To me, this show is really about finding yourself. I knew what I wanted to do with it because I’d wanted to develop the end credits for the whole series. That’s my favorite cue in the whole series - such a simple little thing. When Korra started, I was emotionally going through some stuff. Both my parents had died. My dad had died suddenly in the middle of Avatar and my mom died suddenly right before Korra and I was just like, fuck this man. I’m just laying my emotions out a little bit. And it made sense to me because Korra was a teenager and teenagers go though a lot of stuff emotionally. All along I’d been looking for an opportunity to extend that end credits and I never could find one until that last scene, so when I watched that last act and I knew it’d work definitely, I was so happy. I would get spotty notes, which tell me where there needs to be music. The final episode spotty notes: Transition to score for this last sequence. They will hold hands and turn to each other in the end, so we’d like to have a more romantic feel for this last sequence to support the intention that these lovely ladies are going to get together. I was totally surprised. I couldn’t sleep – I was so happy.
You start with this pitch percussion. Then we have these strings in the background that are just doing these really simple long notes. I wanted to keep it pretty minimal so we had room to grow. Also, it’s a very sorta peaceful moment, you know, they’re looking across the water and you realize they’ve really come a long way together and I just wanted to reflect that a bit. The end credits melody starts with the zhonghu and then it goes out of the range of the zhonghu, so erhu takes over. Erhu is a two string Chinese instrument. There are no frets or anything, so it’s extremely vocal with a lot of sliding into notes and sliding around and it’s extremely lyrical. That arpeggio part is a kalimba and for the end credits it’s only kalimba, but for this I sweetened it with some pegasus. Pegasus is a pitch percussion instrument with mallets, and then there’s the glockenspiel. It’s really simple, but together it sounds layered. And the strings now are playing the melody instead of zhonghu. I’m just using a trio: violin, viola, and cello. So here Asami shows up, and there’s things called shippers, which is a thing I had never known about until way into this show. And it’s these tweens and adults of all ages that vie for these different relationships and characters getting together. There were people who wanted Korra and Asami to get together, and so when Asami shows up it’s this moment for all these fans and it’s clearly a romantic moment. The Chinese instruments left for a little moment to give us some room and now it comes back with the end credits melody and it’s sorta wrapping up here to the last build. Korra and Asami are talking about how maybe they should go away together - a kid’s show showing a bisexual relationship and I wanted the music to reflect that this is a historic moment.
One of the first things I wrote in the series – the Avatar series – became a really important simple little theme. I kind of wanted that to come back for me, selfishly. People who had been through this show and are thinking, oh my god this franchise – this whole thing that I’ve been through and this experience and I was a kid when I watched this show and now I’m a teenager or young adult or whatever – this series is coming to an end and we’ve all been through it together: fans, all the production, and the crew. This huge chunk of life had just zipped by. And so I end on this little melody that is from the first series. All this time has passed, and I wanted them to sort of feel all that time.
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