[
Oh Well is heard in Fargo Season 2]
By Yvonne Villareal Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2015
Excerpt from an interview with Noah Hawley, Cape Cod Times
http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/...LIFE/151019656
Q:
Music, particularly when it comes to period dramas, is a big component to eliciting the feel of the time. How hard is it, though, to have it serve a purpose when you don’t know if that same music will be there when people are streaming it or watching it on DVDs? And also, how do you do it without relying on the obvious?
A: You know, the music of the era is really iconic. But it’s also overused a lot. So the question becomes how do you find cues that are really powerful. So we have this Fleetwood Mac cue, “Oh well,” which is pre-Lindsey Buckingham Fleetwood Mac. It’s a great, powerful guitar-driven song and I made the decision to sort of, when we hit the ‘70s, to hit this Malaise speech from Jimmy Carter. He has that Southern oracle power, and when you set music to it, and we’re showing you documentary footage from the time, there’s a power to it that puts you immediately in that place in time.
But for me, it’s not just about rock songs from the ‘70s. You’ll hear over the course of the season, all kinds of music from different eras, and from around the world. One of the things that’s most interesting is when you see how the ‘70s was interpreted in Italy or France or Africa — that music that is sort of distilled down into other places.