We’re going to take a little break.
This is the halfway point for season two, our mid-season finale, if you will, and we couldn’t go out on a higher note. We’re going to take a few weeks to get the rest of the season ready and we’re going to do some stuff for our Patreon supporters, and I think when we do come back for the rest of the season, you’re going to be delighted by what we’ve got cooking.
It’s been an incredibly busy 2025 already here at McWeeny HQ, and by far, the highlight of the year for me has been hearing all the reactions to the show. We’ve been working on this show in some form for almost two years, and finally rolling it out and hearing people say that they’re enjoying it feels like a confirmation that the work has been worth it. There are so many podcasts that are part of the fabric of my daily life (I walk my dog a lot), and I didn’t want to create another show unless I felt like it was doing something worthwhile. The only measure of that so far has been the reaction from the guests, so being able to hear actual audiences give us feedback has been a huge relief more than anything.
I booked a number of friends to be guests for this season. I did it because I wanted the safety net of knowing these people and having some idea of where these conversations might go. There were also a few people I invited on because I wanted to finally have a conversation with them. That was the case with today’s guest. This is someone I “know” via social media. I like my encounters with them. I think they seem like good people. But we’d never really had a chance to have a chat, and so it’s basically a roll of the dice. How’s this gonna go?
The answer is “Great.” Our last two episodes were recorded back to back, a day after the election in November, and I think all of us, guest and hosts alike, were in shock. We recorded this a week later, and at this point, I know I was looking forward to spending this time talking about a handful of great films with a brand-new friend. We tell the guests we will need about an hour of their time, but this conversation just kept going, and none of us were worried about being anywhere else or doing anything else because it was such a pleasure to dig into this topic with this group.
BEAR MCCREARY is our guest today, and he couldn’t have been more of a delight. From the moment I contacted him about being on the show, he was engaged and excited. He sent me a number of possible combinations of films and themes before landing on the one he went with: Movies that combine rock music and symphonic score on their soundtracks.
Makes sense. After all, McCreary is one of the hardest-working film and TV composers today. His mentor was the legendary Elmer Bernstein, so he learned about film composition from one of the all-time greats, but he’s also a working rock musician who frequently collaborates with his brother Brendan. His breakthrough work was the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and his music was a huge part of that show’s identity. He’s done terrific work for Outlander, Foundation, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. His recent album The Singularity features contributions from guests like Rufus Wainwright, Slash, Buck Dharma, Scott Ian, Joe Satriani, and Corey Taylor. In 2019, he wrote the score for Godzilla, King of the Monsters, a score that my son, a lifelong Godzilla fan, refers to as “straight fucking fire.”
His three Hip Pocket choices were Highlander, Pink Floyd - The Wall, and Heavy Metal, and I felt it was my moral imperative to choose Phantom of the Paradise as our response film.
Finally, I was in a mood after all of that, so I picked Hedwig and the Angry Inch to join the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame.
If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.
If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.
The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.
Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.
It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.
DREW: One of the things I really love about your music, Bear… the work you did for Lord of the Rings is so lovely because I feel like… you responded to what Howard Shore did, but you are not using Howard… you are building on everything he did in a way that I find really lovely, and it's very much like an artistic conversation you're having with him. It's like, here are all the things you did to establish this world. Now I'm gonna fill in other spaces in this world. And it's so great, and I love that… you and Giacchino are the two guys who… take older scores or older themes and you start to play with them, you bring something new to them and you expand on them. It's not just nostalgia. It's really you getting in there and figuring out why we still love these themes.
BEAR: I appreciate that. I mean… thank you. But also, that is… part of the task. You know? I find nostalgia for its own sake increasingly tiresome. And… I’ve had a lot of opportunities to play in somebody else's sandbox. Right? I've reinvented Chucky and Godzilla and Battlestar Galactica. I did the Terminator show. Every one of these brings a different dynamic, right? Like, do you reference the old theme? Do you ignore it? Do you embrace it? You know? And you kinda have to take it on a case by case. But in every case, I wanna show respect for the older material and update it in a way that feels exciting and new. I mean, ultimately, the fact that you're saying your kid likes Godzilla, like, that makes me very happy because my whole goal when I started, if I could summarize it, was I wanted people that knew the old classic Akira Ifukube scores…. he scored the first movie… I wanted them to be thrilled, but I also wanted people that had no idea what that music was to just think this is a cool, modern score that came out in 2019 and not have it feel like, is this some old theme that I don't get? You know? I've heard that a lot. Like little kids like it. Ironically, Buck Dharma's grandson loves my cover of “Godzilla” more than his original version of that. And he laughed, “Oh, my grandson keeps asking for blue Godzilla. He calls it blue Godzilla because of the album cover.” So that tells me something there…
DREW: … I would think getting to write a kaiju score, being tapped to write Battlestar Galactica, these are things that… the idea to put your stamp on these things, to leave a stamp that is permanently yours that is now part of the Lord of the Rings ongoing everything… that's kinda remarkable, man.
