It’s the second part of the geeky discussion on the eclectic soundtrack that is woven through Season 4 of the TV drama series The Bear. So dive in!
First Word
So picking up where I left off last week (see WIS 1Aug25), I’m just going to jump right in to the remaining five episodes of The Bear and my musical choices from each one. Plus the all-important bonus sixth tune.
And as this progresses, it is increasingly hard to prevent the spoilers for those who have yet to watch this fourth season. You have been warned!
Stay Young – Oasis (1997)
Episode 6 – Sophie
Named after Sugar’s incredibly cute baby, this sixth episode is where Wilco finally get back in the mix. During its inaugural season, the great Chicago drama leaned heavily on the great Chicago band. The first episode appropriately uses their Via Chicago while Sugar and Carmy talk about his return to the city. And the end credits to Episodes 6 and 7 roll to fan-favourites Impossible Germany and Spiders (Kidsmoke). When Season 2 used a live version of Handshake Drugs in Episode 1, I wrote about it in WIS 4Aug23. But since then, they have been AWOL with no Wilco tracks whatsoever in Season 3. It’s good to see them back and supporting a scene where the crew leave a message for Syd, who is in hospital with her dad. The choice of track shows that series music curators Christopher Storer and Josh Senior are just as geeky about Wilco as I am. But the band gets way too much time on here already, so I’m not going to playlist the “early run through” version of I’m Always In Love lifted from the out-take and demo-filled 5 LP Deluxe Edition of their third album Summerteeth, released in 2020. I hear a collective sigh of relief…
Meanwhile, back at the plot, the happy, smiling baby Sophie attempts to steal the show in every scene she is in. To the sound of The Ronnettes Walking in the Rain, Cousin Richey confides in Jess about his insecurities over co-parenting his daughter with Tiff’s fiancé Frank, and his anxiety about attending their wedding. Richey then leaves a typical voicemail for Tiff – sweary, passionate and full of angst and love – with Otis Redding pointedly singing Remember Me.
The episode ends with a 1997 Oasis b-side and, since they are this summer’s media darlings and they’ve never been on the blog before, I’m going to playlist Stay Young. This song emerged as the band were on the slippery slope downwards from the bratty excitement of their first recordings to the plodding predictability of their later work. Inexplicably left off the dull Be Here Now album, Stay Young has a great melody and a lightness of touch sadly absent on the LP. In my view, it’s their last good song, but it didn’t make their reunion tour setlist.
A Beginning Song – The Decemberists (2015)
Episode 7 – Bears
Although most episodes of The Bear come in around half an hour in length, it is not unusual for the running time to vary to accomodate the drama. Episode 7 in Season 1 was particularly intense and was shortened to 20 minutes. And the famous five-year flashback episode in Season 2, where a chaotic family and friends Christmas dinner ends with Carmy’s alcoholic mother Donna driving her car through the wall of her house, lasts a full 66 minutes. Episode 7 Bears is one of these longer ensemble episodes where the cast all attend Tiff and Frank’s wedding and it runs for 69 minutes.
They seem to have employed an unusually eclectic wedding DJ as a large range of tunes play throughout this episode. You might expect Ed Sheeran (Throw Your Arms Around Me for Carmy and Claire meeting again) and Taylor Swift (Style for Richey’s opening scene with his daughter Eva). But the DJ also lets the needle drop on Tom Petty’s Walls, Lone Justice’s terrific Shelter, Weezer’s Susanne and Why Not Me by The Judds. And while hardly a wedding staple, Everything But The Girl’s emotional Apron Strings plays pointedly behind Sydney meeting Donna for the first time, and they talk about Carmy.
