Arcane’s secret sauce has always been its soundtrack. There’s no better example of this than one of the early scenes of season 2’s first episode, as Caitlyn mourns the death of her mother. Rather than forcing grief-stricken dialogue to communicate how she’s feeling, the show cuts to a completely unique animation style, with stylized black charcoal sketches draining the color from Caitlyn’s world.
But to underscore Fortiche’s inventive animation the show needed a song that’s as specifically tailored to Caitlyn’s emotional state as the visuals are, so the show’s creative team turned to Freya Ridings to write a beautiful, haunting ballad to let us inside Caitlyn’s head. This kind of decision is all over Arcane — and according to showrunner Christian Linke, it always will be.
Ahead of the show’s season 2 premiere, Polygon had the chance to sit down with Linke to talk about how he and the team work with artists to create the perfect songs, and why he feels like licensed music has no place in the series.
Polygon: Arcane often uses original songs to communicate the feelings of its characters in ways that dialogue alone couldn’t. What’s the process like of crafting those songs and finding the right artists for each moment?
Christian Linke: Conceptually, it is just very important to me. I don’t think I’ll ever in my career work with licensed music and I think it just comes from a point of having been a musician. It’s really hard to have a career in music. The fact that so many franchises with so much money just keep cutting checks for Led Zeppelin, I’m like, Cool guys, I’m sure they need it. There’s so many musicians that struggle to have a career. It’s such a cutthroat world out there.
So I love the fact that all we do is original music. We work with artists from the ground up, we collaborate and we give them — and some of these artists that we work with, they don’t need the platform, they’re already big, but others, it’s really great for them. It really gets the word out there for them. That’s really important to me, that’s a principle that has held up from the beginning. It creates a lot of work, but that’s also what makes it awesome.
You start with a scene in an episode where they feel the thing you’re trying to say, and then you just hunt for the right artist and that’s where you need a good team. We have an amazing team [with] the Riot Music group, where I just say, I need an emotional song where it’s all about this and that, or I need a really loud song where it’s about the anger of this and that. And then they go, OK, they take that away and they think about artists and they come back to me with a list of artists that we then reach out to.
Then do you sort of meet with the artist from there and give them an idea of what they’re looking for?
Yeah, I brief them on, Here’s what the moment is about. For example, when I worked with Mike Shinoda, it was something where I was like: This is about the legacy of Caitlyn, the feeling of what it means to be a member of this esteemed family that’s been really important in Piltover, and the weight that comes with that. And that’s when he wrote “Heavy Is the Crown.” And it’s something if you put the right thoughts in the artist’s head, then you end up getting these amazing pieces of music that you couldn’t even have dreamed up yourself.
What are you listening for when you get those samples that your team has sent you?
I think the emotional connection, the lyrics kind of having a meaning. When the Sting song on season 1 begins and it goes, “I’m the monster you created,” I’m like, There it is. It just belongs and it sits down. It settles in the creative fashion where it just feels connected. And so that’s a big part of it. Other than that, I think it’s just a piece of music that is fun and that feels like it says something. The obvious choice is sometimes necessary for a fight scene, but sometimes the real surprises I liked about season 1 is that we had very different genres. “Our Love” was such a different genre than you would expect from a show like Arcane. And we did the same thing again in season 2. Very, very different, very eclectic genres. But yeah, my job is mostly just making sure there’s a clear emotional connection to the story.
Is there any limiting factor to what kind of genre and what kind of music can be in Arcane and can feel like that?
No. I mean, if anything, people may say that I’ve taken it a bit too far. I like loud stuff, I like extreme stuff. I will say sometimes there are genres where it makes sense, but I’m not at home in those genres and I’m not always so confident in giving feedback and then I need to rely more on the team. Hip-hop: I’m simply a terrible person with terrible taste in that regard. Guitar music: I know what to do. So we have a team that’s a team of musicians, of composers that sometimes need to save my ass, let’s be honest, in making sure we land a certain piece. So we have a very eclectic group and I think what made it work is that we have a lot of different tastes represented that they can jump in when necessary.
The first three episodes of Arcane season 2 are now streaming on Netflix. New episode batches drop every Saturday.