How The Music Of ‘Big Little Lies’ Is Telling The Most Interesting Story Of The Show

If you pay close attention, Big Little Lies has been telling a really interesting story. And no, not just about a group of rich moms in Northern California. But this story has not been told so much with the words the characters are speaking, but in the music that they’re listening to. And they’re listening to a whole lot of it.

The songs chosen for this show are speaking volumes. The mix of eclectic old-school gems and modern day discoveries are helping to tell the story in ways that a sweeping orchestra only dreams of. Which is a good thing, because there is absolutely no orchestra involved in the making of Big Little Lies. As we learned from music supervisor, Sue Jacobs, the director and executive producer Jean-Marc Vallée intentionally chose the songs that would make up the show’s soundtrack.

“What I say to a lot of people is that Jean-Marc paints with music like Jackson Pollock used paint,” Jacobs recalled. “He paints all over and you’ll see that throughout his work. Before I interviewed with him I looked at this movie C.R.A.Z.Y. that he did, it’s incredible if you have not seen it. The music never got cleared for rights so I think it’s only in Quebec so nobody’s ever really been able to see that. What struck me when I saw it was the music, and I was like. ‘You’re better at this than me, so why do you need me?’ What makes him really unique and makes the relationship really unique is he does not use a composer. Now agents finally stop calling me because on Wild they all called and we said ‘Nope, not going to use a composer.’ On Demolition we said ‘Nope, not going to use a composer.’ So now as he gets deeper into his craft, and I think Big Little Lies shows this even more, he creates these devices so the source really becomes the storytelling. Sometimes he’ll write for script, sometimes we’re just working and he’ll be like ‘Okay, I’ve created this character.’ And I’ve already read all the scripts and these characters aren’t in the early draft, but then one character will suddenly have a record player, one character will suddenly have an iPod, there will be something to give him the device to score. This is really his genius and I think that’s why people are responding to the music so well in the series, because they’re very character related.”

Jacobs and Vallée have now worked together on a handful of projects, and as she describes it, “We just got along like a house on fire. He really loved my work with David O. Russell, and so we talked a lot of those soundtracks and American Hustle was a big thing for him. So, I’ve just been kind of rolling with him and we’re already starting our next one. We went right from Wild, right into Demolition, right into seven episodes of Big Little Lies, which originally he was only going to do one or two and it evolved into this whole other experience. Yeah, and now we’re onto Sharper Objects.”

Passing on working with a composer is nothing new for either of them. In fact, they’re only getting better at it as they go. “Literally if we’re going to have no composer, he’s really gotten very good at making sure there’s a record player or iPod everywhere throughout his film in order for him to storytell. That’s not like that on Dallas Buyers Club but he really did that a lot in Reese walking in Wild, she’s singing and going back to music all the time. That was the first thing that we did and he’s building these songs into her head in order to be able to break out into Paul Simon in the middle of walking.”

The most experience Jacobs had with this was in her work with David O. Russell, noting that he, “Uses very little score but not in the same way. It’s hard to do it the way Jean-Marc does it because it is a firm commitment. I think in Silver Lining’s Playbook we only have about ten minutes of score. It’s very little of it and American Hustle very, very little score, like cues, something ridiculously small. But because Jean-Marc goes in their so firmly committed, he builds that in ahead of time. He’ll use like five seconds of one of the most expensive songs in the world and I’m like, ‘C’mon really?’ You have to have that commitment to facilitating that stuff with him and supporting that because it ultimately will make it better.”

Since Big Little Lies is a show where the music is not being composed and dropped in at the end, and uses specific songs with such a strong purpose, how much had to be planned in advance? As Jacobs explained, “There is a lot of stuff that we do ahead of time. Probably twenty or thirty percent were done before we shot. We try to leave everything so fluid and I often say to him ‘shoot flexible, shoot flexible’ and I’ll be up in his grill all the time ‘shoot flexible.’ Because as you start to cut you never want to lock yourself into something that suddenly doesn’t feel like the right tempo or mood at that particular time. Then there’s a lot of footage that was never scripted that he shot that he ended up using because he needed the device to use it. With the St. Paul and The Broken Bones, dancing with ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’, you know there’s stuff there, but they’re all about telling stories.”

Jacobs went on to detail the songs they were certain they’d be using in the show, for example, “We knew that Fleetwood Mac was going to be everyone singing along and obviously all the Avenue Q stuff is going to be on camera. The Otter Bay School was actually lyrics that Jackie and I wrote to the tune of ‘Heart and Soul’. So there’s a lot of stuff where we know exactly what we’re doing and how it’s going to be used. That scene with Fleetwood Mac didn’t change from the day it was shot. All the Elvis Presley stuff is exactly as it was. I think it starts with a playlist and that keeps evolving.”

