How to Create a Soundtrack for National Geographic with ‘Queens’ composer Morgan Kibby | QUEENS

National Geographics Queens celebrates powerful female leaders in the natural world, and behind every inspirational animal on screen is an equally gritty and determined woman. All the women on this Queen's Journey are true leaders—fierce, smart, resilient, and female. All hail the Queens!

Music was always a huge part of my life. I think that music is one of the purest forms of feeling for me. The sounds that I tend to choose and the way I approach my writing tend to want to be participatory in the filmmaking. We're not just there to kind of sit in the background. My music tends to want to be another character within the story that's being told.

Hi, my name is Morgan Kibby. I'm the composer for Queens, and we're here in Los Angeles. I didn't think that music was going to be a career, but then it just kind of happened that way in my 20s when I ended up in a band called M83. I ended up doing two albums, touring the world, and getting a platinum record sent in the mail is pretty cool. I was about to hit 30, and it was like I will not sleep on this bus anymore. No, I'm a backer, and I was very fortunate that one of my oldest and best friends is a director. She hired me, and the rest was kind of history from there.

Music for film and TV can destroy something or make it absolutely excellent. Queens is a remarkable project because I think it's the first show I've ever seen that focuses solely on female tribes of animals. I have had the privilege of working 99% of the time with completely female teams. You can tell that every facet of the production has been worked on by a woman.

I love the Tiny Queens episode because I was really allowed to be, I think, the full electronic music lover that I am. You know, I just wanted to kind of introduce this almost 70s sci-fi experience because the visuals, for me personally, kind of trigger that for me. So I got very excited about that. This cues obviously really fun! We really wanted to do something that felt more like a pop song without lyrics.

There's so much movement happening on the bee while gloss is picking up all this pollen. It's like how, once again, it's like almost visual and musical geometry. It was really fun to think about ways of kind of executing that in the music. I hope that the people that watch Queens just feel moved in the way that I did. I think there are certain things that we experimented with that I haven't really seen made before within this genre. So I'm hoping it feels fresh to people and it gets them excited about these incredible journeys that are happening throughout each episode.