My Monday Morning: Ludwig Göransson

Ludwig Göransson (0:08)

I'm Ludwig Göransson, and this is My Monday Morning.

Lane Florsheim (0:18)

Ludwig Göransson is one of the most successful music composers in the world. He's composed for TV shows like Community and New Girl, produced for Adele and Alicia Keys, and scored blockbuster films for Ryan Coogler and Christopher Nolan, which landed him three Oscars. He also has a number of Grammys, Golden Globes, and Emmys, and he's only 42

His latest project is Nolan's The Odyssey, and for it, Ludwig went looking for instruments most people haven't heard for thousands of years. For his Monday Morning, Ludwig told me about pre-Don Hikes past coyotes in Griffith Park, why Swedes are entitled to daily cinnamon buns, and how he professionally collaborates with his wife, Serena. I'm Lane Florsheim, and that's coming up after the break.

SPEAKER_3 (1:12)

This episode of The Journal is presented to you by Accenture. Behind this podcast and the music you listen to, Spotify has a sophisticated advertising business. Accenture is deeply embedded in that business. Working with Spotify to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, building, maintaining and optimizing. Accenture finds the friction and builds the systems that make things run smoother and faster. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

SPEAKER_4 (1:43)

This episode is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. People have hard questions about AI.

What happens to jobs? Whether their kids end up better off? Anthropic asked over 100,000 people their thoughts on AI and is tracking, in public, what it does about them and where they might not have the answer just yet. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/thejournal.

Lane Florsheim (2:13)

This is a show where we get into morning routines. So what time do you usually wake up on a Monday and what's the first thing you do after waking up?

Ludwig Göransson (2:21)

So it depends on kind of where I'm at in my work, if it's like one of the craziest times, or if it's one of the less or crazier times. Because when I'm during the final time of a project, two, three months before the movie comes out, I'm like, you know, work very late and stuff. But if not, I try to get up early in the morning, get up, like, I've actually gotten a really great routine lately, where I get up at around 5.40. And I do a little hike around Griffith Park with my dog Barbara. And it's crazy because now it's so dark in the morning. So, you know, I almost need to have a flashlight on or something because there's a bunch of coyotes and stuff in the park. But it's, so I do like a four to five minute hike around Griffith Park, go around the Greek Theater. And then, you know, it's so beautiful over there. And then I come home, make some coffee. I wake the kids up.

And we actually have, we started getting the newspaper. So that's like a nice thing. Like right before you get into the front door, you just pick up the newspaper, put on the table. It feels like such an adult, an accomplished adult.

So that's been great. And then at 7.30, we're off to drive to school.

Lane Florsheim (3:46)

That sounds like a really nice morning minus perhaps the potential coyote sightings. How do you take your coffee and do you eat breakfast in the morning?

Ludwig Göransson (3:54)

Yeah, I do coffee, just black, you know. I mean, growing up in Sweden, you kind of, everyone start drinking coffee very early, you know, in age, because that's kind of how you survived the long winters.

And also in Sweden, there's something called fika. Fika means it's a word for taking a break and drinking coffee and eat buns, cinnamon buns. At every workplace, you have to have at least two fikas in the day. So it's kind of ingrained in the system, kind of drinking a lot of coffee. And I don't get too affected by it either, so I can kind of have it pretty late in the day too. So I can have, you know, one at six, one at eight, one at ten, and then two maybe.

Lane Florsheim (4:41)

Well, I was going to ask if you take fikas during your workday here too.

Ludwig Göransson (4:45)

I do, but the cinnamon bun has been, you know, there's some great places in LA now where you can get the Swedish enma buns. But I don't have it for breakfast. Normally for breakfast, I usually, I'd really do the oatmeal. It's really nice, like steel cut oatmeal. And then usually also the tip is, the trick is that you can put some banana in it while you're boiling it. So that makes it a little sweeter.