them all of the music on this show.

• 3:07Casey Newton?

  That's right. This show wants to be in service of its listeners. And so, look, if there's something you want, ask for it, maybe we'll do it.

• 3:13Kevin Roose?

  So we're going to do this in two ways. We'll do an interview with two of the composers, Dan Powell and Alicia Baitut, who helped make the music that goes on our show. And then we'll just play what they have essentially termed a Hard Fork mega mix, which is all of the music that they've made, just sort of blended together in a seamless or DJ-style mega mix. If you just want to hear the music, you can also find all of the songs we're about to play on a special playlist on our YouTube channel. And you can find that at youtube.com/hardfork.

• 3:42Casey Newton?

  So if you just wish Hard Fork was essentially chill, lo-fi beats to study to, it is now there, available for you on youtube.com.

• 3:49Kevin Roose?

  All right, let's bring in Dan and Alicia Baitut.

• 4:00Kevin Roose?

  Dan Powell, Alicia Baitut, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Hey, thank you for having us.

• 4:04Casey Newton?

  Hey, guys.

• 4:06Kevin Roose?

  Where are you right now? I'm just looking. You're, you've got like instruments behind you. It looks very cool and musical.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm in my home studio in Brooklyn, New York. So behind me is the Moog that I've used on a lot of Hard Fork cues, and then various guitars and acoustic panels, so.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  I'm in, I call it the home studio, but it's a bedroom.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Home studio is a state of mind.

• 4:32Kevin Roose?

  You, you two and your team of composers at The New York Times are some of my favorite parts about making this podcast. And frankly, you don't get enough love for the work that you do. And I would include myself in that. Like, sometimes we just have amazing sound that plays on the show. And I'm like, where did that come from? Who made that? And the answer is always that you and your team have, have put together just some amazing original compositions for us. So just, I want to start by just thanking you, because I think a large part of what we hear from listeners is that they just love the music of this show.

• 5:05Casey Newton?

  It's so true. You know, I feel like when people listen to a podcast like ours, which is essentially, you know, people talking about the news, maybe the last thing that they expect is they're going to hear incredible music. And yet, on Hard Fork, they've been hearing it since the beginning. So we owe that to you and your team. And thank you so much.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  No, thank you. It's so much fun to make. This is, um, we, we do, we do a lot at The Times. Hard Fork is a show we work on that's like, I don't know. It's just, it's just like joy constantly. It's constant joy. It's so much fun to make things for Hard Fork.

• 5:41Kevin Roose?

  So one thing I do know about how the music gets made for New York Times podcasts is that every show kind of has a sound or a vocabulary of sounds. Like, when I made Rabbit Hole, which is a podcast I did a few years ago, Dan, you and I and our production team spent a bunch of time talking about what the sound of that show should be. So maybe just describe briefly what the sound of Hard Fork is to you.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a great creative brief from Davis, the producer. I think one thing we really liked is he gave us a lot of great references of sounds he liked and songs he liked, but also things to avoid. And I think one reason this show is really fun to write for is although it's a tech show, when we were developing the sound with Davis, he was very thoughtful about, let's not just do your stereotypical beat boop thing.

• 6:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Like, that's obviously still a part of it, but it's not the primary thing.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I'm actually looking at it right now because it's like, what did he say? It was so inspirational.

• 6:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, what did he say?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  What did Davis say? He said, the aesthetic of the show, light, smart, funny, fun, knowing but accessible, skeptical but open-minded, sitting around, sitting around drinking White Claws with your buds, a good hang.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  And from there, he said some even more inspirational things. But I remember, like, opening up that brief and being like, what? Yes, so.

• 7:06Casey Newton?

  Like, The New York Times is making what?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  So to answer your question, I think musically, we, we don't take things too seriously. I think we try, we try to embrace joy as much as possible. There's definitely like, you know, you can turn in music where we might be like, oh, it doesn't have the Hard Fork sound just yet. It needs a little, a little digital something, a little, a little glitchy something. I think glitches are very important in this world. And yeah.

• 7:36Casey Newton?

  Because of all the mistakes we make.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Really highlight it.

• 7:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, joyful and glitchy is how we are typically described. So I think that, that fits.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  I think one term we throw around a lot is, Hard Fork is the show you can write music for where you can let your freak flag fly a little.

• 7:55Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  It's the show, and we love working on all the shows at The New York Times equally, of course. But Hard Fork is, if you have had an unhinged idea about doing something crazy with sound, it's generally the show that is most open to that happening on.

