My two favourite shows on television right now are The Righteous Gemstones and…Bumpadoo! The Righteous Gemstones follows a dysfunctional family of narcissistic, petulant, insanely wealthy televangelists. Bumpadoo! follows an extraterrestrial yellow blob learning all about fascinating and confounding earthly phenomena – like see-saws and hiccups. One of these shows also asked us to write their music.

Everything about Bumpadoo! is organic: an incredibly talented crew of sculptors, fabricators, and animators shooting stop-motion animation on glass tabletops that required over 2,500 frames of handmade movements per episode. The look, the textures, the backgrounds are all the work of artists steeped in tradition. The main character, Bumpi, however, happens to be an alien. So the challenge in composing the theme and score was to find a way to blend the handmade, earthy, organic nature of the show with the otherworldly presence of a being from outer space. Our guiding principles? Weird, silly, fun.

I might be biased because it’s my instrument, but what’s more organic than an upright bass? 4 strings stretched over a big ol’ piece of wood felt like the right place to start. For the drums, I tried to imagine what Beck might do if he was asked to write for kids. To round out the rhythm section, I reached for a guitar. But the fact that I used the biggest bass I could find meant, of course, I had to accompany it with the smallest guitar available.

With the earthly part of the band now assembled, we needed a nod to the globular, shapeshifting alien. Well, if you’ve never encountered a musical instrument and can only speak monosyllabically, you’re perfectly suited to be a lead singer. We figured Bumpi had always wanted to scat – so we stacked a bunch of voices eloquently singing “doo”, modified to make them not “of this world.” And that’s how an alien joined the band. That’s how organic earth met outer space.

The other secret to this sound is collaboration. Eggplant is a family-first operation. We don’t farm out. We compose, produce, record and play together. We’ve been doing it this way for a long time. That’s how we come up with things like this: