Last night, the third and final season of HBO’s “The Leftovers” opened with Doomsday pilgrims eagerly awaiting the Rapture, circa 1844. As the days of reckoning passed by without a peep, a cover of “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”—originally by the contentious father of Christian rock himself, Larry Norman—began to play. Such a meta musical choice perhaps would raise an eyebrow without any context. But “The Leftovers” and its showrunner Damon Lindelof (of “Lost” notoriety) consistently have used music as part of the show’s ongoing conversation about society’s reconfiguration following the disappearance of 140 million people worldwide. Sometimes that means a Groundhog Day-like loop set to the Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow” as Rev. Matthew Jamison cares for his catatonic wife; other times it’s as on-the-nose as Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five’s “White Lines” kicking in as Liv Tyler’s character snorts coke.
At the helm of these winking choices is music supervisor Liza Richardson, whose highlight reel includes music-heavy TV shows like “Friday Night Lights,” “Parenthood,” and “Narcos.” But for nearly a decade before starting to soundtrack TV’s airwaves, Richardson became well known on the radio dial as a DJ with Los Angeles’ influential NPR affiliate KCRW. It’s a position she holds to this day, 25 years later, with a Saturday night show playing under-the-radar indie rock, disco punk, and throwback soul. In the ’90s, Richardson began experimenting on her show by playing spoken word over instrumentals, getting Viggo Mortensen to read his own poetry and Björk to recite Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. From there, a more literal mash-up of narrative and backing tracks seemed spot-on, starting with music supervision duties for 2001 indie-film classic Y Tu Mamá También.
We spoke to Richardson about the oft-unseen nuts and bolts of music supervision, as well as what to expect for the music of “The Leftovers” season three.
Pitchfork: Take us through a standard timeline, from start to finish, of music supervision on a TV episode.
Liza Richardson: First I read the script and make a breakdown of the life of the episode. It contains every spot in the episode that would contain music, like scenes in restaurants or even in an elevator. There’s always muzak in an elevator in every TV show. But in real life? Almost never.
Then I’ll give the show’s producers an estimate of how much it will cost. Each episode has a budget, whether it’s $10,000 or $80,000. A really expensive piece of music scripted in a $10,000 show means we have to come up with other ideas from the beginning, or the writers need to rethink something. If a song is going to be super featured, then that’s where I’ll want to spend the money. If you can barely hear it, then I’ll want to put in library music or super indie music to solve the budget.
Once the episode starts shooting, editors send me clips saying, “I need jazz music for background at a circus! What do you have?” If there’s time, I like to get a clip of the scene, because you can only tell so much from a script.
Finally we get to a spotting session with the editor, the showrunner, the music editor, the composer, and the music supervisor. We go through each music spot in the episode and discuss before setting the final mix. Some of these sessions go really quickly. Some shows we pause every two minutes to discuss the details of every single bit of music.
Can you give a few examples of how much particular songs have cost for placement? That part of the process seems to vary a lot.
The prices of songs are negotiable and depend on a lot of factors: budget, length of use, distribution plan for the project (or commercial—what’s the media buy?), interest from artist, interest from rights holders. Even how much the actors got paid can affect the price of a song.
Some songs are flexibly priced and some have a lot of precedent. A typical very popular song for TV is about $30,000 to $40,000, but a lot of discovery artists may be $1,000 to $10,000. All songs are split in half, so if an original song is $10,000 total, that’s $5,000 for the writers of the song and $5,000 for the recording of it. Cover songs may not be equal on both sides. A legacy artist like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones is a lot more. Studio film prices for songs are more than TV and more than indie film. Commercial song placements are the most expensive, like a Rihanna song for a Super Bowl ad might be around $1 million, maybe.
How do you find new music? What services do you use?
I follow a lot of record collectors on Instagram, discover a lot of old music from friends like Now Again Records. My peers, my staff, my KCRW DJ friends. I look at Pitchfork. I look at [music review blog] Any Decent Music. I want to mention Last.fm because they have a great algorithm for similar artists. If I’m trying to replace a song by Joni Mitchell, then I can go to their algorithm and get a lot of great ideas.
I personally don’t use Spotify. I have a lot of music supervisor friends who do, but I mostly only deal with physical music. iTunes is a good way for me to figure out what’s out each release day. But one problem with iTunes lately that drives me insane is that the more it becomes useful for consumers, the less it’s useful professionally. So I hope that they either keep professionals in mind, or some new program comes along. I need an MP3 or a WAV file—streaming audio [like Apple Music] does me very little good.
How do you think the music choices in “The Leftovers” differ from other TV shows?
I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a show that used one song repetitively over and over in one episode. “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” [from the opera Nabucco,about the plight of exiled Jews]in season two, episode eight is an example of that. Damon [Lindelof, showrunner] loves to push buttons and boundaries. It’s one of the most refreshing and creative shows that I’ve ever seen, much less worked on. The opening credits this season are spectacular—some amazing harp music and classical, lots of surprises.
Just to clarify, I don’t choose all the songs. Music supervision is a collaboration. Damon is in charge. The picture editors are too, so the music supervision team presents options and solutions. And inspiration always comes from the picture itself. The script, photography, set design, wardrobe, acting style, and editorial style all inform the music.
Between “Master of None” and “Stranger Things,” some have suggested that we’re in another heyday for music supervision.
It might be going through a heyday, but people have been saying that for a long time. Viewers have been noticing these things for a while, but what I think it is: there’s so much television production right now. You can’t even watch half the shows that are up for Emmys [because there are so many], so producers want to have cool music in their shows. I loved the music in “Master of None,” by the way. It was like, “Hey, did you guys steal from my favorite song list?”