Theodore Shapiro - Severance (Main Title Theme)

The TV show Severance debuted on Apple TV+ in February 2022. It was created by writer Dan Erickson, and developed into a series by director and executive producer Ben Stiller. He directed the pilot and most of the episodes. After the first season came out, Severance was nominated for 14 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series, and it won two Emmys: for Main Title Design and for Musical Composition. I love this show, and the main title sequence is incredible. I was so excited to get to talk to the composer, Theodore Shapiro, about how he made the main title theme music. In this episode, you’ll hear how that theme first came into existence in a totally different form, and then, how Teddy re-imagined it to become the final version. For more, visitsongexploder.net/severance https://songexploder.net/severance.

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

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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 Hirway.

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• 1:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The TV show Severance debuted on Apple TV+ in February 2022. It was created by writer Dan Erickson and developed into a series by director and executive producer Ben Stiller. He directed the pilot and most of the episodes. After the first season came out, Severance was nominated for 14 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama, and it won two Emmys for Main Title Design and for Musical Composition. I love this show, so I was really excited to talk to the composer Theodore Shapiro about how he came up with the show's theme music. In this episode, you'll hear how the theme music first came into existence in a totally different form, and then how Teddy reimagined it to become the final version.

• 1:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But first, here's a little background on what the show is about.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  This is Adam Scott. In Severance, I play Mark Scout, an employee at a company called Lumen Industries. He leads a team whose employees have undergone a severance procedure that surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. When they go to work, they know nothing about their lives in the outside world, and in the outside world, they have no knowledge of their lives at work. Mark has chosen to undergo the severance procedure after the death of his wife, so he can go to work free from the overwhelming grief he feels every day. But Lumen Industries is a mysterious company. When Mark and his team start pulling at the threads, things start to unravel in ways no one expects.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Here's Rishi and severance composer Theodore Shapiro.

• 2:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I know you've been the composer on a lot of Ben Stiller's films. What are the projects that you two have done together?

• 3:02Speaker 03

  I worked on Dodgeball, which he produced. He didn't direct it, but he was a very involved producer. I worked on Tropic Thunder, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Zoolander 2, and then Severance.

• 3:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Okay, yeah, so you've got a bunch of experience together.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And do you remember the first time you ever heard about Severance? What the first conversation was that you had about the show?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  The first conversation I had about it was at a Halloween party because Adam Scott's son and my son have been in the same class since kindergarten.

• 3:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Wow.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  I was in a backyard in the valley, talking with Adam, and we were just catching up, and he told me about this project. And I was immediately hooked by it. Like, it just sounded like such a great, simple, brilliant idea. And I just thought, I really hope Ben calls me about that project.

• 4:07Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And then what happened?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  I waited and then Ben called me out of the blue one day and told me they were making this show and would I be interested? And of course, the answer was yes.

• 4:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Did you say, oh, I've been waiting?

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Here are my, here are my many ideas that I've already written about. No, I might have mentioned that Adam had told me about it and I thought it was a great idea.

• 4:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Did he give you a sense of like what the tone of the show was going to be?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  He knew that there would be humor and drama and strangeness.

• 4:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  He referenced a film that uses Bobby McFerrin's music.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  It's really strange and effective. And so I started off wondering whether falsetto male voices might be an interesting sound. And the other thing that we talked about at that time was, I said, you know, my first instinct here is that maybe we should have two different sound palettes, one for the world inside Lumen and one for the world outside Lumen. And he was like, yeah, that sounds right.

• 5:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Did you two talk about the idea of you sending music before they started shooting?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Yes. I had pitched to him from the beginning that I would create a library of music and that there would be a rule, which was you can only temp in music that's original for the show.

• 5:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Huh. And why did you want to set that rule?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  So in film, there is a thing called a temp track. That is when the director or the editor or the music editor takes music from other films or other sources and cuts it into the film as a placeholder.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  And the problem with a temp track is that everybody gets used to the temp track.

• 6:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Right.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  That is often true for the director, but it's also true for the composer. It just starts coloring your judgment, even when you desperately don't want to be thinking that way. It just enters your creative process in a way that closes off doors for what you might do. And so I always relish the idea of starting as early as possible on a project.

• 6:43Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  So my first thought was, what if we do something really cold and electronic inside the world of Lumen? And on the outside, we'll do something really organic. And maybe that would be where these falsetto voices would come in. And it would be a palette that dealt more with Mark's grief in the show. And I pretty quickly got to work.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  I started just playing around with some cold sounds, like these computer toms that feel aggressively electronic and some modular synth loops, just building an icy atmosphere that I thought might go with Lumen.