• 8:09Casey Newton?

  Do you feel that way? Because Kevin and I are freaks.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  No comment.

• 8:13Casey Newton?

  Okay, that's fair, that's fair. I want to ask about what might be my favorite piece of music on Hard Fork, which is our theme song. And Dan, am I right that you took the lead on the theme song?

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. We actually did not compose that, thinking this is the theme. We were kind of composing, we sort of let themes emerge democratically when we're spinning up a new show, where we'll all jam out on a bunch of ideas. And then there tends to be one cue that the team will just be like, yeah, I think this feels like the one that feels theme-y enough. But yeah, it was originally written just as a idea, and then it sort of gradually became the theme.

• 8:46Casey Newton?

  Do you remember like what you were thinking? Or how did the Hard Fork theme come about?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  The theme came together really, I'll be completely honest, the horn arrangement for the theme, which I think was something one of you as the hosts requested. I know, I know either Kevin or Casey said, oh, we want horns.

• 9:02Casey Newton?

  I think I did say that I thought horns would be cool. Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  This is 100% true, but I was in the office on a Friday afternoon when it was totally dead. And I was walking to the men's room, and all of a sudden, the ba-da-da-da popped into my head as I was walking through all the cubicles. And I immediately was like, oh, I got to run back to my desk and get this down. This feels like my work for Hard Fork.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  So that just goes to show.

• 9:26Casey Newton?

  So we almost, if you had not run back to your desk, we might not have the Hard Fork horns.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Yes, you know, and it was, it was worth, it was worth holding it another two and a half minutes. Sorry, I don't know if that's okay to say on a podcast.

• 9:38Casey Newton?

  No, that's very okay to say. I mean, the thing that I love about it is that it conveys a sense of fun and optimism. And we always have known on the show that we are going to talk about some of the most challenging and upsetting things that happen in the world. But from the start, it was important to Kevin and I that when people listen to it, at least in some moments, they had a good time. And I feel like every week, when I hear the Hard Fork horns, I'm like, okay, let's, let's enjoy something about this life, you know? And it just, anyway, from the, the first moment I heard it, I was in Slack saying, can this please be the theme?

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Oh, well, that's glad glad to hear that. And yeah, I mean, I think the optimism and sense of, you know, okay, it's not all doom and gloom. It's not really about doom and gloom. And it's also not about, you know, totally mindless optimism either. It's more about things are changing, things are spontaneous. I think the theme integrates a lot of different styles of music that is also intentional because you have some electronic music tropes where there's a breakbeat in there. You have a sort of 8080 type drum machine. And then there's some synths, but the synths also have a sort of almost, you know, like 90s jock jam almost feel to them. So it's all meant to be a little bit cheeky in the way that it comes across. And it's it's meant to be something that's fun and you can kind of bop around to, but

• 11:02Speaker 04

  also, you know, there's a sense of levity there that I do think was very much informed by the two of your respective energy as hosts of the show. So, yeah.

• 11:11Kevin Roose?

  So tell us about the playlist that we're about to hear.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the playlist we're about to hear is a sort of continuous mix of most of the music that has been composed for the Hard Fork Podcast. It starts with a selection of the earliest days where Alicia, myself, Marion and Diane are our sort of core composition team, were kind of finding the sound of the show. It then goes into an extended mix where when we brought in all of our colleagues from across the engineering team, who also have, you know, music backgrounds of their own. And then Alicia, but do you want to talk about the sound cue mix that comes in?

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it then goes into a sound cue mix, which is, these are the cues, the stingers that we make for episodes. Sometimes they're recurring, sometimes they just live in the moment. But I put together a few minutes of the sound cues of the show. And then the sound cue mix is going to go into what we affectionately call the freak flag mix, which is, it's wild, it's a lot of drum and bass. Maybe Dan, if you want to talk more about that?

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's everything over 150 BPM that we couldn't make fit in the other parts of the mix.

• 12:19Kevin Roose?

  Beats per minute?

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's everything at a very fast tempo. We could not make fit in the other parts of the mix that was left on the cutting room floor, but that we felt like, oh, this should still have a nice little last hurrah moment.

• 12:30Casey Newton?

  And you may want to check with your doctor to make sure it's okay to listen to 150 beats per minute because that could really, you know, get your heart going.

• 12:37Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this is the part of the mix that will make you want to get up and dance. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts. We love working with a team of such talented composers and musicians.

