CNN
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Of the many dark gifts Showtime’s eerie hit series “Yellowjackets” serves up for us, the juiciest this season is by far the music.
The show – which bounces between a troupe of teen soccer players trapped in the 1990s Canadian wilderness after a plane crash and the survivors’ corresponding adult selves in the present day – embraces nostalgia, incorporating long-cherished tunes from the tail end of last century, with staples from Tori Amos, early Smashing Pumpkins, Massive Attack, Veruca Salt and much more.
In Sunday’s episode of “Yellowjackets,” alt-rock queen Alanis Morissette will debut a version of the show’s theme song, “No Return,” and has already released it as a single.
One of the most unexpected and successful uses of throwback music came in the first episode of Season 2 last month, when Warren Kole’s Jeff had a moment to himself in the car after an intense tryst with wife Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) – during which he rocks out hard to Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” (sure, the track actually came out in 2000, but that doesn’t take away from its retro vibe).
In an interview with CNN, the show’s music supervisor, Nora Fielder, explained that the Papa Roach song selection was scripted, and “served as a perfect physical outlet for Warren whose anxious feelings were riding high while sitting alone in his garage.”
Other standout moments in the script, however, are hers to interpret, and Fielder relishes the opportunity to match those moments with the right songs from the period.
“I re-immerse myself into the show’s era and spirit of the times as I start to build my playlists for the show,” she said. “The main thing I try to keep in mind is to just stay true to the story and let it tell me what it might need musically.”
Case in point, from the same episode – the placement of Amos’s signature track “Cornflake Girl,” off her groundbreaking 1994 sophomore album “Under the Pink.”
The song – which appropriately has the lyric “Things are getting kind of gross” just as teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is about to ingest something unthinkable – “came to mind pretty quickly as a possibility” to Fielder.
“I felt that Amos’s lyrics could serve as a befitting launchpad for the first episode’s ending…
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