Welcome to “Sync or Swim,” a new monthly interview series where music supervisors who work on Netflix titles talk about their careers, their favorite music and the scenes they’re excited about. For the first installment, Tudum interviewed Brienne Rose, the founder of Noise/Racket and the music supervisor for Russian Doll, Emily In Paris, The Pentaverate and many more.

Hearing a great song at the right moment can be an overwhelming experience. If you’ve ever learned about a band by hearing them in a film or TV show, cried at a ballad during a particularly heartbreaking scene, or Shazamed a theme song or soundtrack highlight, you’re already a fan of music supervision. Every movie or TV show has a music supervisor who not only helps select and curate the soundtrack in the title but also ensures the songs can be licensed and the appropriate songwriters, publishers and rights holders are paid for the sync. They also work with directors and writers to collaborate on the music, work with rough cuts of scenes to find places where they can add songs, and even work with score composers and on-screen musicians. The list goes on. 

Emmy nominee Brienne Rose, whose non-Netflix credits include Search Party, The Other Two, Minx and others, has been working in music supervision for almost 20 years. Her Zooming from her home in New Mexico, Rose listed some of her favorite moments from Russian Doll Season 2, the different challenges shows like Emily in Paris and The Pentaverate can bring, and her favorite way to find a new song. 

The music on Russian Doll is so good, and it seems like it’s a great collaboration between you and Natasha Lyonne. Can you tell me about some of the conversations you two had going into Season 2? Natasha is such a music person. She’s so well versed and knows what she likes. She knows stylistically who she is and I think that informs a lot of Russian Doll. It informs everything, from the aesthetics in the apartments and the wardrobe, in such a sincere way. So, yeah, of course, she’s this massive music head and knows a ton about music. It’s so much fun, because we can really get granular with it. She knows how to talk about music and she really knows stylistically what we’re aiming for. Even if that means we’re shuffling through a lot of different options, it’s such an informed conversation. In some cases, there are pieces that were in the script and that became really important — obviously that Harry Nilsson song in the first season was written into the script. In Season 2, there were a couple of pieces, like Danzig’s “Mother,” that were in there and that was really important. Thematically, the song was important to the show and pieces like that feel very much like the personas of these characters coming through. It’s always such a pleasure to start from there and then have those tent poles with Natasha and then she and I really build out from there.

Season 2 obviously presented some different challenges compared to Season 1 with the time travel aspect going back to New York in the 1980s, 1960s Berlin and 1940s Budapest. How hard was it diving into those worlds that may not necessarily be your bread and butter as a music supervisor? When I get to explore those different things that aren’t as typical for shows that I work on, it just becomes really fun. You think, “How do we want to approach this? What’s going to work about this?” and really starting to think about those pieces. It becomes a really neat part of any project where you really get to expand your universe of knowledge about music. I love classical music. It’s always exciting to get to dive into that a little bit more. With the Lizst pieces in the show, we wanted it to be Hungarian and we tried a lot of different things, but that just felt like the quality of those had a kind of a surging, oscillating feeling to them. So, they fit into our world in a good way. And most of them were piano, but there were some more orchestral suites too. 

Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” pops up more than once this season. Was that written into the script?  That was something we discussed early on. Even the footsteps in the beginning shot [matches the beat of the song]. So, that was either in the script or discussed fairly early on, but that was important, and then it’s reprised in, I think, Episode 4 as a remix. We explored different remixes there, and I think always in this world, we want things to feel like they are coming back around and thematically pulsing through the show. The show itself feels very ’80s stylistically. I think there are a lot of pieces that have that dirty eighties feel to them. 

András D. Hadjú/Netflix

In music supervision, if you use a song, you have to get permission again to use it more than once. With Depeche Mode, the Harry Nilsson song, and it being a show that’s about going back in time and scenes repeating, was it a challenge to tell these rights holders, “Hey, this is how the show works, we’re going to have to use this song multiple times?” I love that question, because sometimes people think music supervisors are just putting songs in and trying different pieces. But so much of it is also thinking and considering, can we afford this? Is this something that’s going to clear? And the multitude of uses, what is that challenge going to look like? Honestly, the rights holders were lovely about that. That wasn’t too challenging. I will say our biggest get this season was Pink Floyd. That was massive for us, because it was such a long use. It was very complicated, it’s a tough dynamic and so I think that was the most complicated clearance.

