'I love your song from "Grey's Anatomy"': How the ABC medical drama's soundtrack changed these artists' musical careers

Within two minutes of the Grey's Anatomy series premiere, Rilo Kiley's 'Portions for Foxes' begins to play, and immediately the tone is set. We see Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), a surgical intern, locking the front door of her family home in Seattle, before driving along the highway until she arrives at Seattle Grace Memorial Hospital. There, she steps into an operating room, where she's met by a group of strangers, her fellow interns Christina Yang (Sandra Oh), George O'Malley (T.R. Knight), Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) and Izzie Stephens (Katherine Heigl), each sizing up the other.
Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis sings 'I'm just bad news, bad news, bad news,' as Meredith realizes just how grueling the next five years of her residency will be.
A drama, comedy, romance and soap opera wrapped into one, Grey's Anatomy has long used music to underscore its most meaningful moments. With more than 440 episodes and counting, the series, which premiered on ABC on March 27, 2005, is known for its ability to pack an emotional punch.
Season 1 of the show revolves around the hospital's interns, residents and attendings. The staff deal with life-or-death cases on a daily basis at a top-tier trauma facility, all while trying to keep their perilous workplace romances and friendships from boiling over into their work.
Ask any Grey's fan and they'll likely be able to recall one song, if not a handful, that reminds them of a particularly affecting scene from the show, like Keane's 'Somewhere Only We Know' playing as the interns walk out of their first shift or Butterfly Boucher's 'Never Leave Your Heart Alone' punctuating the moment Alex realizes he lost his first patient. Maybe it's the opening chords of Tegan and Sara's 'Where Does the Good Go' or hearing the sisters belt out, 'Look me in the eye and tell me you don't find me attractive,' while Meredith and Christina dance it out for the first time.
Music in Grey's Anatomy has always been a focal point. For that, we have Alex Patsavas to thank.
Patsavas, who served as the show's music supervisor from Season 1 through Season 16, selected the songs featured in each episode. During her tenure on the series, 2000s indie rock and pop was her bread and butter. (Patsavas didn't respond to Yahoo Entertainment's request for comment.)
For artists, both up-and-coming and well-known, primetime placement on the hottest medical drama on broadcast television at the time was career-changing.
Singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb, whose song 'Fools Like Me' was featured in Season 1, Episode 3 of Grey's Anatomy, told Yahoo Entertainment that she's grateful when her music becomes 'part of the story.'
The track plays over the episode's final montage when Meredith and Derek share a sweet moment in the hospital's locker room. They're fresh into their forbidden workplace romance, and Derek admits to Meredith that he's into her.
'It isn't about the chase. You and me,' he told her, as Loeb's song swells in the background.
'Especially in the digital age, I feel like being on a TV show like that, where people can just focus on a song and the scene — it really connects with people in a whole other way, which does end up making an impact,' she said. 'Especially when it's placed like that, where the song helps the scene, but the scene also imbues the song with some meaning as well.'
When the episode aired in April 2005, Loeb had already established herself as an indie pop darling. Her breakthrough hit, 'Stay (I Missed You),' was featured during the credits of 1994's Reality Bites. Since then, her songs played in television shows like Party of Five, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
While Loeb admits the song itself isn't actually romantic — it's about a woman whose affections aren't being reciprocated — there is a glimmer of optimism.
'It goes on to still celebrate what love is, and I'm still open to looking for it,' she said. 'I think that's the part that probably connects you with the Grey's Anatomy story. The part that, no matter what you go through, maybe you're a fool but you still believe in love.'
Grey's Anatomy remains the only show 'Fools Like Me' has been featured on.
'When I play concerts, people will say, 'Oh, I love your song from Grey's Anatomy,'' she said. 'I think there's an authenticity and a closeness to the performance. I think the song is able to show a full picture of love. It's not just a happy-go-lucky song about love. It's the time that people feel the worst, but they need to have a bright side.'
Ivy, an indie pop band from New York City, was also featured in the first season of Grey's Anatomy. The trio, which consisted of members Dominique Durand, Andy Chase and Adam Schlesinger, was initially approached to write the show's theme song. While their demo wasn't selected, losing out to Psapp's 'Cosy in the Rocket,' their music still appeared on the show.
'I think she was a big fan of ours,' Chase told Yahoo about Patsavas. 'She used a lot of our songs for a lot of her different shows she was working on, so she contacted us and said, 'Would you guys be willing to be on [Grey's Anatomy]?' And we were like, 'Yeah, absolutely.'
