This year Death Cab for Cutie released their eighth studio album Kintsugi, but for many they were cast in amber back in the mid-2000s, reaching millions of listeners via their recurring storyline in the teen melodrama "The O.C." Suddenly the Washington band went from being "hermits in (their) own head" to performing on a primetime series on Fox. For many teenagers, Music from The O.C. provided an entry point into indie music and also paved the way for indie bands breaking via TV or commercial placement, a decade before that became the new normal.
In the universe of "The O.C.", Death Cab for Cutie is rooted in a very specific context. Alt-teen dream Seth Cohen played "A Movie Script Ending" in his car in a crucial scene, gave their CDs away for Christmas, was identified as a rare find because he liked both Death Cab and comic books ("Death Cab’s a band, yes?" asked his father/every father). They were continually referenced in the TV show, they performed at the Bait Shop, and were featured on the official soundtrack. Teenagers who worshipped the show—myself included—inhaled these references. Now revisiting albums like Transatlanticism and Plans has the same intimacy as reading old diaries, complete with a tinge of vulnerability that comes with looking back at your more earnest, angsty 16-year-old self. (I mean, only a teenager can listen to the line "you'd skip your early classes/ and we'd learn how our bodies worked" without cringing just a little.)
Programs like "Beverly Hills 90210" and "My So-Called Life" had tie-in soundtracks, but it wasn’t until the late '90s that they started to perform as an extra-textual reference. In the "Dawson’s Creek" season 3 finale, bad girl Jen Linley explains to her pals "this is some alternate reality where our intellects are sharper, our quips are wittier and our hearts are repeatedly broken while faintly in the background some soon-to-be out-of-date contempo pop music plays." The narrative importance of the teen TV soundtrack was so ubiquitous that it was worth breaking the fourth wall over. But just like adolescence itself, the shelf life of these artists was often fleeting (sorry, Rooney). To preteens, teen TV soundtracks operate like passports to adolescence, exposing you to a world of moody longing that you’ve possibly never encountered before. Before I was even allowed to watch "Dawson’s Creek", I would obsessively listen to the original soundtrack on cassette, thrilled by the curse words and imagining whatever scene had Sixpence None the Richer playing in the background (my imagination was pretty accurate). The music may have been chosen for teenagers by people who were far from it, but it worked: that year the "Dawson’s Creek" soundtrack was the fifth highest selling album of 1999 (coincidentally, it was the same year that the Teen Choice Awards were launched). It was an era of slick media convergence in the realm of teen entertainment: remember when Britney Spears was on "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" to sing her latest single, "(You Drive Me) Crazy"? Which was also the title of Melissa Joan Hart’s newly released movie? "Dawson’s" was also one of the first TV shows to cash in on this, offering record labels a 15 second promo spot at the end of episodes in exchange for waiving music licensing fees.
More than any musical tie-in that had come before it, Music from The O.C. remains the most influential teen TV soundtrack critically and commercially. Part of this is due to the cultural climate in 2004: teenagers' experience of the Internet was edging towards the autonomy we have today, but they didn’t quite have the same ease and fluidity of social media to share and discover new music. Sure, you had LimeWire, Kazaa and MySpace, but without knowing what to look for, they kind of seemed useless. If you didn’t know where to start, you wanted an older, cooler sibling to curate your indie listening experience (which now has kind of been replaced by the Internet). "The O.C."’s show runner Josh Schwartz and music supervisor Alex Patsavas took that mantle very seriously—there’s a reason that "The O.C." called their musical releases ‘Mixes’ instead of soundtracks.
