Tuning In

CR Men

For more than fifty years, the dominant form of recorded music has been the album: a discrete work, about ninety minutes long, a dozen-odd sequenced songs. The album was an immersion into a single audio world, with an overarching perspective, its moods shifting within a larger narrative. As streaming tech continues to reconstitute culture into a digital Ship of Theseus, the album’s latest replacement is not the CD or the mp3, but the TV show.

Or the TV show playlist. These too cohere to one narrative, run to an hour-plus, and reflect a single vision—usually that of a music supervisor, a figure who lately exerts as much influence on a show as its director of photography. The composer of a show’s score tends to hide in plain sight: goosing dramatic beats, adjusting the temperature on screen. But the person who drops a needle plays with the raw materials of our stories. Our memories and associations around not just songs but artists, eras, genres, and production styles. Hardwired into our limbic system, these elements do the work of twenty-five screenplay pages. A needle-drop compilation now begs its own genre.

Such was the case when the Stranger Things soundtrack breathed life into its show’s spooky early-80’s milieu. That show’s music supervisor, Nora Felder, had the benefit of the 2001 film Donnie Darko, whose soundtrack provided a blueprint for spinning shivery ‘80’s vibes with gothy New Wave hits. But Stranger Things worked a more fundamental integration of period music and story, entering a subliminal dialogue with the past. A recognizable older brother figure—the arty high-school loner who finds refuge in import records and college radio—served as a human portal for tracks by Joy Division, Television, Echo and the Bunnymen, and the Smiths. And the visual and thematic nods to early Spielberg and Stephen King let the burbling electronic instrumentals of Vangelis and Tangerine Dream carve out a Trump-era oasis of analog synth temps perdu.

Other period pieces generate playlists in various themes: Bayou noir (True Detective); 90’s girl power (Yellowjackets); Wesleyan non-binary (Girls, Broad City). But occasionally, a supervisor’s college-DJ sensibility meets a story world and a moment and the convergence yields something rare and near transcendent. And it’s worth considering why the two clearest examples of this, The Leftovers and Station Eleven, are both set at the apocalypse.

Both shows were music-supervised by Liza Richardson, needle-drop auteur of other stand-outs from Friday Night Lights to Watchmen. Premiering in 2014, The Leftovers followed the survivors of the sudden, unexplained disappearance of 2-percent of the earth’s population. Justin Theroux leads the cast as Kevin Garvey, a small-town sheriff who struggles try to keep the peace, fighting back forces of delusion, nihilism, and evangelical violence that arise in the wake of this “Departure.” In a sense, HBO’s new Station Eleven inverts this ratio, following those leftovers who represent the tiny percentage of humanity that has not disappeared, as an extinction-level flu erases 99-percent of humanity. In both shows, well-known and obscure songs are blended into the stories’ DNA.

In the Leftovers, songs from the past 150 years punctuate minimalist elegies by the score's composer Max Richter: a Verdi chorus, a Gravediggaz cut, EDM by Major Lazer, ‘80s synth-pop hit by a Downtown horn ensemble. The songs start, stop, and restart in a character’s earpods, as the show is exceptionally true to the way music is entwined with modern lives. And one song, sung onscreen, by a character in extremis, provides the show’s most indelible moment.

After a suicide attempt, Theroux’s Kevin awakens in a hotel cum Bardo, then struggles to parse threats and clues to his possible resurrection within the hotel’s dream-like setting. At a peak of desperation, Kevin stumbles into the hotel's karaoke lounge, whose MC he soon recognizes as a kind of doorman to mortality. The man's unimpressed with Kevin’s stated reasons for returning him to life—“’You love your family.’ “It’s not your time.’ C’mon, mate, be original,” he says—insisting that Kevin’s only path to redemption is on the karaoke stand. Kevin relents, gets onstage and spins the wheel, which lands on an old Simon & Garfunkel hit. Eyes grimly fixed, Kevin raises the mike to begin and, within the first verse of “Home,” whose title word repeats like a prayer, Theroux’s tremulous singing gives us all the fragile, aching longing his character has held inside for two full seasons.

Pop songs work a similar magic in Station Eleven, and unspool an even grander, more poignant narrative. Based on Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of the same name, the show jumps between two different times: one that’s recognizably our own, when a deadly pandemic arrives to begin erasing civilization; and a time 20 years after this, when Kirsten, who we met as a child actor in a Chicago King Lear production, is now a core member of the Traveling Symphony, a theater troupe whose horse-drawn caravan makes an annual circuit around Michigan, performing a Shakespeare play at every stop throughout a season. These characters bear a torch for beauty through a verdant landscape, which only occasionally hides a human threat. 

Pitched by its showrunner Patrick Somerville as an “apocalyptic show about joy,” Station Eleven spends more time in lush, green idylls than blasted hellscapes, its characters tend toward brave, loving artists processing trauma rather than warlords hoarding petrol: a post-pandemic North America populated by Brooklyn baristas and comp-lit profs. But it’s strikingly true to how music actually works in modern humans, how it shapes our interiors and exteriors, how thoroughly hip-hop methodology was assimilated into contemporary life, an unexamined part of the way we process sounds, experiences, and cultural artifacts. 

When Jeevan, Kirsten’s de-facto guardian throughout Year One, breeches an empty suburban house to hunt supplies, he finds a keyboard whose keys have been programmed to trigger snatches of family members’ voices: a toddler’s laugh, a grade-schooler’s rambling story. Testing a few keys, Jeevan fills the empty house with now-silenced children’s voices, in a moment that recalls the spectral beauty of Janet Cardiff’s sound installation, Forty-Part Motet, a circle of 40 audio speakers, each playing a recording of one voice singing a different part in Tallis’ devotional chorale work Spem in alium. The Traveling Circus tour and perform Shakespeare because, per their motto, “Survival is insufficient.” Not far from their circuit, in a regional airport turned sanctuary, Clark, also a former Shakespeare actor, fills his Museum of Civilization with found artifacts like a mobile phone, or Nintendo Switch—intent on preserving the ideas and works of a humanity few will soon remember. Station Eleven’s soundtrack is itself an elegy, since every single track is from a world no longer here. In a newly published survey, the music analytics firm MRC Data found that old songs represent 70-percent of the U.S. music market. And all growth in this market is represented by old songs. If TV show playlists truly replace recorded albums, we may look back to the Station Eleven soundtrack as prophecy as well. 

2022 CR Men