The band's song 'Edge of the Ocean,' released in 2000 on the band's third studio album, Long Distance, was featured during Season 1, Episode 5. The track plays as a blissfully drunk Meredith dances alone on her porch as a house party rages on inside. In this moment, she doesn't have a care in the world — and Derek can see that. He's been watching her, sweetly, the whole time. They eventually sneak off and have a rendezvous in his car.
'They're at a party and it's romantic,' Durand recalled of the scene. 'He's looking at her while she's dancing and then they're having sex in the car, and it's just the perfect song for it. It just kind of works.'
Prior to Grey's, the song was featured in a number of notable projects, including Roswell, Alias and Veronica Mars and the 2001 film Shallow Hal, which Ivy scored. The track remains the band's most commercially successful single to date. They were 'more of an intimate kind of band,' said Durand, so placement on primetime television shows was crucial to putting them on the map.
'Grey's Anatomy brought our song to a pretty wide, diverse audience, maybe even more than had it been in a movie in theaters,' Chase said. 'So for a band like us, it really gets its fanbase from simply touring and movie and TV show placement. That was almost the peak of our career in the mid-2000s, and that really helped kind of push us up this hill. Even today, sometimes we get fan mail and they say, 'I just discovered the band because I was rewatching Grey's Anatomy.''
When selecting music for the series, Patsavas didn't limit herself to solely American artists. She often looked across the pond for lesser-known indie artists, like Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann of the British electronica band Psapp.
'I grew up in the 1980s and my focus was definitely on the great music coming out of the U.K. at that point, so I think I have a special love for it. But, with work, the important thing is not where music comes from; it's more about where it fits,' Patsavas told the BBC in 2008.
Psapp's unreleased track 'Cosy in the Rocket' was used as the Grey's Anatomy theme song for the show's first two seasons. Members of the Grey's fandom can likely attest to the fact that the dreamy, lullaby-like opening is an earworm 20 years later.
'It was quite early on in our writing career that we wrote that,' Durant told Yahoo. 'But I do like the song, and what I really like about it is that we found loads of music boxes and we isolated all the individual twangs from the music boxes and sampled them. That was one of the first times that we did something like that.'
The primetime placement of 'Cosy in the Rocket' led to what felt like immediate success in the United States for the duo. They found themselves suddenly immersed in a world of music supervisors and production companies in Los Angeles that wanted to feature their music. For Durant and Clasmann, the sudden catapult to fame was surreal.
'We were a bit like a fish out of water,' Clasmann said. 'It wasn't quite what we were doing. It's quite flattering that so many people hear your music and love the song, but everything around it sort of didn't quite fit because we were still sort of [an] underground little band from the U.K. In some way, I'm quite impressed that they chose our song for a big TV series.'
The duo has since parted ways. Durant is now an illustrator and graphic designer, while Clasmann is a sound engineer and producer. But their collaborations live on in the numerous television shows their music was featured in, like Roswell, Nip/Tuck and The O.C., which Patsavas also worked on.
As for 'Cosy in the Rocket,' Durant describes herself and Clasmann as the song's 'surrogate parents.'
'To me, it kind of doesn't feel like it's ours anymore,' Durant said of the song. 'It feels like it's sort of owned by Grey's Anatomy a little bit because it's had its own kind of momentum. We sort of set it free as soon as we'd written it.'
The international recognition that comes with being featured on Grey's Anatomy also took Kieran Scragg, the lead singer of the British band the Buffseeds, by surprise. The band's song 'Sparkle Me,' was featured in Season 1, Episode 5.
It wasn't new to American audiences, who first heard the track on an episode of One Tree Hill in 2004.
In Grey's Anatomy, 'Sparkle Me' plays during the ending monologue. The moment is somewhat revelatory for Meredith, who, up until that point, had loathed the responsibilities of being an adult. Suddenly she's grateful to have grown up.
'It's a love song. It's kind of this thing for my future wife, as it were, at the time,' Scragg said about the track. 'But it ended up on the end of the show, and they based the whole sort of final scene around it. It's really strange to see.'
After the Buffseeds broke up in 2004, Scragg and his writing partner, Neil Reed, wrote the song 'Heart of Stone' for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part Two. From there, Scragg founded My Hart Canyon Music, which composes trailer music for television shows, including Netflix's The Crown and The Witcher.
'Having something on Grey's was an enormous thing. It still is now,' he said. 'So we can kind of trace that direct lineage of having a presence and having all those contacts and having that success early on to where we are now. It's true to say that it's life-changing.'
For Scragg, as with many artists whose songs were featured on Season 1 of Grey's Anatomy, the opportunity remains once in a lifetime.
'It's brilliant,' he said. 'You feel like you're winning the lottery, being in this situation.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Washington Post