This sounds fine and dandy but there’s no way things always go so smoothly. So when it doesn’t quite work out? “There’s definitely times where he’ll get in there and suddenly he’ll go ‘No, we’re going to montage it’ or ‘I’m just going to take that out.’ He cuts, he edits, you know, Jean-Marc shoots himself, he’s a one-man band. He’s a cinematographer in a way, he shoots one camera and turns it around, he does everything so differently than any other director. If you start looking at Big Little Lies, you see snippets of footage all over the place that’s all very much musical, I think. That’s creating the tension in the music and all that.”

Oh, and this music is for sure creating the tension. In fact, it’s creating tension that doesn’t even exist yet. When I ask Jacobs how much the music is being used to explain the current scene vs. upcoming stories yet to be told, she estimates, “I think it’s a real 50/50. When we look at Jane (Shailene Woodley), because she’s so sweet and yet you know something’s wrong and when she starts singing ‘Motherfucking asshole’ [Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole”] you’re like ‘Oh, wow!’”

Jacobs goes on to explain how many other viewer faves ended up in the show, starting with the fact that, “My girlfriend and I were talking about how fun ‘Dance This Mess Around’ is because the B-52’s sort of get overlooked in a different way. Everything is so eclectic and I love that you can have ‘Man in Charge’ up next to Otis Redding. You can have some Fleetwood Mac overdone song and the next song is ‘Queen of Boredness’ [by Kinny] which nobody knows what that is. Everything’s treated very equally, that’s what I really like about the way Jean-Marc plays around with music and uses music. It’s like, okay we like this Alabama Shakes song, let’s put that there and we like this little kind of totally unknown, nobody’s every heard of Martha Wainwright song, not that many young kids will know and that is going to get equal casting. It’s not like Janis Joplin might get short tripped over The Flaming Lips. I like that. St. Paul and the Broken Bones is so great. I think Leon Bridges is so especially nice because [Chloe] talks about how beautiful it is, it’s just so emotional and Agnes Obel is just amazing, that ‘September Song,’ the little piano piece that just comes over and over and over is fantastic.”

Also impressive is the fact that these elementary school children aren’t listening to say an Ariana Grande or Bruno Mars, but instead, Chloe (Darby Camp) opts for the ultra-hip Leon Bridges. “Chloe’s in the book but that’s not what the character does in the book. [Jean-Marc is] putting Chloe with the iPod and having that dialog and conversation because he knows he’s never going to use a composer so he’s committing to that as he shoots. So he’s always very clear that he’s setting things up to be able to deepen the story. I think that’s why people relate to it because Leon Bridges shot right up to the number two in the R&B charts right after the episode. Sony was calling going ‘Oh my god, thank you so much, we’re so excited!’ I think it’s actually because people are feeling that [song] as Reese.”

It’s true: when that tune comes on, you feel like you’re experiencing it just as Chloe or her mother Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) are at that time. “If we had just played the song in any other way, like in the end credits, that would not have had that emotional resonance,” Jacobs notes. Which is exactly what this show is tapping into — without the dun dun dun of a typical orchestra, viewers are picking up on notes of other emotions from hearing pop songs playing, and songs that the characters are listening to at the same time as they are.

“It’s pretty great because I think that’s the power of the music. It’s super hard, really challenging, unbelievably detailed and difficult. Even in episode seven when I have backup bands that are normally for casting, we just get some people to mind some stuff, not for him. He’s like ‘Sue, go cast it.’ They’re all from super cool, indie rock bands around LA. So, those are the details and those things really matter to him.”

It sounds like episode 7 will be pretty crazy for many reasons. Obviously, the show is building up to the big reveal in the finale, but in more ways than one, this show will truly be going out with a bang. “You’re going to hear some outstanding performances. I’m very excited about them, and you’ll have a lot of fun musically. Seven comes to the end, and if it’s a musical firework, this is where they do all the fireworks.”

Having Jacobs and Vallée sign on for the entire season certainly makes a huge difference in the storytelling as well. “I don’t really ever do episodic or TV work, so this is new for me, but my guess is that it doesn’t always happen that way. Often times you don’t have the same director, so the fact that it’s a single voice going in and that he’s shooting in episode order that really allows the music to develop, then you always see where you’re going. We knew where we were building to at the end. We knew where we wanted to go.”

We can’t wait to see, and hear, where the rest of the season takes us.

Big Little Lies: Music From The HBO Original Series will be available worldwide from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other digital retailers on 3/31/17.

Where to watch Big Little Lies