The Bear, the FX series about chefs trying to create fine dining in Chicago, is propelled by needle drops — songs by an eclectic collection of artists that in Season 3 includes Beastie Boys, Giuseppe Verdi, Kate Bush, Kool & the Gang, Talking Heads, Weezer, Van Morrison, Radiohead, Taylor Swift, and Nine Inch Nails. (There’s a lot of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.)
Executive producers Josh Senior and Christopher Storer serve as the show’s music supervisors, and you can tell that there’s a lot of personal passion in the mix for these songs, a blend of propulsive and/or moody tracks that often have deeper significance to the show as a whole. Thus, below is a comprehensive breakdown of every song featured this season, episode by episode.
Senior and Storer, it should be noted, pack a lot of music into this season, but deserve to be commended for how often they really let a song play out over the course of an episode — sometimes, needle drops can be blunt or hastily incorporated into a soundtrack. But these tracks below all get a welcome amount of time in the spotlight, while simultaneously underscoring the show’s funniest/most dramatic/most tense/all of the above moments.
[Editor’s note: The following contains mild spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The Bear, “Forever.” Hear where these needle drops appear by watching The Bear on Hulu.]
Episode 1: “Tomorrow”
The Bear (FX)
• Nine Inch Nails – “Together”
While the season premiere of The Bear credits its score to “Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross,” the music used to score this 30-minute look inside the chaos of Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) mind is, specifically, this 10-minute track from NIN’s 2020 album Ghosts V. It’s a fine reminder that the Ghosts albums, not to mention 1999’s The Fragile, were early indicators of how well Reznor and Ross would take to the world of film and TV composition. And an FX representative confirms that Reznor and Ross did customize the song specifically for its use as score in this episode.
Episode 2: “Next”
The Bear (FX)
• Eddie Vedder – “Save It for Later”
• Radiohead – “(Nice Dream)”
Eddie Vedder’s new cover of English Beat’s “Save It For Later” is featured a lot over the course of this season, with an almost ethereal sound mix in comparison to the original version. In this episode specifically, it serves as theme music over a traditional opening credits sequence (typically The Bear episodes don’t have opening credits like this, but once a season or so they break that rule). Compared to other episodes, this one’s relatively music-free, but Radiohead makes another appearance on the soundtrack (Season 1 used “Let Down” from OK Computer) for the end credits.
Episode 3: “Doors”
The Bear (FX)
• Pietro Mascagni – “L’amico Fritz / Act 3: Intermezzo”
• Bohuslav Martinů – “Špalíček Suite No. 2”
• Franz Krommer – “Symphony No. 7 in G Minor, P I:7: IV. Finale. Adagio – Allegro”
• Franz Joseph Hadyn – “Symphony No.44 ‘Mourning’: Allegro Con Brio”
• Pietro Mascagni – “Cavalleria Rusticana: Intermezzo”
• Ludwig Van Beethoven – “String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135: II. Vivace”
• Alessandro Cortini – “Corda”
• Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari – “Susanna’s Secret”
• William Vincent Wallace – “Lurline: Overture”
• Felix Mendelssohn – “Saltarello: Presto from Symphony No. 4, ‘Italian'”
• Camille Saint-Saëns – “Saint-Saëns: Danse Macabre, Op. 40”
• Richard Strauss – “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28”
• Giuseppe Verdi – “La Traviata: ‘Intermezzo'” (End Credits)
And now, for something different. For this episode spotlighting the chaos of The Bear’s kitchen during these tumultuous early days, the soundtrack leans hard on classical music, with a lot of Italian opera in the mix. It’s a weirdly effective blend, the violent passion of the music underscoring the violent passion of the chefs at work. Verdi gets the end credits slot — I wish I knew more about classical music so I could end this with a really killer Verdi joke.
Episode 4: “Violet”
The Bear (FX)
• Cocteau Twins – “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”
• Brian Eno & John Cale – “Spinning Away”
• Taylor Swift – “Long Live”
• Weezer – “Getchoo”
This episode, which offers some slice-of-life vignettes featuring the ensemble, features an appropriately eclectic selection of music. The most noteworthy track, of course, comes from Taylor Swift (whose “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” was an essential part of Season 2) — and aptly enough, it’s used in another scene focused on Ritchie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Here, though, Ritchie isn’t singing along — “Long Live” is the song playing in the background as Ritchie talks to Frank (Josh Hartnett), the soon-to-be husband of Ritchie’s ex Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs).
Also, for the end credits track, Weezer makes its first Season 3 appearance. It will not be the last.
Episode 5: “Children”
The Bear (FX)
• Walter Schumann & Charles Laughton – “The Night of the Hunter: Main Title”
• Van Morrison – “Purple Heather”
• Eddie Vedder – “Save It for Later (Instrumental)”
• The Rolling Stones – “Mixed Emotions”
“Children” opens with a bang thanks to the dramatic orchestral score from 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, before bringing in some Van Morrison and just the instrumental portion of that “Save It for Later” cover. And then The Rolling Stones dominates the rest of the episode, with the many flavors of “Mixed Emotions” underscoring a tense series of scenes in which some characters, yes, might be experiencing emotions of a mixed variety.
Episode 6: “Napkins”
The Bear (FX)
• Kool & the Gang – “Get Down on It”
• Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – “The Start of Things”
• Kate Bush – “The Morning Fog”
• Genevieve Artadi – “Nice”
• Beastie Boys – “Sabotage”
• Ghetto Brothers – “Got This Happy Feeling”
No better way to start your day than with Kool and the Gang, as Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) shows us in this flashback episode. We’ve also got the return of Reznor and Ross to the soundtrack, specifically with a track originally written for Jonah Hill’s 2018 film mid90s, and the establishment of a new musical motif for the season: When you think “The Original Beef,” think Beastie Boys. “Sabotage” has rarely been used so well on screen, and that’s really saying a lot, given how often it’s been sampled.
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