‘Love and Death’ Music Supervisor Robin Urdang On Selecting Songs for Sex, Murder, and Candy Montgomery

In Max’s Love and Death, we often see Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) driving through Wylie, Texas, humming or singing along to a song on the radio. It’s kind of a recurring theme throughout the series that has spawned a good amount of chatter online. The songs she sings are not haphazardly placed.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Whether you realize it or not, music supervisors serve as key components of any television series, making critical decisions that shape not only the way you experience the action but also how you understand the characters’ motivations. They absorb the material either via early scripts or provided dailies and work with the director to determine when and where songs should be used within the project. Once they determine the quantity of songs they’ll need, they balance that input with their allowed budget to find suitable songs that capture the theming, emotion, or ironic commentary on the scene at play. Hopefully, they’re able to secure rights to their wish list of songs without blowing that budget. Otherwise, it’s back to the drawing board.

Love and Death music supervisor Robin Urdang understands her craft extraordinarily well. She received three Emmy Awards out of four nominations for her outstanding work on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Her work on its fifth and final season puts her into the Emmy conversation again, but strangely, she’s competing against herself for the Candy Montgomery story.

As director Leslie Linka Glatter takes us through the, at times, shocking and emotional material, Urdang’s music choices supplement the narrative in unique ways. The first half of the series features the most music, which makes sense as it focuses on Candy’s effervescent and attractive persona.

“The first three episodes, especially the first two episodes, it’s Candy’s external persona, and how people see her. All of the music is happy, starting when she meets Allan. It’s her happy, outgoing persona, but it’s really the persona that people see her as. She has to live up to that, which is a difficult situation to begin with as a ‘perfect’ churchgoer,” Urdang explains.

Songs reflecting Candy on this positive, increasingly romantic or lustful, journey include Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” or the Bee Gees “More Than a Woman” and “Stayin’ Alive.” Freddy Cannon’s “Palisades Park” accentuates one of Candy and Allan’s first dates at a local carnival. ” Even Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” definitely serves its purpose within the Love and Death narrative, even if it doesn’t quite mask Candy and Sherry’s (Krysten Ritter) conversation about Allan smelling “like sex.” When Candy and Allan finally consummate their hesitant courtship, it happens to “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” by Betty Everett.

One of the more prominent songs in the limited series — Carole King’s “Tapestry” — was written directly into David E. Kelley’s script as it weaves directly into defining threads of Candy’s persona.

Yet, after Candy murders Betty Gore (Lily Rabe), the Urdang-provided songs become fewer and far between. That transition makes sense as the narrative becomes far more serious. Still, there are still sequences of Candy escaping into her own world by singing in her car.

“It was very, very intentional, as the show went on, that the music changed, that Candy changes, and she’s no longer the same persona. She’s not going to live in that world anymore. Now, her internal turmoil, her vulnerability, and her life have changed so much that, just like human nature, we listen to different music when we’re in different places in our lives,” Urdang remarks. “Songs like ‘Queen of Hearts,’ which plays when she drives to church following the murder, those songs were Candy struggling to be her old self but would never really happened again.”

When working on the production, the last song Urdang and team settled on was Nina Simone’s take on “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” There were other choices used during the editing process, choices that would have been far more expensive in terms of music rights, but the Simone track seemed to fit the narrative and tone perfectly. When Urdang and team played options on Zoom calls with Glatter, the director immediately felt drawn to the tune.

Urdang remains thrilled with the results, though, despite the song being one of the hardest she’s had to select.

“Did we want to give away too much in the beginning? Did we want it to engage people with a happy-go-lucky song? It really just took putting all the music together, putting it on picture, knowing in my mind what was definitely not going to work and what maybe would work or something a little offbeat, and found the song and it was so right,” Urdang enthuses. “It was a hard choice because, again, you could have gone in so many different directions, but the lyric and the mood for this one were so perfect. Not everybody knows the Nina Simone version, which was the original version, but I’m thrilled with it.”

Love and Death streams exclusively in its entirety on Max.