3 hours ago

• Washington Post

‘Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything' could have told us more

There's nothing wrong with ''Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything,' the new Hulu documentary about the late broadcasting icon. It's an extremely thorough and enjoyable recap of the life of an extraordinary, pioneering television journalist. But it never really goes deeper than that. Jackie Jesko's star-studded film features testimonials from television legends such as Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric about the role that Walters played — both in their lives and for the industry. Some of Walters's most prominent sit-down subjects are also featured, including comedian Bette Midler and Monica Lewinsky, who both attest to her humanity and character. The film does a good job of telling her whole story, beginning with a difficult childhood and ending with her departure from ABC and all of the 'mixed feelings' (her words) she had about stepping away after 50 years on television. It also charts the sexism, and sexist anchors, that she had to overcome to rise the ranks. A 'warts and all' look at Walters, the film drives home the point that what made her so good on television — an extreme dedication to her craft and an insatiable competitiveness — also hurt her personal and family life. It includes a strong section that poses thorny questions about the ethical implications of Walters's approach to landing interviews with some of world's most hated and feared figures, including an uncomfortable-to-watch-now meeting with Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi and his family. 'I think Barbara would be friends with the devil if it would get the interview,' a former ABC News producer says in the film. It's less clear what the ultimate goal of the film was. Did the filmmakers set out to provide a historical accounting of her career and legacy? Mission accomplished. Or were they hoping to make something that connected her story to the present moment and used it as a window into how television has changed, how it continues to change and what that means for the future? If so, the film falls short. There are, to be clear, some astute observations made about how things are different today than they were in Walters's heyday, when news shows regularly attracted tens of millions of viewers. As recently as 1999, her '20/20' interview with Lewinsky was watched by about 70 million people, a near impossibility today for a distracted populace that spends their evenings scrolling on their phones instead of sitting down for a prescheduled program. 'There's a certain feeling you get when you're watching something knowing that everyone is watching the same thing at that very same moment,' Couric says in the film. 'And that doesn't exist anymore, and I think that's when Barbara was the queen.' Winfrey also talks about how celebrities today no longer need gatekeepers and go straight to the audience. 'There really is no place for a Barbara Walters interview now because everybody does their own interviews,' she says. But the film doesn't explore that keen observation. It doesn't talk about what is lost when newsmakers no longer have to go through someone like Walters to talk to the public. It doesn't address how an Instagram Live video from a pop star is not news or journalism. And it doesn't necessarily connect the dots at a larger level and examine the slow-motion collapse of the television industry, which has been shedding relevance and revenue because it no longer serves the role it once did. Those big newsmaker interviews, for example, helped subsidize some of the less profitable aspects of the television business, meaning that networks today just cannot cover the world like they used to. These days, 'scoops' still matter, but they can't fundamentally change the outlook for a network that is competing with cooking shows on Netflix for attention. While Walters was briefly shown pushing back on Donald Trump in a now-viral 1990 interview, the film doesn't dwell much on the current era in politics, a missed opportunity, as television networks — such as her former employer, ABC — struggle to cover a hostile president who has shown a desire to exact his will on the media industry. The film ends on an extremely uplifting note, with video shown of Walters's last appearance on the daytime talk show she started, 'The View.' Winfrey played emcee as she announced a long list of female television hosts who lined up to greet Walters and wish her well upon her retirement. The picture today is murkier, though. None of the broadcast evening news shows are hosted by women anymore, after Norah O'Donnell was replaced as anchor of the 'CBS Evening News' by two men, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, this year. If the point of the documentary is to make clear to viewers how special Walters was and how dynamic she was and how influential she was, it also made clear how irreplaceable she was, at a time when her talent at extracting information and confessions is needed more than ever. And that's a sad note to end on. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything premieres Monday on Hulu.