When you work on shows or films, you usually get onboard very early on in the process, at the script stage before shooting. Did you know going into Season 2 that the Harry Nilsson song would be reintroduced in Season 2? We did talk about that. Yet again that was an early conversation. I like to be onboard as soon as possible on any show, because I like to build playlists. For this show, as soon as I started reading the scripts, I was thinking about the early eighties and building those playlists and then thinking just about everything. So, we’re kind of building out what the soundscape sounds like. Even if we don’t use 95% of those songs, we’re just establishing that this era is going to feel like this, and this is going to feel like this. It’s so important, because you have to have parameters that you’re really pulling from and using as the sightlines. It’s such an important piece of understanding the characters, knowing what things sound like, because music for so many people informs emotional response. 

This isn’t the only Netflix project that you’re working on. You also were the music supervisor for The Pentaverate. It’s a very different show than Russian Doll so what challenges did that bring?  They’re such different shows. With Russian Doll, everything is very thematic and metaphorical, and we want each music piece to have layers of meaning. With The Pentaverate, I think it’s a lot more a reflection of Mike Myers’ crazy world of genius, that you’re just dropped into and some of the music is played for a little bit of humor. Some of the music is really just setting the tone and scenes for where we are. We had such incredible composers on that show. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the band Orbital, but they’re a really rad electronic duo that came up through the eighties and nineties, and they did our score and they created such a neat sphere of music for that show. They got really neat and introspective with the music, which was really fun. It’s a much more score-heavy show, too. 

Same goes for Emily In Paris. All three shows require totally different approaches to music supervision.  Well, in Season 2, there was a band in the series. One of the main characters, Mindy, forms a band. We had one big original song that Freddy Wexler wrote, and he’s an incredible pop writer and producer. So, that was really fun to get to work with him on that, but typically, for Emily, we’re seeking out supercool up-and-coming French and Parisian bands. It’s so exciting, too, because I’m a Francophile to begin with, and then to source some of those bands and artists and pull them into that show has been just a dream come true.

When you have characters in the show who are in bands, how does your role change or what sort of things do you have to do? It becomes very hands-on at that point. I become a little bit more of a producer, because I have to make sure that whatever song we’re performing is either written or cleared. In the season, Mindy also performed “Dynamite,” the BTS pop song. We had a Cher song that she performed. There were seven performances this season. Over the course of the season, as they’re shooting, I need to be very aware of the dates, because we have to have the song cleared or written. And then we have to pre-record the song, which means we go into the studio and I’m working with a producer who is putting the band together. 

It’s everything: What instruments do we want on camera versus what instruments are we having in the studio? Do we want them to sound a certain way? What key is the actor’s singing? These are all considerations that we have to be very aware of, because it can be a disaster, if you have a whole song produced and then it’s in the wrong key, and I know you can imagine not a great scenario. It hasn’t happened yet, knock on wood, but certainly a possibility. So there’s a lot of different pieces that have to come together. Also, how is the song going to be edited that works with the picture? How does the director want to shoot it? Are we doing the full song? I always try to get the full song cleared just so we have the coverage, but sometimes, we have to make certain edits to the song that where something’s happening on camera that we have to accommodate. With all that, it’s weeks and weeks of work for one [song] on camera, even if it’s 10 seconds.

There are so many ways to find new music. What’s been your favorite?  One of my favorite ways, and this is a little bit sad because of COVID, is going to shows. I would go just to see the openers. Because whoever the headlining bands that I loved were taking on tour with them, even if it was a smaller band, would always be so good. It just became this great resource, where you would go and see a show, and really it was the openers who would steal the show. That’s obviously been dampened with the last couple of years, which is a shame because there’s such a wealth of knowledge there where it’s some weird, obscure thing that you may not have ever heard of.