Picture the composer of the most sweeping fantasy film score of the 21st century, then picture the same man decades earlier in a fuzzy bee costume playing saxophone behind Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi on late-night television. This episode charts the improbable evolution of Howard Shore, born in Toronto in 1946, who befriended Lorne Michaels at summer camp at 13, studied at Berklee, played in the jazz-rock band Lighthouse, and became the original musical director of Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980, where he wrote the theme music and suggested the name The Blues Brothers.

We follow Shore into the darkness of his decades-long partnership with David Cronenberg starting with The Brood in 1979, his work with Martin Scorsese, and the suffocating low-register score for The Silence of the Lambs, alongside mainstream hits like Mrs. Doubtfire and Philadelphia. Then comes the pivot that baffled Hollywood: Peter Jackson hiring the maestro of psychological dread for The Lord of the Rings, where Shore’s evolving leitmotifs earned three Oscars and survived an Academy rule change that nearly disqualified The Two Towers. The conversation closes with his concert-hall career, The Fly opera, a piano concerto for Lang Lang, a Macy’s organ fanfare, a 2023 lawsuit over shoddy unauthorized concerts, and his graceful exit from King Kong.

• How arranging comedy stingers and genre parodies on live TV taught Shore to manipulate emotion on a dime
• What dissonance, scraping strings, and slow pacing do to make music feel like body horror
• Why the One Ring is essentially a psychological thriller villain and why that made Shore the right choice
• How the Shire theme moves from a bright tin whistle to a mournful solo horn by the time Frodo reaches Mordor
• Why Shore appeared on screen conducting Max Steiner’s 1933 score after being replaced on King Kong