CBS News

14 hours ago

• CBS News

Hermit Woods Winery in New Hampshire takes different approach to winemaking

An innovative craft winery located in downtown Meredith, New Hampshire, Hermit Woods is taking a different approach to winemaking. Host Rachel Holt learns all about why they are so dedicated to overturning tradition, and how their non-conventional process sets them apart. Rachel Holt Rachel Holt is a lifestyle reporter for WBZ-TV.

Yahoo

19 hours ago

• Yahoo

Scrubs Revival: Everything We Know About the Potential ABC Sequel Series

As the new Scrubs awaits an official series order at ABC, TVLine is rounding up everything we already know about the highly anticipated revival. The hospital-set comedy first bowed on NBC in 2001, and chronicled Dr. John Dorian's rise from intern to attending at Sacred Heart. When NBC announced that it would not renew the series beyond Season 7, ABC swooped in and picked up the show for what was conceived as an eighth and final season, complete with a series finale that creator Bill Lawrence first conceived of years prior. But ABC ultimately renewed Scrubs for Season 9, which was subtitled Med School and featured a mix of new and returning characters, with Kerry Bishé's med student Lucy Bennett installed as the quasi-spinoff's new narrator. More from TVLine Casting News: Andor Subs In for Kimmel, Connie Britton Joins Steve Carell Comedy and More Bad Monkey EP Bill Lawrence Offers Season 2 Update, Confirms 'Razor Girl' Adaptation On Hold in Favor of New Story With Same Cast Shrinking EP Tees Up Brett Goldstein and Cobie Smulders' Returns, Michael J. Fox and Jeff Daniels' Season 3 Arcs The original Scrubs ensemble consisted of Zach Braff (JD), Donald Faison (Turk), Sarah Chalke (Elliott), Judy Reyes (Carla), John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox), Neil Flynn (The Janitor) and Ken Jenkins (Kelso), while recurring players included Christa Miller (Jordan), Robert Maschio (The Todd) and the late Sam Lloyd (Ted). Season 9 additions included Bishé (Lucy), Michael Mosley (Drew), Dave Franco (Cole) and Eliza Coupe (Denise). So, what can we expect from Scrubs 2.0? And how soon can we expect to see the revival should ABC pull the trigger and order Season 10? Scroll down for a recap of all of TVLine's original reporting. The in-the-works Scrubs revival has locked in its leading man: TVLine reported on May 21 that Zach Braff closed his deal to reprise Dr. John Dorian (aka JD) in Season 10, which is still awaiting an official green light at the network. Attention now turns to closing deals with fellow legacy cast members Donald Faison (Turk) and Sarah Chalke (Elliot), who, along with Braff, are expected to return as series regulars. Additionally, TVLine hears that talks are underway with a number of OG Scrubs supporting players — Judy Reyes (Nurse Carla Espinosa) and John C. McGinley (Dr. Perry Cox), among them — to recur. 'My hope would be that we establish where everybody from [the original show] is,' series creator Bill Lawrence previously told TVLine, 'whether they're still with us at the hospital or not.' That also includes Neil Flynn (The Janitor) and Ken Jenkins (Dr. Bob Kelso): 'I hope Ken [who is now 84] is able to come play with us a little bit. He's a little older, but we love him so much.' 