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Sorry to leave you hanging last week. Where was I? Begging and choosing. Right. Well, after a few meetings with Ira, Chris Wilcha, and the bosses at Left/Right, we decided on the combo platter: we'd get cue libraries from artists we love and albums from bands who could work with our budget, and we'd have a few composers on call.
The composers were already on board, so I sent out an APB to everyone I could think of who had anything to do with the music industry: people at labels, friends of bands, my cousin who used to own a guitar. Pretty much overnight, my office was flooded with CD-Rs and instrumental versions of albums from artists like Bedroom Walls, Jonah Matranga, and Madlib. If you jump ahead to the track list, you'll see that much of the music on this week's show came from that effort.
Finally, I asked our staff if there were people whose music they loved, and I started cold-calling the people they suggested. HA! That was fun. "Hello, scary, critically-acclaimed independent music dude, I'm a producer for the public radio program This Americ...huh? No, not NPR, PRI....Okay, fine, yes, we're on NPR...sort of....Well, anyways, I was wondering if you'd be interested in licensing a few songs to our television series....I don't know how much....Okay, how about you just imagine it being the smallest possible amount. Would you do it for that?...No? How about yes?"
Eventually, we had enough songs to get our editors started—about 300 tracks from over 60 artists. And the fun began: placing songs. For a segment's first cut, the editors would choose all the music. Then we'd have a screening. We'd all be in love with most of the choices, but usually one or two cues in each story wouldn't work. "Too sweet." "Too serious." So we’d end up auditioning dozens of tracks to look for the right one.
Like, in the story about the boy who will not love, where Ira interviews the kid's classmates about boy-girl drama in junior high. Because the pictures recur, we thought the music should, too. And we wanted to find something that was wistful and romantic, but not too sappy. Hm. Who do I know who lives in a constant state of wistful romanticism, but would kill me for saying that? Jon Autry, that's who. Jon is a friend of mine from the Midwest who now lives in a small, two-room apartment in Brooklyn. He sleeps in one room, and the other houses stacks and stacks of instruments and recording equipment. Every song of his that we use in the series (and trust me, there are going to be a lot) were made by him. Alone. Usually in that room. Depressing! It just seemed too perfect. And it was. In fact, that track "June 26 (for Jill)" ended up in a handful of stories before anyone knew it. We had to pull back and just let it live in a few segments, breaking some editors' hearts in the process.
Another tricky placement was in Act Three: Still Life. About halfway into the story, Marcus Halevi starts talking about moral dilemmas he faced as a photojournalist, and we're seeing incredibly sad pictures of land mine victims and orphaned children. We needed music to play during this section, but we had to be careful. If the song is all sad, then the segment becomes cheesy, and we don't want that. If the song is too fast or upbeat, we seem like jerks—as if we don’t get the seriousness of the subject matter. Producer Lisa Pollak and editor Joe Beshenkovsky went 'round and 'round, auditioning so many songs and rejecting every suggestion I sent their way. Then this thing happened that I'm sure has happened to you: they went back to their first choice, a song by Sean Lennon that in the beginning felt so wrong, but in the end was clearly the only thing that worked. And it's just perfect.
Here's something I have to admit about this episode: it was actually the fifth show we made, so by this time we were old pros when it came to selecting music. But! Next week, I make one of the biggest mistakes in music supervisor history. Stay tuned.
Music used in this episode, in order of appearance:
Prologue
• Infernal Bridegroom Productions—"Untitled 5.1," from The Hotel Play
Act One
• String Theory—"Honey-Top"
• P-Love—"Let's Start at 58th & Roosevelt"
• Jon Autry—"June 26 (for Jill)"
• One Ring Zero—"The Carnival Man in Purgatory"
• Jon Autry—"June 26 (for Jill)"
• Plaster—"..."
• Bexar Bexar—"Tecolote 3"
Act Two
• One Ring Zero—"Mad Tea Party"
• Madlib—"Elements For Mr. Crabfeather"
• Tim Kinsella—"Piss on Glass Mall Waterfall #3"
• Mark Mothersbaugh—"Happy and Desperational"
• John Kimbrough—"Evan Signs Away"
• Jonah Matranga—"Lament"
Act Three
• Lusine—"Still Frame"
• Sean Lennon—"Max"
• Nate Tucker—"Mouse Victory"
Credits
• Bedroom Walls—"Somewhere in New Hall"
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