Sometimes you don’t even realize how music will affect you. You can be shopping in a store or out in public and hear a song that you haven’t heard in 20 years before being transported to your teenage bedroom. For many of us who came of age in the ’90s, the bands have a specific sound and mood, and every music cue made me want to search my closet for a flannel shirt. For music supervisor Brienne Rose, selecting the background music for Under the Bridge was essential to conjure images from the 1990s to get us into atmosphere of a brutal killing from 1997.
The end of episode one brings us a truly inspired music selection in Nirvana’s “Something In the Way,” a moody track that begins with slow guitar strumming. The sound is almost gentle, but, in its usage at the pilot’s end, conjures images of a teenager playing the guitar in a darkened room. It’s a cue that feels so perfect, that I almost expected it to be written into the script.
“It wasn’t actually,” Rose admits. “A lot of the hip-hop was written into the script since it was so integral to the story. With a lot of the other music, the focus was to evoke a lot of things at once: the time period, the complexity, the emotion. That was the primary goal. It was a song that we tried and the tone was perfect. It looks back to the beginning when the kids are incarcerated. It’s so dark. The way the song unravels is stunning. We originally had the song over the top when Rebecca gets to the jail and we ended up having score at the beginning. Nirvana really brings out the ’90s, and the guitar tone captured the spirit of what we needed to end the first episode.
The first words sung in Nirvana’s song are, ‘Underneath the bridge/tarp has sprung a leak/And the animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets.’ It’s tempting to think that “Something in the Way” was used just for these lyrics, but it’s purely a coincidence. The tone in Kurt Cobain’s voice even echoes the feeling of anticipation before the story breaks on a wider level.
“That was a hole-in-one, but we didn’t seek that out,” she says. “We never wanted to be on the nose, but we couldn’t resist with that song. There were so many elements that it was impossible to ignore, and it captured everything we needed. Quinn [Shephard] and Samir [Mehta] are such music people, and when you’re working with the creators and they have a clear vision, it makes it more elevated to have conversations about music. It feels cerebral. Maybe it can even say something that the characters can’t say. You hear the tone from Nirvana that it puts you right into it. Sometimes with Alex Somers’ score, we tried to see if we could find music that could complement what he was doing or have the same sound to weave into the sound overall. His score and the songs were really informing each other.”
Later in the season, we see Rebecca’s mentorship with Warren grow as she gives her permission to wear her brother’s suit. The scene is a calm one but we hear Hoover’s “Absolutely Zero” wafting through the room. Was this a song playing over the scene, or was it organically in the room? Are the characters hearing the song as well, and, if so, what meaning does this song have to Rebecca? Sometimes a music supervisor is also evoking a feeling from a character in a particular moment of a series.
“I love that you brought this scene because, for us, it was one of the most challenging scenes to find music for,” Rose says. “We had a lot of things in mind and went through some different iterations. It had to feel sweet and a little somber, but it couldn’t be romantic. We didn’t want elicit or suggest that, because this is a scene where Rebecca is thinking a lot about her brother and feeling sympathy for Warren. This was a tough one. Ultimately, this song hit the mark in terms of lack of romanticism, and it conjured a nostalgia for her in terms of where the triangle of her, Gabe, and Warren meet. We wanted it to be a song that maybe her and Gabe would’ve listened to. I heard that song on a compilation called “Sad About the Times,” and it’s a fantastic collection. There was a diegetic element of them listening to it in the room, but we wanted to level up its presence so it can play to the audience.”
Since Under the Bridge deals with a specific case and moment in time, I was curious if Rose was curious to look further in time to pull music back. She reveals why this was never the case.
“We experimented with that early on, because we thought within the story itself we would keep it to 1997 and before,” she says. “We thought that, as a show, we could used pieces from later. We ultimately discovered with music from the era that we could tell the story, but it was more effective overall if we honed in on this time period. There is just a wealth of music from this era. Bob Dylan said that there will always be more old music than new music, and that is very true in the case of our show. We can reach back if we wanted to, but we weren’t a current sound and we didn’t need to tell the story that way.”
A lot of people assume that music supervision is simple, but it’s an art form that really has to align with the vision of the themes of the show. Working on shows like Minx, Russian Doll, Emily in Paris, and I Love That For You, Rose has to balance more than just time period and mood. A lot of people think that her job only entails finding a song that fits.
“For me, the first priority in terms of the creative aspect is world building,” Rose says. “I’ve worked on shows where I am less familiar with the music, but I know it’s informing the world that we are inhabiting. Music can be so important in terms of world building. It’s What does that world need? Storytelling is very important to me, and I like to find an angle. What is the music saying overall? For Under the Bridge, we wanted to speak to the era, but we also wanted to hold up the tentpoles for those characters. We can move from one headspace to another character’s headspace, but, at the same time we are in this lush, beautiful town where something horrible happens. What sounds beautiful on the surface but has a dark undertone.
Secondly, so much of our job is about clearing all the songs, working with the budget, and clearing samples in songs. We do a lot of negotiations that people don’t know about. The best part is finding the music, but that’s not the only thing a music supervisor does. There are times when you can be dealing with a sensitive subject matter, and sometimes an artist doesn’t want their music associated with that. It’s totally understandable, but it’s also a tricky game to play when we are trying to find the right song for the right moment.”
Under the Bridge is streaming now on Hulu.
