The soundtrack for Hulu's new Sally Rooney adaptation includes artists like Pillow Queens and Phoebe Bridgers, who recorded a new song for the show.
Hulu; Rachel Mendelson/Insider
Within the first minute of Hulu's "Conversations With Friends," the main character is introduced as a baby-faced woman who listens to the singer CMAT — a self-described "hot mess" who hails from Dublin — as she walks alone to the library.
It's the first concrete piece of information that viewers receive about Frances (Alison Oliver) before we even learn her name. Naturally, selecting the perfect song for that meeting was no simple feat.
Music supervisor Juliet Martin told Insider that she spent about 10 hours sorting through potential tracks before landing on "I Don't Really Care for You" from CMAT's 2022 album "If My Wife New I'd Be Dead" to open the first episode.
"We originally had something there that was much more whimsical, that was more 'Normal People,'" she said, referring to Hulu's moody adaptation of Sally Rooney's second novel, on which Martin also worked.
"The note we got back was like, 'No, we don't want to set that tone yet. The characters haven't really earned this feeling,'" Martin continued.
"Conversations With Friends" is the saga of Frances and Bobbi (Sasha Lane), best friends and ex-girlfriends, who become entangled with an older married couple. It was Rooney's first novel to be published. However, as Hulu's newest limited series, it faces the challenge of following "Normal People," which whipped up a mild frenzy when it premiered in April 2020.
The comparison is easy to make. Both stories are set in Ireland's capital city; both follow the secretive loves and lusts of messy young people. But according to Martin, the crew was passionate about painting Frances and Bobbi's realm as separate, unique, and interesting in its own right.
And as with other shows that prioritize emotional impact over plot structure, music played an important role in that process.
Enda Bowe/Hulu
For "Conversations With Friends," Martin said she tended to prioritize artists who felt more "current" and "electronic" than her previous selections for "Normal People," which skewed towards folksy singer-songwriter music.
The resulting soundtrack includes an array of emerging artists that specialize in hypnotic indie-pop, many of whom hail from the UK, such as Cosha and PinkPantheress.
"We didn't go into it saying, 'Right, we must use lots of Irish music,' for example. But it worked," Martin said. "What we were definitely trying to do was create a sense of the girls' world and their place in it."
The soundtrack also features a new song by Phoebe Bridgers, titled "Sidelines," written exclusively for the show.
"I know she's a Sally Rooney fan, so I think she was really open to the idea from the outset," Martin said, adding that an executive from Hulu made the request.
"She watched the episodes and just responded immediately to it," the music supervisor added. "It was actually a very straightforward process."
"Watch the world from the sidelines / Had nothing to prove / 'Till you came into my life / Gave me something to lose," Bridgers sings in the chorus, echoing the book's narration by Frances, who understands herself as a cold observer and Bobbi's less intriguing other half.
Martin also took care to differentiate Frances and Bobbi's audiovisual vibe from that of Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Melissa (Jemima Kirke), their seemingly sophisticated, grown-up counterparts.
She was especially mindful that two college-aged queer women like Frances and Bobbi, who perform anti-establishment slam poetry in their spare time, would likely gravitate towards expressive queer music.
In one scene, Martin noted, the duo dance to "On the Regular" by nonbinary artist Shamir. In another, Bobbi's headphones bleed the "attitude-y" music of Pillow Queens, an Irish band comprised of four queer women.
"For Melissa and Nick, we had a reference of Fleet Foxes although we didn't end up licensing any of their music," she explained, humming a few soothing bars from the band's single "Can I Believe You." "But that would be the music of their world, you know?"
Enda Bowe/Hulu
Although securing a song's clearance can take several months, Martin said the process for this production was much quicker than she's experienced in the past.
"I don't know if that was because people knew the success of 'Normal People,'" she said. "But we did have a lot of artists who were delighted to be included."
One such artist was Sallay Matu Garnett, an artist of Irish and Sierra Leonean origin who records music under the stage name Loah.
Garnett actually joined the cast as Nick and Melissa's friend Evelyn. In episode four, she joins the group on holiday in Croatia and treats them to an acoustic cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren."
Frances and Nick, who would soon rekindle their illicit affair, cast each other furtive glances as Garnett gives a voice to their yearning: "Here I am, waiting to hold you," she sings in the episode.
"She just performed that live. We didn't do a prerecord," Martin revealed. "She's just got this amazing voice. I was really involved in picking a track that she would perform, and she just does that so well."
Enda Bowe/Hulu
When sourcing a song for a specific scene, Martin said she actually pays "less attention to the lyrics than you might think."
"I wouldn't necessarily pick it for the lyrics, and you particularly don't want to be too on the nose with lyrics, either," she explained, adding, "Often it's just about the feel or the vibe."
For instance, at the end of episode five, Bobbi discovers Frances and Nick naked in bed together. To capture the couple's vulnerability and ambient dread, Martin employed James Blake's haunting cover of Joy Division's "Atmosphere."
The right song can also offer compelling juxtaposition if it doesn't match the mood of a scene, hinting at a future shift or alerting viewers to a character's ambivalence — as when Frances storms out of Nick's house to the tune of Joanna Newsom's "Peach, Plum, Pear."
"Frances has left Nick's house, and they've had this argument, and she's being really despairing," Martin detailed. "It's almost a little bit counterpoint, in that it's almost a happy song, but it's scoring something incredibly heavy."
To score a show defined by emotional conflict, crippling indecision, and so many things left unsaid, Martin's team had to get creative. But after whittling down a playlist with more than 400 songs, she said she's incredibly proud of the result.
"I wouldn't say that I could specifically nail down, 'Right, this is the tone of the music.' We very much treat it on a scene-by-scene basis," she said, adding later: "It's all about finding the music the script connects me to."