BEAR: It's cool, man, and…I’ll just answer the question you're not asking, like, is that intimidating? Right? Like, how do you start that? And, of course, the truth is if I woke up and said, well, I'm gonna sip my coffee, and today, I'm gonna write a theme for some Hobbit characters that needs to be as memorable as the Shire theme. Like, I think I would put my coffee down, crawl back into bed, pull the covers over my head, and just cry for eight hours. You can't do that. You can't be creative. Also, I'm not trying to outdo or match anything that's come before. I'm just trying to tell a story that fits, like you said, a puzzle piece. I found a corner that didn't have a piece, and I put the piece there. So I really enjoy that opportunity to embrace musical storytelling… that means so much to me. But also at the end of the day, I'm just doing what I wanna hear as a fan, right? That's just what I wanna hear, And it really starts and stops there. And then I bring in, you know, my collaborator as a filmmaker. Like, this is what I wanna hear. What do you wanna hear? And then a few other producers. But really, I mean, if you think about it, how many people weigh in on the outside? Ten? We're this brain trust. And then… it's going out into the world now. Millions of people are hearing it, and you're gonna find out if that's what they want to hear. But I mean, I think as a fan, I grew up with all this stuff. I love it as much as other fans do. So far, it's my instincts about what I wanna feel on a new Lord of the Rings or a new, you know, Battlestar Galactica has been in alignment with what other fans feel. So I trust my instincts that way.
DREW: Was [Pink Floyd - The Wall] a movie that you grew up with, Bear? Was this one… that you found when you were young?
BEAR: Yeah. I mean, high school. Yeah. The first rock band I ever played in was a Pink Floyd tribute concert. There was a guy who went to my high school who's actually on my solo record because a clip of us in high school is in my solo record… guy named Ryan Ho, who… did a Pink Floyd tribute concert. He's like, you play keyboards. You're into Pink Floyd. Right? And, look, I was only into film music, you guys. I didn't listen to rock at all. So I listened and fell in love with it, but then I played. I had my little Yamaha consumer keyboard, and I got up there and played all the Rick Wright parts, and discovered The Wall and just got really big into… well, I mean, spoiler alert, at the same time, I discovered Queen via Highlander. I discovered Oingo Boingo via Danny Elfman. I just started piecing together like, oh, all my favorite film music can lead to this other genre that is every bit as emotional and theatrical and impactful and thoughtful, because, honestly, I just wasn't into like pop or rock or top 40 anything when I was a kid. So this was like a huge gateway drug for me into a genre of music coming from the cinematic side of it.
COMING SOON
The back half of our season is so much fun. There’s one episode where I’m pretty sure we laugh the entire time we’re talking to our guest. There’s one episode that covers some emotional landscape I genuinely never expected to be talking about on a movie podcast. I talk to some old friends and some podcasting legends and it feels like every single time, something brand-new happens.
We’ll be back at the start of April with six more weeks of episodes, one per Friday. In the meantime, we’re going to be doing some bonus episodes for our Patreon supporters, and we’re going to start booking our guests for Season Three, and we’re even planning our first festival appearance.
I hope you’re enjoying the show. I would like to ask you to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify if you’re enjoying it, and please share it with other people who might enjoy it. We are not supported by any podcasting networks or advertisers, and we depend entirely on word of mouth right now to let people know what we’re doing.
I feel like we’ve built a space here and the people who have come to share this space are having a great time. Honestly, that’s success. That’s all I hoped to do, and anything else that happens is just a bonus.
In the meantime, I’ll have something here for you every Friday while we’re waiting for the second half of the season, so there’s plenty more Hip Pocket goodness to come.
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