The #SaveWoT movement is driven not just by our fandom’s passion for the story being told, but also for the whole army of creative professionals who have made the Wheel of Time TV show a feast for the senses in every way. I’m Max, a longtime fan of the books and the show, and I’m here to talk about the show’s soundtrack and the fandom’s love for it.

The past two years, I’ve been making use of my background in music theory academia to transcribe, analyze, and catalogue every musical motive in the Wheel of Time soundtrack, and track and index how those motives are used throughout the show’s underscore. If you’re interested in more of what I have to say, I’ve been talking about what I’ve discovered in an ongoing series of videos with YouTuber Lezbi Nerdy (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

The short version is: the music in this show is a lot more complex than, for instance, “this sound comes from the Moiraine track so it’s about Moiraine.” Lorne Balfe’s original soundtrack can be broken down into over 100 independently significant motives, where the verse and chorus of a track (or even just the accompaniment by itself) can take on their own meanings as they build associations between moments in the story.

The result is a dense network of meanings that can, for instance, foreshadow future plot points or give us insight into what a character is thinking. The music becomes a rich sonic tapestry providing a secondary layer of meaning throughout the show. It’s part of why this show has a depth to it that would make it a quality addition to any streaming catalogue willing to pick it up!

This article isn’t about why I love the music though – it’s about what you, the fandom, love about the music! I attended my first JordanCon this year, and in exchange for badge ribbons, I asked fans I met to tell me their favorite musical moments in the show.

It’s not the most scientific polling ever: I let people choose to tell me their favorite diegetic music (in-world music, music that’s made and heard by characters in the scene), non-diegetic music (underscore, music that the audience hears and the characters don’t), or both; and if they had multiple favorites, who was I to say they had to pick only one? Nor did the poll have the biggest sample size: I only recorded answers from about 40-50 people. But I had some awesome conversations about what people liked and why, and got a decent sense of what this slice of the fandom’s favorite moments were overall.

Let’s take a look at what fans loved to listen to in the show!

Diegetic Musical Moments

We’ll start with the diegetic music, since there were fewer moments to pick from. You may be unsurprised by the “winner” of the poll: with 15 responses, the “Hills of Tanchico” stole the show, and rightly so! Many fans talked about how they loved this moment as a point along Elayne’s arc – an indulgence the fun, free-wheeling side of her that’s in tension with her duties to Andor and the Tower. Many simply loved what a fun banger it is, and how it captures the bawdy spirit of the book’s tavern scenes. I highly recommend checking out composer Nikhil Koparkar’s own breakdown of the song; the mixture of styles (sea shanty plus African percussion and East/Southeast Asian strings), and the progression from tentative seriousness to revelry, are also part of why this song resonated for fans.

The second most popular song was “Weep for Manetheren,” with 8 responses. I think it’s no accident that the top two choices here were songs meant to be sung communally, and to foster identification with a location; there songs effectively invite us as the audience to feel included in the bonds forged through social singing. While somber, this song also uses memory to inspire and invigorate. Four fans specifically chose the moment in episode 307 when Perrin does just that, inspiring Two Rivers courage more effectively than any pre-battle speech could have. Two fans pointed instead to episode 102; few of us had dared to dream that we might get to see and hear Moiraine tell the story of Manetheren, so that first appearance tapped deep into our nostalgia for the first book – just as it revealed that Manetheren was equally deep in our heroes’s roots.

Yet another communal song was mentioned in 3 responses: the harvest song we hear in the Glass Columns, which is implied to be The Song that the Tuatha’an lost. It was a special moment to get to hear this mythical song that book fans had longed to hear for so long. It perfectly captures the spirit of a work song, with just a touch of sweet harmonizing. (And as some fans discovered when trying to transcribe it, it’s a quartertone “off” from normative tuning, giving it an aura of being from a whole other world for those who are sensitive to that sort of thing).