But I’m playlisting A Beginning Song by The Decemberists which plays in its entirety through the key scene of this episode. It begins with Richey agreeing to help Frank console Eva, who is hiding under a table to avoid performing a planned dance with Frank. Claire and Carmy then join them and then Sydney arrives before most of the Berzattos and Faks involved in the restaurant clamber under there as well – its a big table! To help Eva, the group takes turns opening up about their fears and everyone seems to feel the better for it. The song is taken from the band’s seventh album What A Terrible World, which saw a turn to more personal, inward looking-lyrics by songwriter Colin Meloy. I feel the opening lines fit the narrative arc of the drama as the people under the table are faced with their collective challenge – but I’m almost certainly reading too much into them:
Let’s commence to coordinate our sights
And get them square to rights
Condescend to calm this riot in your mind
Find yourself in time
Western Ford Gateway – Elton John (1975)
Episode 8 – Green
After the emotional heft of the wedding, its back to trying to make the restaurant survive. Based on her experience under the table and her nightmare in the opening sequence of this episode, Sydney decides to stay at The Bear. And Luca takes time to offer support to Tina about efficiency in dish preparation. The soundtrack returns to familiar ground with repeat appearances for Tom Petty (Square One) and The Ronnettes (Baby I Love You) as well as what might be Patty Griffin’s debut appearance on the drama soundtrack with her emotionally-charged Long Ride Home lifted from her third album 1000 Kisses released in 2002.
And after his unexpected good time at his ex’s wedding, there is sense of a burgeoning relationship building between Richey and his new FoH colleague Jess. As they are deep in conversation in the office, Peter Buck’s familiar guitar arpeggio opening from R.E.M.’s Strange Currencies plays. “You know with love come strange currencies/And here is my appeal”.
And after a difficult scene where Sugar and Computer survey the only slightly improving figures in the accounts, the episode ends with a focus on a distracted and unhappy Carmy. After the difficulties coping with his mother at the wedding, Sugar has forced him into taking some old photos that Donna wants to her home. To the sound of Elton John’s Western Ford Gateway, the episode ends with him reluctantly walking up the path of his childhood home and raising his hand to knock the door before the credits roll. In recent years, I’ve developed a liking for the songwriting on show in some of Reg Dwight’s early 70s work like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water – this track comes from his 1969 debut album Empty Sky.
Save It For Later – Eddie Vedder (2024)
Episode 9 – Tonnato
With the recent episodes full of music, things get a little quieter as we reach the penultimate episode. Of the three songs featured, the only song new to the drama series was the appropriately themed The Show Must Go On by Bruce Hornby and The Range. This plays out as Sugar announces to the delighted crew that the humble pastry chef Marcus has been named as one of Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs. But rolling the end credits to the shuddering metal of New Noise by Refused (used for the third time since Season 1) reminds us that the clock is still (literally) ticking down on the restaurant’s future.
Back in WIS 23Aug24, I playlisted the great Save It For Later by The Beat. My ramblings back then referenced that the song had appeared on the seventh episode of Season 3 of The Bear, which we were binge-watching at the time, having been away in the van – some things never change. I also pointed out that Eddie Vedder’s cover version had been played during the second episode and that Pearl Jam used to cover the tune when playing live. Since then, I’ve discovered that wasn’t entirely true. It seems that Pearl Jam’s hugely popular song Better Man… erm… bears such an uncanny resemblance to The Beat’s song that Eddie Vedder frequently acknowledges Save It For Later when the band play Better Man live.
I’ve also discovered that Vedder recorded his solo cover specifically for use on Season 3 of The Bear and so it’s reappearance in this fourth season gives me the chance to playlist it. Vedder’s cover does what many covers do – he takes the brilliant, insistent rhythm and musicality of the original and strips it back to the bare bones. However, in dialling it down, he manages to retain the song’s identity. His voice is in the front of the mix and his acoustic strumming has the original’s mistaken guitar tuning, along with a slightly less raspy sax solo. The song is reprised for the scene where Carmy, against his instinct, spends time with his mother. They open up and talk over what has gone wrong with their relationship. And, after wandering round his unchanged teenage bedroom, Carmy makes Donna a roast chicken dinner, almost as a symbolic peace offering.
Fast Slow Disco – St Vincent (2018)
Episode 10 – Goodbye
And then there is… silence. At the end of the previous episode, Sydney finds out that Carmy has written himself out of the updated partnership agreement, such that the restaurant’s ownership lies with her, Sugar and Uncle Jimmy. In short, he is planning to leave. The season finale is a single scene shot in the back alley behind the restaurant. The only sounds are voices as minds are spoken, issues are confronted and arguments rage. There is no kitchen, no service, no mothers, no babies or anything. Just Sydney, then Carmy, then Richey and finally Sugar come together on the screen. And I’m not going to spoil what finally transpires; suffice to say that the silence behind the words is as intense as the narrative.
