The band Air is a duo from Versailles, France. Their first EP came out in 1995, followed by their critically acclaimed debut album, ‘Moon Safari,' which was an international hit. Then they made the music for the film ‘The Virgin Suicides,‘ which was written and directed by Oscar-winner Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. The movie came out in 1999, and it was Sofia Coppola’s first film. An album version of Air’s score came out in 2000, and it was nominated for a Brit award. Pitchfork put it at number four on their list of the best film scores of all time. In addition to the instrumental music that appears in the movie, Air also wrote a song for the end credits called “Playground Love.” That song featured Sofia Coppola’s future husband, Thomas Mars, from the French band Phoenix, on vocals. Phoenix was still a very new band, and he and Sofia hadn’t even met yet. Thomas appears on the song under the name Gordon Tracks. So for this episode, I spoke to all of them: Nicolas and JB from Air; Sofia Coppola; Thomas Mars; as well as Brian Reitzell, the music supervisor of the film.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/air.

My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, ‘Brick,' in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including ‘Looper‘ in 2012; ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘ in 2017; the murder mystery ‘Knives Out‘ in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the 'Knives Out' series, ‘Wake Up Dead Man,‘ which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to ‘Das Rheingold‘ by Richard Wagner.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/rian-johnson.

Jessie Reyez is a singer and songwriter originally from Toronto. She's won two of Canada's Juno awards, and she's been nominated for a Grammy. In addition to writing her own music, Jessie's been a songwriter on tracks by Calvin Harris, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Eminem, and many others. You're probably aware that there are songwriters and producers whose names you'll find over and over again in the credits for big hits; Jessie is one of them.

But for this episode, I talked to her about her own song "Goliath." And the day that she wrote that song, she happened to be in the studio with a bunch of other songwriters and producers. So I also talked to Jordan and Stefan Johnson, from the production team Monsters & Strangerz, and Jeff Gitelman, AKA Gitty. Between the three of them, their credits also include songs by Selena Gomez, Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, Mac Miller, and again, tons more.

When a group like this gets together to write music, they don't always know if they're going to be making a song that's going to get recorded and released by an artist somewhere down the line, or if the song's going to get recorded at all. But in the case of "Goliath," what came out was a song that was very personal to Jessie Reyez.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/jessie-reyez.