• 12:49Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it's the best. You guys are the best.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 12:53Casey Newton?

  When we come back. Everybody report to the dance floor. It's time for the Hard Fork Mega Mix.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 13:46Speaker 05

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• 14:21Speaker 06

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• 14:54Casey Newton?

  Kevin, you ready to drop those beats?

• 14:55Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it.

• 14:56Casey Newton?

  Hit it.

• 58:00Kevin Roose?

  Wow, that was truly incredible. Casey, are you ready to go to the club?

• 58:05Casey Newton?

  I mean, I feel like we've been at the club. I'm, I need, I need some water and some electrolytes.

• 58:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So when we come back, we're going to do a little bit more music, but we're also going to talk with our composers again about the outro to the show.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 58:59Speaker 05

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• 59:35Speaker 06

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. ramp.com/hardfork.

• 1:00:09Casey Newton?

  So here's my question. If we gave you one year, could you do a club mix of the Hard Fork theme song?

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say if you gave us one year, we would focus on let's actually open a club together.

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, like, we build a light show.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  I think, and like, pyro. I really do think we have a great team, because you two have never had the pleasure of going to karaoke with Alicia Bo, but she's the ultimate hype woman. And I feel like she and Casey could really just get a crowd in and hype everyone up. Kevin, you're very level headed. You could, I think, keep things managed and under control. I could, you know, do the sound in DJ booth. You know, if we're, if we're thinking big, year-long, moonshot, like, let's go all the way, let's make this an institution, but.

• 1:00:50Kevin Roose?

  All right, well, you heard it here, Hard Fork Club, opening 2025. Get your tickets now. All right, well, before we let you guys go, can you just tell us about the outro? This is the, the version of the theme song that plays at the end of the show that is slightly different than the intro.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the outro, here's a fun fact, the outro was written first, and the intro theme is a remix of the outro. The horns you hear in the intro theme are actually chopped up versions of the horns in the outro. You'll notice that in the outro theme, when the horns come in, they feel a little more natural, whereas in the intro theme, when the horns come in, they feel kind of clipped and jaunty. That's because it is literally just taking the audio of the horns from the outro, putting it through a sampler in Ableton, reworking it. It's basically two variations on the same theme, just via remix. The other difference is the intro theme has drums going through a vocoder, which gives things a nice little melodic pulse. The outro theme does not have that.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  And the, as far as the doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, you know, for the longest time, I thought to be a legitimate composer, you had to play everything yourself and perform everything in real time. And I can proudly say that that melody you're referring to, Casey, I point and clicked one mouse note at a time in Ableton, just over and over again, just because it felt right. Or I might have been dumb and forgotten my, you know, to bring a keyboard to the office that day. I, I don't, I don't know what the reasoning for it was, but it just felt right to make, make life difficult and point and click it to glory.

• 1:02:20Casey Newton?

  That's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. You know, one of the places, again, I, I usually just, you know, do not weigh in on any of this at all, I just hear what you make, and I think that sounds fantastic. When we were talking about the theme song, I do remember having the discussion with our producer, Davis, like, can we please put the horns in the, like, the horns are the, the, the money here, you know?

• 1:02:40Kevin Roose?

  That's what gets the people going.

• 1:02:40Casey Newton?

  That's what gets the people going. And so I didn't actually know that, that you had remixed the outro to turn it into our intro, that's very cool.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, they are, they are two, you know, both, both spawned from sort of the same, you know, the same cell and evolved in their own.

• 1:02:54Casey Newton?

  The same bathroom break.

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  The same bathroom break.

• 1:02:57Kevin Roose?

  Well, thank God for you and your bathroom break. And remind us, before we play this outro, to take us out of this episode, remind us what this outro is called?

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  This outro is called "No, It's Fine." And the intro, a remix of it, is called "I Said It's Fine, Really."

• 1:03:14Kevin Roose?

  All right, so let's take this episode out by hearing "No, It's Fine." And Dan and Alicia, thank you so much.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Awesome, thank you.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  Bye, guys. Thanks so much, appreciate it.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 1:05:43Speaker 05

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's Outsystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used Outsystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. Outsystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 1:06:53Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land, Rachel Cohn, and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Dan Powell. Original music by Alicia Baetou, Marion Lozano, Sophia Landman, Diane Wong, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemestow, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Gagloli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Burgerson. Go check us out on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Kate LaPresty, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].

• 1:08:10Speaker 06

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