'The only bummer [about doing the revival], obviously, is that Sam Lloyd [who played hospital lawyer Ted Buckland] was such a huge part of the show, and he passed on [in 2020],' Lawrence has said. But other than Lloyd, you can expect to see all your favorites back. Lawrence has even said that, unlike Roseanne and Will & Grace, which found clever ways to erase their divisive finales from series canon once they were revived, Scrubs Season 10 will stay true to the developments of Season 9, which shifted gears (and locations) and focused on a quartet of newbies, including Kerry Bishé (Lucky Bennett), Michael Mosley (Drew Suffin), Dave Franco (Cole Aaronson) and Season 8 holdover Eliza Coupe (Denise Mahoney). That means the door is open for any (or all) of them to make guest appearances. 'I'm not against seeing those people, and I think it would be fun to have one of them zip by,' the EP said in December. 'But that [season], if you remember, was supposed to be a med school, and those people that were going through it would then go off into the world and land as physicians in places here, there, everywhere. What I think we will really be focusing on is a place where some of our core regulars' — AKA the legacy cast. There will, however, be a major change behind the scenes: Although Lawrence, who is under an overall agreement with Warner Bros., struck a deal that allows him to shepherd the 20th Television-produced revival, he will not serve as showrunner if Season 10 moves forward. Braff has said that the Scrubs revival will aim to capture the same humor and heart as the original run, but showcase a version of JD who has been 'beaten down by the system' over the last 15 years — an idea that Lawrence also expressed during a recent interview with TVLine: 'The hardest part is that Zach and Donald have aged,' the EP said with a laugh. 'People still have that affinity, and love, for that goofy youthfulness — it's why the T-Mobile commercials work so well. But if I saw two guys in their late 40s/early 50s doing 'World's Most Giant Doctor,' and carrying each other around all the time, I would go, 'What the f–k is going on,' you know? To see what that [friendship] looks like at their age, and [take] a comedic look at what medicine has become since those kids started out as interns, and see how our people would look at it, deal with it, and try to remain optimistic,' is their main objective. 'I will tell you that the people I based the original characters on, like the real JD [Dr. Jonathan Doris], is still the medical advisor on the show, and still a cardiologist and a heart surgeon in L.A.,' Lawrence revealed. 'But the real Elliot [Doris' wife, Dr. Dolly Klock] is no longer in medicine because it got to be too much for her, and she wanted to do other things that are equally as philanthropic. She does this education thing for adolescents and kids now. So, to look at how the system not only changed, but how it has beaten some of these people down, and how they retain their optimism with a new wave of young characters, has really been fun.' Meanwhile, unlike Season 9, which saw JD pass the proverbial torch to a new protagonist, Lucy, a hypothetical 10th season will be told exclusively from Dr. Dorian's perspective, and the story will 'start with JD and Turk.' If ABC hands a series order to Scrubs 2.0, it could premiere as soon as midseason/early 2026. TVLine will keep you posted as we learn more, so be sure to bookmark this page and check back for updates. Ted Lasso Season 4: Everything We Know View List Best of TVLine 20+ Age-Defying Parent-Child Castings From Blue Bloods, ER, Ginny & Georgia, Golden Girls, Supernatural and More Young Sheldon Easter Eggs: Every Nod to The Big Bang Theory (and Every Future Reveal) Across 7 Seasons Weirdest TV Crossovers: Always Sunny Meets Abbott, Family Guy vs. Simpsons, Nine-Nine Recruits New Girl and More