The first two minutes of Sex Education’s series premiere don’t just introduce you to the show’s characters, timeless aesthetic, and frank approach to sex. They’re also the first — but definitely not the last — time you hear musician Ezra Furman, whose song “I’m Coming Clean” plays as Otis (Asa Butterfield) opens a drawer containing an adult magazine, marking the start of a beautiful four-season partnership between Furman and the dramedy. 

A singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Furman is an instrumental component of Sex Education’s soundscape. While composer Oli Julian handles the show’s catchy score, Furman has both contributed her own songs and written many original ones specifically for the series.

Her time on Sex Education — whose fourth and final season premiered Thursday — actually began with “I’m Coming Clean,” which was one of the demos Furman submitted when she was in talks to work on the show. Everyone, including Furman herself, was surprised by how well “I’m Coming Clean” fit the show. 

“They were like, ‘This is creepily, perfectly timed to this already existing scene,’” Furman tells Tudum. “The lyrics mention a dresser drawer while there’s a shot of stuff in the dresser drawer. They were like, ‘This looks like it was tailor-written to the scene.’”

Samuel Taylor/Netflix

The full lyric (“I’ve got pictures in the dresser drawer/ I whisper through the bedroom door”) is also fitting because moments later, Otis’ bedroom door unexpectedly jolts open. That stunning coincidence assured Furman she had chemistry with Sex Education, who says, “It’s destiny. We were meant to be together.”

From there, it was planned for Furman’s music to be a “continual presence” throughout the series, like how Simon & Garfunkel were prominently featured on The Graduate soundtrack. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been waiting for this.’ I felt extremely lucky to be offered such a thing,” Furman says. 

Of course Sex Education also features songs made by various artists, but as a recurring player, Furman has been a consistent part of the soundtrack, which was curated by music supervisor Matt Biffa. Furman has enjoyed how the creative process has evolved over the show’s four seasons.

Samuel Taylor/Netflix

“For the first season, they gave me so much [info] because I didn’t know what the show even was. I discovered [that] this is a responsible and healthy look at teenage sex. It’s not false advertising; in terms of the title, you can learn things about sex from the show. Once I realized that, I was comfortable,” she says. “[In the beginning,] I had multiple episode scripts, then they started giving me less scripts in advance and were more like, ‘Here’s the whole arc of the season for Maeve [Emma Mackey]. Here’s what’s going on with her, can you write something for this scene, at this point in the arc?’ I love doing it that way.”

Those requests resulted in a lot of music being produced. “For the first three seasons, we made nine songs for each of them and they had their choice to use any of them,” says Furman, who did face some challenges along the way. “I couldn’t always come up with something, [but] a lot of times I could and I surprised myself.”

One of the biggest surprises came in Season 4. “We’d already given them a bunch of music, but then they [said], ‘We want a very emotional ballad for this pivotal scene, can you do that?’ And I was like, ‘You think I can just turn on an emotional faucet and come up with something heartfelt? I don’t think so, buddy. That’s not how it works,’” she says. “Then they showed me the scene and gave me a bit of writing about what’s going on emotionally. And I just surprised myself and wrote. That was a microcosm of the whole process.”

The song in question is a ballad called “Tether,” featured at the end of Episode 3. “Because these are well-written, true-to-life characters, it was possible for me to find something I could write that was actually heartfelt,” Furman says. Throughout the series, emotional moments like this one draw heavy feelings, and oftentimes it’s Furman’s music working in tandem with them to amplify the sensation. 

Jon Hall/Netflix

Looking back on the show’s run, Furman says her favorite contribution was during an “I am Spartacus” moment at the end of Season 1’s fifth episode, when several students claim ownership of a vagina in a photograph that’s being passed around school. “My song, ‘Body Was Made’ comes on as the exclamation point. I was euphoric. I wasn’t even sure it truly had a purpose until that moment. It’s the perfect use of that song. I was like, that’s why that track exists,” she says. 

Scenes like that made Sex Education conjure emotion on a regular basis, and Furman sums up her immense contributions to four seasons’ worth of tears and goosebumps as simply “a resource.” Reflecting on the series coming to an end, she tells Tudum, “I just wanted to be a good resource to them, and when they were looking for a song, I wanted them to have a good one. You know what I mean? I just wanted to be useful to them.”

Here’s the full list of every Ezra Furman song featured in Sex Education. You can listen to them all — and the entire soundtrack — below. 

Season 1

“Love You So Bad” (trailer)

“I’m Coming Clean”

“Every Feeling”

“Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde”

“Restless Year”

“Early Rain”

“La Madrugada”

“My Zero”

“Good Book”

“Body Was Made”

“If Only the Wind Would Blow Me Away”

“Can I Sleep in Your Brain”

“At the Bottom of the Ocean”

“Splash of Light”

Season 2

“I Can Change”

“Amateur”

“Care”

“Devil or Angel”

“The Queen of Hearts”

Season 3

“Trans Mantra”

“Going to Brighton”

“Frying Pan”

“Mysterious Power”

“Don’t Turn Your Back on Love”

Season 4

“You Like Me”

“Tether”

“Honeycomb”