As the time finally runs out, the closing credits do get a musical accompaniment and this track from Anne Erin Clark, the artist known as St Vincent, gets the honours. Slow Disco first appeared on her critically acclaimed 2017 album, the caps-lock titled MASSEDUCTION, which was a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In its original form, the song floats on synths and strings with her distinctive voice carrying the melody with no rhythm track – the clue is in the song title.
A year later, St Vincent reworked the album acoustically as piano and vocal tracks and released it as the cleverly re-titled MassEducation – not quite all in lower case. The shorter, ‘slow’ version of Slow Disco was used to promote the new album and was actually featured briefly at the start of Episode 3 as Sydney developed her scallop recipe on her own in the kitchen early one morning – not mentioned last week!
It is her third version of the song that is used in the finale, the pop-tastic, knowingly re-titled Fast Slow Disco which was released as a single in 2018. All sequencers and beats, it was accompanied by a video that Madonna would have been proud of in her heyday. And, just in case you aren’t sated with the variations of this tune, there is a fourth version kicking about of St Vincent performing it on acoustic guitar in the 6Music Live Room.
Walking In The Rain – The Ronnettes (1964)
Bonus Track
It’s a reasonably simple task to choose a bonus track this time round as, with three songs across the ten episodes of Season 4, The Ronnettes seem to be the star act this time round. I’ve already mentioned all three of their appearances and have decided to go for Walking In The Rain from Episode 6.
The girls formed as a family group with two sisters Estelle and Veronica (Ronnie) Bennett and their cousin Nedra Talley. They were very much a singles act – they only ever released one long player and all their success came in a two year period after they signed with Phil Spector’s label Philles Records in 1963. They only had one top ten hit in the US and the UK with their first release, the iconic and highly influential Be My Baby, which actually only featured Ronnie on the recording. Walking in the Rain, complete with its thunderstorm effects, was written by Spector with Barry Mann and Cynthia Well and became their fifth straight Top 40 hit in the US when it was released in October 1964. In the year since Be My Baby, they had visited the UK where they met The Beatles on their first night in London and had The Rolling Stones open for them on their short tour.
But the pop world was fickle in the 60s and following Walking in the Rain, the group’s popularity began to slowly wane as tensions rose between Ronnie and the others over her lead role and her relationship with Spector. Their earlier success got them on the bill of The Beatles 1966 US tour but a jealous and insecure Spector insisted Ronnie did not join the tour, getting her cousin Elaine to fill in for her. The band eventually broke up in 1967 just after releasing what was their final single I Can Hear Music, which bombed despite Ronnie’s great vocal performance. However, Ronnettes fan Brian Wilson liked it and he recorded it with The Beach Boys on their 1969 album 20/20 with his brother Carl on lead vocals. Released as a single, it made the US top thirty and reached No 10 in the UK. As I said, fickle.
Last Word
I did warn you that the geekiness would continue into this week and so it proved. But, it’s over now, you’ll be glad to know. However, after all this deep diving, just what I find to write about next week is anyone’s guess. Myself, included!
All these fine tunes have been marinated for hours and then flash-fried in the master playlist, accessed at the link below.
Finally, there seems to be some upstream issues with the Spotify software at the moment – hopefully these are resolved by the time you view this and you can see this week’s playlist at the top of the page.
AR
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WIS FREQUENT FLIER TAG CLOUD
Allison Russell Amy Winehouse Aztec Camera Billy Bragg Blondie Brandi Carlile David Bowie Eels Elton John Elvis Costello & The Attractions Emmylou Harris Everything But The Girl Ezra Collective Faces Gang of Four Gil Scott-Heron Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit John Grant Johnny Cash John Prine Lucinda Williams Madness Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Nick Lowe Paul Weller Prefab Sprout Public Service Broadcasting Ramones Sparks Steely Dan Steve Earle Talking Heads Taylor Swift The Beatles The Clash The Cure The Decemberists The Go-Betweens The Jam The National The Rolling Stones The Stranglers The Waterboys The Who Wilco
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