A Seven-Year-old has better music taste than you

By Grace Roberts 

Almost six years ago, the limited series Big Little Lies premiered on HBO featuring an all-star cast and one of the most shocking finales to grace the small screen. So popular it received a second season, the series follows the lives of five mothers living in Monterey California, each episode slowly revealing the events of a school fundraiser turned deadly. The setting is stunning and the opulence overstated, but the real star of the show isn’t Celeste’s beachfront mansion or Bonnie’s boho wardrobe—it’s the soundtrack.

The cast of kids have become fan favorites, but none more than Chloe, the show’s resident DJ and mood-setter extraordinaire. Fiery, stubborn, and 7-going-on-20, her big dream is to become the owner of a record label. You know, the career choice of most first-graders. It doesn’t take long to see why: Chloe has a music taste to rival the best of us. The girl is in first grade and listening to Alabama Shakes and Cigarettes After Sex! The show uses Chloe’s character to carefully craft the ambiance with a song practically every time she is on screen: PJ Harvey’s ‘The Wind’ for a drive along the Carmel Coast, Leon Bridges’s ‘River’ to diffuse a moment of tension (one of many) between her parents. The theme song, ‘Cold Little Heart’ by Kiwanuka, is her pick too, becoming synonymous with the show and quickly scaling the charts following its release. Though a fictional character, music choices become an essential component to the narrative arcs and are essential to understanding the directorial choices of diegetic sound.
Directed by the late Jean-Marc Vallée, an absolute powerhouse, Big Little Lies got lucky with its sound designers. Working with music supervisor Sue Jacobs (a veteran in the industry and Vallée’s go-to partner for many of his movies and shows) Vallée curates a soundtrack as nuanced as the show’s narrative, setting a new precedent for the importance of sound in television. Perhaps one of the most unique elements of his sound design is this use of diegetic sound; this means that the music audiences hear also exists in the world of the characters.  When Jane, one of the mothers, dons her earbuds and goes on rage runs along the beach to Death in Vegas and The Flaming Lips, for instance, the experience of sound is the same for her character as it is for the viewer. This use of the diegetic is one of the more underrated uses of sound design, though arguably the cleverest, especially in its musical interactivity. If a character takes out their left earbud, for example, the experience is mirrored for the viewer; if the viewer is also wearing earbuds, they will lose the sound in that left earbud as well. The spatial sound design is an easily missed but genius element of production that adds another layer, fully immersing the viewer in the story and strengthening that audio association. 

One of the most poignant scenes of the show is one such example of characterization through the use of diegetic sound, relying almost entirely on the subtle meaning behind the song ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone.’ Ziggy, Jane’s son and one of the children the series centers around, chooses the song innocently enough, dancing while Jane looks on. But the situation becomes a little more clear when Ziggy sings along, “Mama, I’m depending on you to tell me the truth.” It’s a direct reference to Jane, whose refusal to elaborate on the mysterious nature of Ziggy’s father continues to haunt her throughout the show. If this song had simply been added over the scene in post-production, it would have lost its complexity and been far too obvious, but because Ziggy chooses to listen to the song, its existence in the narrative gives it further significance. It’s a brilliant bit of messaging, done entirely through the soundtrack. Though Ziggy’s name is a not-so-subtle nod to Bowie, the ability to weave typically objective elements of television production into the actual narrative is ingenious and never overbearing. It’s clear that Vallée wasn’t kidding when he called himself,  “a frustrated DJ who’s making films.”

Much of the musical association stems from West Coast culture, an era based around fusing pop and disco with a more laid-back approach, so the show plays on major soul influences. The soundtrack  brings in modern soul artists like Leon Bridges alongside vintage classics like Charles Bradley and The Spinners, harkening back to the music culture of the seventies. There is something nostalgic but fresh in choices like Brenton Woods’s ‘Great Big Bundle of Love’ or Al Green’s ‘Jesus is Waiting.’ The soundtrack is fitting for the stunning coastline and sprawling hills, refined enough for the wealthy Renata’s multi-million dollar property, where she literally hires Earl Young from The Trammps to come and perform ‘Disco Inferno’ for her daughter’s birthday party, and hippie enough for down-to-Earth Bonnie’s yoga studio. Who loves Sade, of course. And it wouldn’t be a show set in California without a Fleetwood Mac feature, on a road trip no less. It’s a fabulous blend of old and new, truly an homage to the roots of California and West Coast culture. 

Big Little Lies became a staple of television the moment it came out, but its lasting legacy cannot be attributed only to its cast of Hollywood icons. The soundtrack gained immense popularity after the fact; ‘Cold Little Heart’ and ‘River’ were catapulted to fame, with the compilation and album soundtrack not far behind them once released on streaming services. Its use of diegetic sound and spatial experimentation is essential to its brilliance, as well as the carefully selected songs that hint at the core of the show: beautiful on the surface, hiding the brutal emotional reality underneath. It is a shining example of how elite direction and music supervision can garner even more popularity for an already well-crafted piece of drama, and elevates Big Little Lies to a true piece of art. Now Chloe, cue up ‘September Song’ by Agnes Obel.