“So, this is your job?”

Engrossing even if you thought “library music” was music played in libraries. Which they don’t even do, so, there’s that.

Usually it would work like this: an editor would describe to me some images or sequences she needed music for (“man on a mountain peak at sunset”), and I’d plug certain mood-related keywords (motivational/inspirational) into the online archive for which our company had paid access, which in this case was an L.A.-based library called Killer Tracks. I’d put a few of my chosen tracks on a flash drive and walk it over to the editor, who’d usually send me back with more-specific guidelines (“I want something more dramatic than ‘Extraordinary Determination,’ but with slightly less gusto than ‘Overcoming Challenges’”), at which point I’d continue to scour and eventually hit upon a winner (“Follow Me Up,” perhaps, which the site describes as “inspirational, indie/alternative rock” and has for cover art a distressed photo of a colonial-era drum corps with the title “Motivational 8” scrawled in a graffiti-inspired typeface).