• 7:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's interesting that it's, those are synth sounds, as you're kind of using percussion. The toms are digital toms, but they're also still toms.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But then you've got these sounds that are, I don't know.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  What is that?

• 7:48Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  That's what I think modular synths do so well, this organic and yet electronic sound palette that doesn't get you too deep into something that you can really identify, but yet gives you a rhythmic impulse that you might need.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  I have a Moog Model D, which I use all the time. And that was part of the palette.

• 8:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The visual world of Lumen inside the building, it has such a specific aesthetic. It feels like early 1980s in terms of like the technology and the wardrobe. And all of this music, all of these sounds feel like that. Were you working off of something at this point? And they hadn't actually shot anything. How did you arrive at a place that already felt like it fit the finished product?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  That's just serendipity.

• 8:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Really?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yes. We never had any conversations about that. It just ended up fitting with the aesthetic of the show. In February 2020, Ben asked if I wanted to fly out to New York and come talk about music and see the sets and just sort of get a sense of what they were planning.

• 9:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And you'd already sent him some music at this point?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  I had sent him a bunch of music and he was really enthusiastic about it. I went to the set and saw a bunch of the sets that they were building. And he sat down and started playing a lot of the music.

• 9:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  In front of you?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  In front of me, always very relaxing. And in particular, there was a part in the middle of this piece that he kept coming back to more than anything else. And one of the things that I have learned over the years is that Ben has incredible instincts. And if you can follow where his head is going, it will lead you to good places. And so I just was aware that there was something he was responding to in this middle section.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  The chords were a Wurlitzer through a vibrato effect. That's sort of giving it that wobble and just adding a little bit of weirdness.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Pitch wobbles are really a good friend, a lot of times, in making music. A lot of what is exciting about human beings making music together in a room has to do with discrepancies of pitch, and that is sort of what makes it human. So I think that having the pitch wobble back and forth there, I think, just adds this kind of uncanny human element to it.

• 11:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And was it specifically like this breakdown section that Ben Stiller kept playing? Or was it the whole, this whole part?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  It was really where the breakbeat comes in.

• 11:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  OK, let me play that part.

• 11:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Did you say to Ben Stiller, "Hey, I noticed that you keep going back to this one piece of music"?

• 11:30Speaker 03

  No. And maybe part of it was that I had landed on this other thing, the falsetto voices idea. That was what I thought was going to be the main idea.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  When I got home, I sat at the piano and I started playing the chord progression.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  As soon as I started playing the chords at the piano, it opened up this whole possible other world and other direction.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  It felt connected maybe more to 70s cinema.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  And pretty quickly, the melody just came spilling out very fast.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  And I thought, this is exciting. This could be a totally different take on what the score for this show could be. In that case, it wouldn't be a dichotomy of an indie music and an outie music. In the world of this theme, this would be the big canvas of the show. And that canvas would be asking the question, what's happening here? It would present the show as one big puzzle.

• 13:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You'll hear how the ideas in that voice memo got turned into the final theme when my conversation with Theodore Shapiro continues after this.

• 13:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You might have heard me say that Song Exploder is part of Radiotopia from PRX. And I wanted to explain what that means and how it connects to you. PRX is a public media nonprofit, so they're focused on supporting work that serves the public interest. And they started Radiotopia as a way to empower independent podcast makers like me. Here on Song Exploder, we try to book artists from a really wide range of music and backgrounds and ideas, and we spend a long time editing together each episode. I think that's what makes the show special, but it's not a great formula if you're trying to maximize profit. But I've been able to keep this show going despite that because of the support of Radiotopia and listeners like you. Radiotopia sells ads for the show, but those come and go.

• 14:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And nothing is as reliable as the listeners who believe in what we're doing. So if you care about this show, and if you care about supporting independent media, please visit radiotopia.fm/donate. You can chip in any amount that works for you. It all makes a difference. Again, it's radiotopia.fm/donate. Thank you so much.

• 14:27Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So after you recorded that voice memo and had this new understanding of the piece, did you send that to Ben Stiller?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  No. I sat down and I did a full rendering of this idea.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  I performed the piano on two different pianos. I did the chords on an upright.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  And I did the melody on a grand piano.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  I thought that the idea of like two pianos felt like it mirrored the In the Audi idea.

• 14:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  That's awesome. When Ben Stiller was playing those chords in that middle section, did you start to think, I'm definitely going to stay within these four chords? Like, it's going to be this hypnotic trance-like thing that I'm going to make? Or did you feel any pressure, like, is this going to be OK? That I'm just staying in this same chord progression?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  I did not see that coming, to be honest.

