TVLINE | “Love Story” is firmly set in the ’90s. But ’90s music was kind of all over the place, genre-wise. Was there a specific vibe that you were going for this season? We don’t hear a lot of grunge in there, for example.
I think the directive from the top was to make the show as universal as possible, by not sticking to a certain genre. There were some genres that… like grunge, for example, I don’t think it really fit into the love story aspect of the show. Because at the end of the day, my job is to serve the story and the vision of the showrunners. But I do feel it was super fun working on this show, because we did get to work with a lot of different genres, and a lot of people have been gravitating to those different songs in the show. But yeah, we wanted to make it not just a one-note type of tone, no pun intended, and to give everybody a different song or genre to really connect with and to help tell the story.
TVLINE | Are there any personal favorite artists or songs from that era that you knew you wanted to work in?
I was really lucky that I was able to work in a lot of the songs that were my favorites. There are a lot: Cocteau Twins, the Peter Gabriel song [“Blood of Eden”], I absolutely loved. The Stone Roses, I have been dying to get in a show, as well as Primal Scream. I mean, there’s just so many. It was great to get a really deep cut from Portishead in there. I mean, that song [“Roads”] has been on my “I need a good cry” playlist forever, and it was just one of those perfect scenes that was like, “Yep, this is great.” So yeah, there were a lot of songs that I’ve always wanted to put in shows. And working on this period-authentic piece, I grew up in the ’90s, so some of these are core memories.
TVLINE | There are also a few songs from different time periods in there, like the Velvet Underground song this week, “Venus in Furs.” How do you decide when to mix in something from an earlier era?
It’s really what the scene calls for, and just what works, but also keeping the show very well-rounded. We do have an Ella Fitzgerald and a Nina Simone. So I think that the Velvet Underground, obviously, they are New York, you know. You hear Velvet Underground, you hear New York, and Nico, you have the fashion aspect of it. So it’s just such a cool song and something that’s not licensed. You don’t hear that song in a lot of shows. So it was just a really cool moment of, like: This is not ’90s, but it still gives it this really well-rounded sound, and it just worked there. That’s probably one of my favorites, too.