To round out the diegetic category: one response mentioned Thom singing his ballad of The Great Hunt for the Horn. It’s apropos that that’s how Mat discovers him, but it’s also fun to hear a melody that sounds like it could be repeated over and over like a kind of recitation formula – could this be the closest we get to one of the higher registers of chant from the books? And for one final piece of diegetic audio: two fans brought up the sound of the Dark One coming through the hole in the sky that Mierin/Lanfear bored. It may not exactly function as “music” by most definitions, but it was a magnificently alien, cosmically horrifying piece of sound design. Electronics aren’t my specialty, but I’d guess this sound involved taking some kind of buzzy, glitchy feedback and filtering it in ways that evoked the sound of vowel formants, implying we might actually have been hearing what passes for the Dark One’s speech!

Non-Diegetic Music: Honorable Mentions

For the underscore music, we had many more options to pick from (and therefore, often, fewer votes per option). Some fans chose their favorite music generally, apart from any single appearance in the show, while others focused on very specific moments where the soundtrack was noticeable and meaningful to them. I’ll arrange them as a countdown to the most popular choice, but let’s begin with a kind of “honorable mention” category for music that was only chosen once each by fans I spoke to – just to see the range of music that mattered to the fandom!

Some fans chose favorite tracks independently of specific moments in the show:

  • Mordero’Sheen, “Bringers of Death,” combines an eerie chromatic melody with an irregular-meter chant of the names of Trolloc bands. That chromatic melody made a devastating return in 307 amidst the apocalyptic fire-bombs as Trollocs poured through the Two Rivers’s opened gates.
  • Al’Cair Sei, “Goldeneyes,” originally featured purely instrumentals (a sequence of layered riffs and a melody with no lyrics), as a nod to Perrin being a Wolfbrother and thus having access to non-verbal communication. In season 3, we finally heard some lyrics to the main melody from this track, signaling that the challenge now would be his relations with his fellow humans.
  • Mashiara, “Lost Love,” functions as the theme song of Lan and Nynaeve’s romance, with the verses matching the wary and antagonistic edge of their initial flirtation and the expansive, warm chorus accompanying their most tender scenes. One other fan chose as their favorite moment the scene in 104 where Nynaeve encounters Lan praying: the end of that scene, where Lan explains the meaning of the phrase her father told her before being killed, is the first appearance of the Mashiara chorus in the show – fitting, as it’s the first moment we see the two of them discovering each other’s hidden depths and come to the verge of confessing their feelings to each other.

And other fans chose specific moments that stood out to them:

  • The “shredding” music from 301: motives from the “White Tower” track play throughout this sequence, but the most striking moments (like the tableau of Liandrin in the fiery sphere with her cabal slinging sawblades beneath her) feature a special variation of the chorus of that track, with bombastic orchestration and harmonies overlapping into grating dissonance. This would’ve been one of my own picks as well; I also like that there’s a long, almost nauseating slide upwards in the music right as we watch the bisected Brown Sitter’s torso slide downwards.
  • The moment Aviendha sees Rand in Rhuidean with the double dragons (304): the music here is the accompanimental figure that begins the “Rand al’Thor” track and then continues underneath its verse, plus what I believe are fragments of the same track’s chorus passed through a distorting filter. In this moment, Aviendha is grappling with her feelings now that this man, whom she felt was unworthy of it, is nevertheless now confirmed as Car’a’carn – and those feelings may be even more complicated after whatever she saw in the Rings; at the same time, Rand is trying to reconcile with her now that he knows the truths behind her culture. So it’s fitting that while the tone of the music is one of mystical revelation, it’s actually the much more personal theme for Rand that we’re hearing here, as both he and Aviendha confront what destiny means for them and for how they’ll relate to each other.
  • Rand carrying Moiraine out of Rhuidean (304): music definitely plays its part to make this moment special. It’s quiet and understated, but the fiddle figure from the Aman Syndai “Dragon Reborn” track plays, as it often does in fateful moments, and the simple guitar figuration previews the haunting rendition of the Aman Syndai chord progression. After handing off Moiraine, Rand is too emotionally drained to acknowledge Egwene’s concern, while we hear the first half phrase of the “Egwene” chorus, cadencing in minor, to end the episode. Perhaps this signifies the rift that Rand feels with Egwene after being changed by his experience in the Columns – or perhaps it’s a reference to the lyrics, “ninte culieb vinlog (remember who you are),” which would not be the first time Rand and Egwene’s mirrored story arcs have been reflected by re-signifying their musical motives.
  • And let it not be said that there are no fans of the less tuneful moments in this soundtrack: one fan identified the moment when Egwene and Perrin jumped off the wall to escape from Shadar Logoth in 102 as a favorite moment! Shadar Logoth does have its own motivic elements – a rhythmic pattern of 3 + 3 + 2 +2, some horror-movie-esque high dissonant strings, a rising choral line – but what stuck out to this fan was specifically the way that the texture cleared out into the final vocal notes hanging on through reverb, as if the music were suspended as the two of them were in freefall. It’s a nice testament to the skill of Lorne Balfe and his assistant composer team that momentary effects created in a digital audio workstation can leave just as much of an impact as creative tunesmithing!

