As far as interviewing pseudonymous people go, the mysterious musician Breakmaster Cylinder is surprisingly personable. At least, as far as I can tell. To keep their identity a secret, we’re conducting this interview in one of the least engaging (yet somehow intimate) fashion: over Twitter DM. I’m an adult raised through the AIM-era and now text messages so I like to think I can still extract a personality about of a text-only conversation.

Instead of neat, perfectly-constructed paragraph answers to my questions, Breakmaster Cylinder responds like an excited person on a group text thread, using emojis and often splitting answers into several consecutive messages. It’s endearing, it’s real. This is usually an issue when doing interviews over email, or in this case, Twitter DM. The answers are too often canned and lack any real emotion. When Breakmaster responds with a short answer, then immediately follows up with an added statement, you get the sense the thoughts are coming unobstructed.

Probably best known as the musician who crafted the Reply All theme song and the serialized space story in the credits, Breakmaster Cylinder has become something of a celebrity within the podcasting community. Their podcast music has become in high-demand and their resume now boasts over 60 podcast theme songs. Along with the famed Reply All theme, Breakmaster created the songs for Vox’s Today, Explained, The Pitch, Say Something Worth Stealing, We The Ppl, and several other podcasts you likely recognize.

Breakmaster isn’t just a talented musician, their name itself is a clever pun. As one Redditor pointed out “breakmaster” is a term for a musician who excels during musical breaks, while “master cylinder” is a automotive part controlling the brakes of a car.

As the tale goes, it started with a tweet. Then TLDR host, Alex Goldman, saw a YouTube video Breakmaster Cylinder did remixing The Chordettes Mr. Sandman while splicing in gory images from horror movies. Goldman tells Hrishikesh Hirway of Song Exploder, “I started following their music, and then when it came time to do a theme song, I was like, ‘who is just weird enough to work with us and make this thing?’”

The TLDR theme sounds like a demented video game from the 80s. In other words, it’s weird and perfect and the epitome of Breakmaster Cylinder.

Breakmaster Cylinder then went on to do Goldman’s next project, the aforementioned Reply All. As the podcast has risen in fame, so has Breakmaster Cylinder’s mystique. Each episode ends with “our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.” This has led to what is likely a pretty lucrative niche career. That’s not all Breakmaster has contributed to Reply All, however. In more recent episodes, there’s an MCU-esque story arc that takes place post-credits. When listened together, the bits form together to tell a serialized story. Breakmaster describes the story, “Dog and I are lost in space without internet, learning things about ourselves and the universe. They’re like an old serial radio play and I get to mess with making impossible weirdness sound like a live recording, best as I can.”

This story only adds to the intrigue of Breakmaster Cylinder.

When asked about staying anonymous, Breakmaster Cylinder told Exolymph, “I just don’t wanna be out there. I don’t matter. It’s nice to be any / every / nobody.”

It would be too easy to compare Breakmaster Cylinder to famed anonymous street artist Banksy or Daft Punk. True they’re anonymous and have become influential within their respective creative spaces, however, Breakmaster Cylinder is as accessible as an anonymous person can be. They’ll respond to your tweets, comments on SoundCloud, and your emails. Whereas the other two personalities have embraced their mystique, adopting it as part of their schtick, Breakmaster seems to simply be anonymous for privacy reasons. When asked if they’d ever reveal themselves, they stated (in what I can assume is a very genuine response), “really my identity just doesn’t matter at all. I enjoy the idea of people imagining BMC however they like.”

Though I didn’t press too much about their identity — that was the sole question about it — Breakmaster didn’t seem especially interested in talking about it either. Our conversation was mostly around podcasts and music. They had previously analyzed and broken apart the Reply All theme in the above quoted Song Exploder episode, however, I was interested in a similar treatment for the new marquee podcast, Today, Explained.

For a daily podcast that covers the recent news and fluctuates from somber to lighthearted to informative stories on any given episode, the theme song needed to be versatile. “We tried a lot of different drafts. Ranging from organic sounds treated organically like the midroll music (a Books-style guitar chop up thing) to more purely beep boop Raymond Scott synth kind of jams.”

Asked about the final theme, Breakmaster admired their work, “I think what works with their theme is the clattering drums. They’re imperfect but still hold together, which is appropriate for a daily news podcast right this second. Other important elements include a distinct single tone or note that you could play and immediately recognize the podcast from.”

Breakmaster did mention a previous version that on my initial reading seemed more interesting. “I wrote another full length theme for them I really like actually but it’s true it didn’t fit as well as this one did. It sampled James Comey saying ‘lordy I hope there are tapes’ and then the beat drops.”

Though no two podcast themes are alike, neither is the process that goes into composing them. Breakmaster typically starts the conversations trying to get as much detail from the podcast creators as possible. Things like ideal song, theme, tone, and what they like about other podcast themes. From there, Breakmaster creates several samples to gauge initial feedback and both composer and creator go back and forth until the finished product, typically two to four weeks later.

For podcast themes in general, Breakmaster has the recipe. “Catchy hook, straight to business, sometimes an introductory single riff or sound effect so even just that one chime is enough to announce your show.. you need that stuff.” Breakmaster continued, “you should be able to conjure the show’s theme easily when listening. Sometimes that’s on the nose, like water sounds for a show about bathing. Wall-to-wall animal noises for a show about animals.”

Whether Breakmaster is in space with Dog or beamed into your brain via your favorite podcast app, you’ll now start to recognize their signature style.

Related posts:

The Podcast Discoverability Problem The History of Podcasts The Serial Effect: How True Crime Came to Dominate Podcasts
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