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| guardian.co.uk |
HERC can count on one hand (way to go, HERC!) the number of people he knows who will like the music in the playlist below and that is precisely the point in making playlists: you focus on your intended audience or just one listener, usually yourself. Making playlists for others is a deeply personal and intimate experience when properly executed and should not be mistaken for making playlists to be played at parties or other social gatherings, which is an entirely different dynamic. It took upwards of 106 mixtapes like the one above, which were the grandfathers of modern playlists, for HERC to ensnare the woman who would become Mrs. HERC and she remains the intended listener for a lot of his playlistic efforts.
The music in the featured playlist is the soundtrack of the CW fish-out-of-water series Hart Of Dixie which stars Rachel Bilson as a city doctor who moves back to the country, down South in ol' Alabama. One of the show's executive producers is Josh Schwartz, who also created The O.C. (which also starred Bilson) and co-created both the recently ended Chuck and the on-it's-last-season Gossip Girl. All three of those shows featured lots of music playing, either in the background as atmosphere or at the forefront, accentuating plot points - the music was almost another character.
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| wikipedia |
On it's own, The O.C. released six Mixes filled with the music heard on the show. The single thread that binds all of the music on these shows together appears to be musical supervisor Alexandra Patsavas. It was she who picked all the songs heard on The O.C. (specifically catering to Schwartz's indie rock preferences) and the accompanying Mixes. After witnessing the success of the music featured on that show, Schwartz hired Patsavas to musically supervise both Chuck and Gossip Girl and now, Hart Of Dixie.
Alexandra Patsavas is also the go-to music supervisor for show-runner Shondra Rhimes, who hired Alexandra to populate the shows Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice and Scandal with music. Ms. Patsavas has also served as the music supervisor for the shows Supernatural, Roswell, Rescue Me, Fastlane, Tru Calling, Life On Mars, Suburgatory and Mad Men. Her company, Chop Shop Music, has also been the music supervisor for all 5 Twilight film soundtracks as well as the recently released The Perks Of Being A Wallflower.
[FULL DISCLOSURE: While HERC cannot attest to the quality of the music selected for the Twilight movies, the Shondra Rhimes shows or The O.C. or Gossip Girl because he has never watched any of them, he will swear under oath that all of the other shows mentioned above have featured good music at one time or another. Furthermore, HERC did indeed watch the entire first season of Hart Of Dixie as he thinks Rachel Bilson is a talented actress but has chosen not to view the second because Mrs. HERC knows that is not all HERC thinks about Ms. Bilson - he gets the song titles form the show's CW site.]
Labeling music is not what HERC is about but he'll take a shot here and call the songs played on Hart Of Dixie a hybrid of country-pop, with a dash of blues and singer-songwriter adult contemporary added for flavor that reflect the show's modern Southern locale. Imagine the polished roots music of Sheryl Crow played by younger artists or the music of Taylor Swift played by slightly older, unsigned indie artists. There are a few certified country hits sprinkled throughout (including a couple by Ms. Swift and The Band Perry) as well as some of that swell new Americana stuff by the likes of The Lumineers.
The playlist above is not all inclusive of the music featured on Hart Of Dixie - certain songs have been left off at HERC's discretion to maintain the overall ambiance of the playlist while other songs are simply unavailable on Spotify at this time. Songs that appeared more than once in an episode or songs that appeared in more than one episode are only represented once in the playlist. As the great hillbilly poet Dwight David Yoakam once said: "Maybe you like it/ maybe you don't."
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