Non-Diegetic Music: Top Four Responses

…or rather, top six, since there was a three-way tie for fourth place, with two fans each calling these their favorites from the soundtrack! I’ve talked about them all in my video series with Lezbi Nerdy, so I’ll keep my comments here brief:

  • Aman Syndai, “Dragon Reborn”: this track establishes a cluster of themes – a chord progression with a slow melody ending with a mysterious tritone leap, a plaintive countermelody (that doesn’t appear in the track, but fits together with the main melody and often appears together with it), a driving, pulsing ostinato, and a mournful fiddle motif. They all signify different aspects of the Dragon Reborn as an idea, a prophecy, a legend, whether as an inspiration or a threat or an unavoidable destiny. One of the fans who selected this music as their favorite pointed to the presence of all four of these motives woven together during Rand’s revelation scenes (both the montage and the flashback to Tam) in 107.
  • Perrin’s dual wielding scene, which uses the badass instrumental battle music from the Ost Ninto Shostya (“On Your Knees”) track. This music was associated with Shienaran soldiers fighting the Shadow in 108, and here I think it is meant to get us thinking about Perrin’s connections to his Shienaran comrades and how he is synthesizes lessons from all the cultures he’s engaged with to save his people (though the use of electric guitars also musically rhymes it with the first time Perrin used an axe to defend the forge from Trollocs). “Get behind me – kill the ones I miss!” is one way to apply the Shienaran lessons about teamwork and shield coverage, but I think the music is also reminding us of Ingtar’s advice to Perrin from 201, that he might find it useful to ask why Darkfriends do what they do – advice that comes in handy when he realizes he can apply leverage to cut short a losing battle.
  • “Like a Raging Sun”: this is the soundtrack for all of Nynaeve’s greatest and most emotional One Power moments, though the melody itself is actually the Noriv al Zaffid “Two Halves of One Whole” variant of the Aes Sedai theme. That melody often represents channelers who stand apart from the institution of the Tower, and/or those connected with the idea of the Aes Sedai as a gender-balanced institution in the Age of Legends. The iconic harmonization of this melody actually first begins to develop in the Logain cold open, and it’s no mistake that the full version plays throughout a scene that is pretty consequential for both Nynaeve and Logain at the end of 104. See Part 3 of my video series for some further thoughts about this theme, but be ready to click away from the video when we start talking full book spoilers!

Three fans cited the Aiel music in general as their favorite, bringing it into third place. The music for the Aiel includes two melodies (the verse and chorus) from the “Desert Warriors” track, along with the lively melody, in irregular septuple meter, of the verse from the “Aviendha” track (that track’s chorus is the same as “Desert Warriors,” tweaked slightly to fit the meter). In S2, apart from some very subtle underscore using the “Desert Warriors” melodies during Jolien’s burial, we mostly heard the Aiel through Aviendha’s theme, perfectly fitting her athleticism in her fight with the Whitecloaks. In S3, that lively theme softens into a regular meter and blends with the others, now that we see Aiel warrior spirit in the context of the greater whole of Aiel society. The Aviendha theme is even heard simultaneously in counterpoint with the Desert Warriors chorus, like when we first approach Rhuidean and later Cold Rocks Hold, establishing the depth of Aiel life during these sweeping vistas. The chorus melody itself develops in S3 through many variations – note how different it sounds when Aviendha is called to give up her spears, compared to the version when approaching Al’Cair Dal where the end of the melody is altered to rise over a more tense harmony.

