Christmas came early for podcast fans with yesterday’s premiere of Serial‘s second season. The This American Life spinoff program, which follows the story and controversy surrounding Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl this season, unveiled the first episode and Nick Thorburn‘s (The Unicorns, Islands) new score.
About the new season’s focus, Serial has stated that Bergdahl will actually speak out about his experiences and his motives for the first time:
For this season, Sarah Koenig teams up with filmmaker Mark Boal and Page 1 to find out why one idiosyncratic guy decided to walk away, into Afghanistan, and how the consequences of that decision have spun out wider and wider. It’s a story that has played out in unexpected ways from the start. And it’s a story that’s still going on.
It has been previously reported that Serial will come out with two new stories in rapid succession, and while there is still no new developments on the third season, Thorburn confirmed that he has given the podcast more music than he did last time around:
The first season was a kind of a true-crime thing. I heard the first episode and made a library of music [for the producers to use] based on what I got from the first episode. Where I first went to was the Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks kind of thing: the twangy, echoey guitar and icy synths. This time around, I’m still sort of creating a library of sounds for them instead of more traditional scoring. I’m giving them a lot of cues and moods and tonal things. The music is different, but it’s sort of me just trying to go against the instinct of writing songs. My instinct is to have all these changes and these melodies, and I’m trying to reel that in and create a mood without necessarily a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Listen to the first episode of Serial‘s second season here.
(via Consequence of Sound)