"The O.C." used music in a different way to other teen dramas. "Pretty Little Liars" music supervisor Chris Mollere told Rolling Stone that it "changed that format on television and showed that you could do things like have a song with lyrics play during a scene with dialogue. Before "The O.C.", that was not an accepted thing… placement on that show took bands to another level." It was impossible to separate the music from the narrative (think "Dice" playing when Ryan tells Marissa he loves her, Imogen Heap humming as Trey is shot and Caleb is buried, "Hallelujah" playing at key moments in season 1 and later when Marissa dies). The music acted like the Greek chorus. Alex Patsavas was well known for contacting bands on MySpace who hadn’t officially released anything before. Josh Schwartz had songs from his iPod written into the script for the pilot. These people were deliberately sourcing out new artists no one had ever heard of, let alone played on TV, and by meticulously recording every song played in every episode on their website, encouraged viewers to hunt down bands and albums as if they had discovered them themselves. They were putting together mix tapes in the same way as an alternative radio station would put together a compilation, without a hint of condescension. They trusted that you 'got' Bloc Party as much as they did.
In an interview celebrating the show’s anniversary, Schwartz said that he felt strongly about introducing young people to music that they wouldn’t have heard otherwise. "This was a time where there was no iTunes and MTV was not playing music videos, and terrestrial FM radio was like the same eight songs per hour, and 'Hey Ya!' every hour on the hour," he said. "A lot of these bands probably would have had deeper reservations about having their music debut on a Fox teen soap, but there was no other way to get their music out. We would mention Death Cab for Cutie on the show and sales would, you know, go up." The calibre of indie artists featured seemed to evaporate the cultural cringe of appearing on a mainstream teen drama, and acts like Beastie Boys and Beck chose to debut new material on "The O.C." before it was available to the public (Beck was particularly keen, allowing five songs from Guero to be played in a single episode). Reviewers, shocked that young fans of a mainstream melodrama would even be interested in alternative indie music, couldn’t believe the impact this show about Californian teenagers was having on the music industry. "Imagine if half of 'The O.C.''s audience bought a copy of Transatlanticism," they wrote. "We'd have a new Nirvana on our hands."
As the show wrapped its first season Death Cab for Cutie were achieving their greatest success. They were signed to Atlantic, were charting on Billboard, were nominated for a Grammy and their next record went platinum. They began appearing on more TV shows and wrote a song for the second Twilight film (the music supervisor again being Alex Patsavas). Summer Roberts may have thought that they were nothing more than "one guitar and a whole lot of complaining," but fans of "The O.C." embraced them with open arms. Their album reviews continue to be rife with "O.C." references almost 10 years after the show ended. Death Cab for Cutie weren’t the only band to benefit from "The O.C."’s normalizing of indie music. In the same way that teen TV soundtracks can act like an entry point to adolescence, they can also be a platform to jump off and discover new scenes. Death Cab for Cutie led me to Ben Kweller, and Ben Kweller led me to Rilo Kiley. In my house, hearing a band like Le Tigre on mainstream television had all the excitement of seeing the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show". By the sixth and final soundtrack, "The O.C."’s influence in highlighting indie artists got meta and they commissioned other indie artists to cover the songs, like "Smile Like You Mean It" and "Float On", that they had given mainstream success years before. They knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s hard to argue that Music from The O.C. is exactly the same as a personalized mix tape because, regardless of intention, it was still a way to cash in on a specific pop cultural moment. But even though these soundtracks were manufactured to give you 'light bulb' moments, that doesn’t mean those feelings were any less real. Too much onus is put on how people find music, as if that determines their capacity to like it and understand it. The songs on these soundtracks were carefully chosen to convey emotional cues in the teen characters/every teen’s lives, and listening to these albums made you look at your own life in montage: staring out the window on the bus to school, walking down the corridor to class, wondering if that boy you liked would like you back if he heard that particular Joseph Arthur song. Music from The O.C. represented a synthetic adolescence and synthetic emotions that allowed you to play make believe: this song will makes you feel sad, this one will make you feel like a badass, kiss that dude to this one. Because sometimes listening to a song and feeling false love, false heartache or false rebellion feels just as good, if not better, than the real thing. It can give you an escape from your own not-so-exciting adolescence. "I like this song. It makes me gloomy," Rory Gilmore says to her best friend Lane, while listening to Black Box Recorder on her bed. "Gloomy is good," Lane replies with a smile. Ben Gibbard would probably agree.