With our second place winner, we get to non-diegetic musical moments that were equally as popular as the top diegetic moments: seven people cited the “Horn of Valere” cue as their favorite music in the soundtrack! The full cue, first heard when Mat blows the Horn, consists of a string intro, a swelling choral ascent, and then a lush harmonization of the verse and then the chorus from the “Mat Cauthon” track, slowed and smoothed from triple meter to duple meter. This close musical connection between Mat and the Horn is perfect for this Turning, where blowing the Horn and the memories that result are the major turning point of Mat’s arc. Some fans specifically called out this first instance of the music as their favorite, but others pointed to the two instances in S3. The quarterstaff fight once again brought the Horn into close alignment with Mat’s character arc: hearing this music play while he centers himself before the fight tells us Mat is finally learning to see the cards he’s been dealt as a gift and not just a curse. The Horn music playing during Loial’s self-sacrifice reminds us of his 208 admonishment that we be the Heroes of another Age’s legends – while also giving us hope that we might see him again as a Hero of the Horn. This shows how musical signifiers can drift, since we’re hearing Mat’s melodies without Mat – but then, Mat’s chorus does mention Manetheren, which Loial remembers to steel himself to what he must do, drawing (just like Mat) on memories of the past to become a hero for the future.

And finally, the song that was most cited as favorite non-diegetic music, by 8 JordanCon 2025 attendees: Siuan’s theme song, Al’Naito, “The Flame.” This ending brings us back to a beginning (though there are neither endings nor beginnings to the turning of the Wheel of Time), because this was the first track released in advance of S1. It was well beloved (fans even came together en masse to collaborate on a group cover!), and many of the fans I talked to mentioned that the nostalgia of first getting to see and hear this story brought to life is why the song has remained their favorite. The album track shows off Lorne Balfe’s craft in melodic writing, orchestration, and harmony – especially when the melancholic minor of the verse gives way to the warmth of the major key three steps lower for the chorus, though the minor key is never fully replaced, representing the sacrifices that are the cost of the Seat for Siuan. Its evocation of the pelog scale from traditional Indonesian gamelan in its opening accompaniment is one of the clearest examples of Balfe’s approach to musically representing the cultural melting pot of Robert Jordan’s worldbuilding.

One fan specified that they particularly loved the 106 cold open, where Al’Naito playing over sweeping vistas instantly connects us to Siuan’s free-flowing spirit as the daughter of the river. Other fans praised how the music poignantly captured the emotional weight of Siuan’s death, with the chorus swelling when we cut to Moiraine feeling her Oath to Siuan dissolve. Over the course of three seasons, Al’Naito becomes inextricably bound with Siuan’s romance with Moiraine and all the sacrifices they both make, with its chorus often intertwined with the Moiraine and Aes Sedai themes in pivotal moments in their relationship. In the final moments of Moiraine’s showdown with Lanfear, the Al’Naito theme makes all that heartache palpable. Sung clearly while Moiraine breaks through the shield to slice Lanfear’s throat, it almost gives the sense that the Daughter of the River is there in spirit, a musical presence giving Moiraine the strength to carry on.

On that note, I hope my commentary on some of the fandom’s favorite music has helped you recall what you loved about the show, eased the pain of missing it, and inspired you to fight for any chance it has to be picked up again. I certainly want to hear what Balfe and his team had in store for the rest of this story. And… I want to hear from you! Which of these moments were your favorite – or is there another moment you love that no one mentioned? Tell us in the comments or find me on BlueSky or Discord, and if you see me at WoTCon, ask for a ribbon!

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