• 15:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I mean, one of my favorite things about the theme is the fact that the chords don't change.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There's a real effect that comes from the repetition.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  It feels inexorable. You have four chords. And the first chord, C minor, is over a C in the bass, as it normally would be. And then each of the next three chords are also over the same note in the bass. But the chords are changing so that they are dissonant with what's happening in the bass. And that's creating this constant tension and release.

• 16:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I think inexorable is such a great word. There's something about this show and this music that feels like you're caught in a trap.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  The bass is set to glide, meaning when you hit the note, it comes to the note from whatever the previous note was.

• 16:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  A portamento.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Portamento. So I silently made the note that it's coming from at the very top of its range. So that when it enters, instead of just hitting on the note, it goes boom. And I really like how it does that.

• 16:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The breakbeat kind of changed in its timbre as well.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  The beat hit harder in version 1.0. But I think I felt like it was disrupting the music in some way, or trying too hard, or something. So ultimately, I made the beat a little bit more abstract and airy. Tambourine has little bits chopped out of it, which is kind of a fun little, small detail. I just wanted it to be abstracted in some way. You know, I didn't want it to sound like a person in a room shaking a tambourine. Just give it some strangeness.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  We recorded live strings.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Rob Moose and Gabriel Cabezas, they worked together.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  But a lot of the elements that went into the final version are the same elements in the demo. The pianos are things that I do with sample libraries, and I'm very happy with how those sound as MIDI.

• 18:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Those are MIDI pianos?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, they sound great.

• 18:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The thing that I wait for, I mean, like, just my favorite thing, is when you play, I don't know what the correct music theory term would be, but other than to call it "the wrong note",

• 18:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  when you play the wrong note in the melody, chromatically just off by half a step.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Show me exactly which one you're talking about.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  It's really fun because you have a chord that clashes over the bass note. You sort of have two scales that are equally correct in that moment. And it leads to some really fun wrong note feelings, which I think are ultimately very much in concert with what the show is making you feel. And then I had come up with something that I thought was interesting, which was this reverse piano that kind of stutters and fritzes out.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  I felt like it was really a strong way to end the piece. And I had a sense when I did it that the meaning of the gesture was related to the idea of the fraying of the self. And that ended up paying a lot of dividends in the show. I sent it to Ben and he did not respond for three weeks. But he finally, one day, just called out of the blue and said, oh, I love this. This is really great. That was really encouraging, but I was still hanging on to the falsetto voices idea.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  And then we started talking about a main title sequence. And I did one main title with the falsetto voices and one main title with this.

• 20:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Because you wanted to present them with ideas or because they asked for multiple ideas?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  No, I like to present Ben multiple ideas. I just think that it's nice to be presented with options sometimes. And when you choose something, you're choosing it in relation to something else, which doesn't feel as good.

• 20:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, and if they say yes to one and say no to the other, they've only broken half of your heart.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Okay, so you send two options.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  And he was like, this is great. I'm really excited about this. So at that point, I was really locked in, I felt.

• 21:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Do you remember when you first saw your music against the actual picture of the titles?

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Well, I had to cut it down. I had to cut it down to 90 seconds.

• 21:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Right, because when you wrote the suite, you weren't thinking it would necessarily be main titles.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  No, I wasn't.

• 21:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What was it like for you when, you know, you said that you were thinking about this kind of fraying of identity with that piano sound, to see how that actually manifested visually in the final picture?

• 21:32Speaker 03

  It was so exciting. Oliver Latta, the brilliant designer who created those titles, first of all, to see Oliver's main title design just come together as a finished product. But second of all, to see how he responded specifically to that musical element. It really cements the idea of this fraying of the self. To whatever extent I had that idea in mind when I made that sound, you know, it really comes into solidity with his visualization of it.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  This project is uniquely exciting in the sense that it has so many elements that have come together in a great way. Just the way in which all of the various departments have put together this extraordinary work, and the cast is extraordinary, and all of that, plus the way in which the creative process and my work with Ben feels like an unusually productive version of a collaboration. I think that that makes it extraordinary.

• 22:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now here's the main title theme from Severance by Theodore Shapiro in its entirety.

• 24:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  To learn more, visit songexploder.net/Severance. You'll find links to buy or stream the Severance theme, and you'll also find the videos for the main titles for Season 1 and Season 2, which are both incredible, the music and the visuals. And huge thanks to Adam Scott for doing the synopsis in the intro. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.

• 25:07Hrishikesh Hirway?

  If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can also follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram, and you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt.

• 25:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 25:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Radiotopia.

• 25:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  From PRX.