Music has always been a prime ingredient in the strange and potent blend that is “Weeds.” Jenji’s script for the pilot opened with the complete lyrics to Malvina Reynolds folk anthem “Little Boxes” -- from there, songs have served as counterpoint, punctuation, atmosphere, comic relief and, every once in a while, scene-stealer.
This season was a turning point for the show and the music. With Nancy and crew fleeing Agrestic and setting up operations in the Mexican border town of Renmar, change was in the air. We lost “Little Boxes” as a theme and cover song project (Boo hoo! This caused all sorts of internal strife before we got over ourselves and made peace with the new direction) and began sampling cross-border flavors and a few darker more menacing sounds.
What’s remained is our intense and at times insane obsession with finding the perfect song for a particular moment. We still swap mix CDs like geeky teens, agonize endlessly over how Showtime promos stomp all over our end-credit Big Music Moments, and bemoan the fact that we can’t afford the vast majority of music we know and love (What can we say: we’re a bitchy bunch).
But as always, our limited budget forces us to seek out new and unfamiliar bands, dig through the slush piles of emerging talent and otherwise look for artists who are willing to play along for the exposure and the love of the show.
Given that, it’s amazing and gratifying that this volume includes so many accomplished artists from such diverse genres. We’ve got electro-folk, vintage soul, gypsy punk and classic reggae -- an oddball mix that still somehow shares a common thread of loopy, introspective energy that always feels distinctly “Weedsy.”
We got wise to DeVotchKa before production began and went a little crazy in our enthusiasm. The band’s Latin-tinged, vaguely sinister, muy romantico sound so perfectly captured the new season’s vibe that we even hoped to enlist the band to record a new theme song. While producers ultimately ditched the theme entirely, we were delighted to build a crucial sequence (in which Nancy walks through the smuggling tunnel for the first time) around the track “A New World” and then to finish the episode with the also-magnificent “Head Honcho.”
Nortec Collective also felt entirely right this year. We could’ve picked from a dozen of their stellar cross-cultural confections but settled on “Tengo La Voz” for a memorable montage in which Nancy reconvenes her old crew.
Philadelphia freak-folk vet Greg Weeks is the man behind the oddball ballad “Made” -- this is one of those irregular gems that felt perfect for the show on the very first listen.
The Handsome Devil may have originated in the Orange County punk scene, but their most recent recordings have taken a deliciously weird and musical turn. “Mexico” was the obvious and natural choice.
How much do we love Miss Li? The Stockholm-based, beret-and-legging-clad singer-songwriter sounds like a Tin Pan Alley vet gone psychedelic, and again we had a tough time choosing a single piece from her voluminous recent output. “Don’t Try to Fool Me” won out, providing a lovely loping surge to the scene where Nancy walks home through the drug tunnel after her first tryst with the mayor.
Credit goes to the great public radio show Sound Opinions for turning us onto the gem “Bullets” by the UK Folktronica vanguards Tunng. Such pastoral sounds, such scary words -- perfect counterpoint to what may be the most violent and disturbing “Weeds” scene ever (the torture-by-sander and execution of a DEA agent at end of episode 12. Good times!)
We discovered the mind-blowing "gypsy punk marching band" while trawling a Chicago record shop last summer. Their take on the traditional melody “Borino Oro” gave us our favorite musical moment of the season -- the long steady-cam reveal of the drug tunnel leading to a close-up of the cigar-chomping hunky drug kingpin Esteban. A great band, even better live, the sort of music we’d like played at our funeral.
The Los Mono song “Se Puede” gave us a nice closer to the first episode, as Nancy and her old pal Guillermo stand at the Tijuana border surveying the chaos and opportunity before them.
Sometimes the sweetest, most innocent sounds are the best backdrop for the highly compromised goings-on in “Weeds.” Such was the case with “Thank You for Making Me Feel Better,” the painfully direct ode by the singular indie artist Linus of Hollywood, which put Nancy’s moral struggle over her mercy killing of the ailing bubbie into high relief at the end of episode 3.
We’ve been big fans of North Carolina-based indie faves The Mountain Goats from early on, with one “Weeds” writer building entire episodes around favorite songs. This year the pick was “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” which provided the mysterious glue holding together a sequence in episode 7 known internally as the Most Inappropriate Montage Ever (who could forget Lee Majors’ buff girl fetish, or especially, Silas’ icky self-love to racy pictures of mom?)
Big ups to "Weeds" music editor Michael Brake for bringing our attention to the Toots and the Maytals anthem “Celia” for the moment when our favorite Agrestic housewife gets fully schooled in the brutal ways of the Mexican mafia. An anthem for the ages (or at least for a city councilmember-turned-coke sniffing waste case).
And we wrap things up this volume with another bit of tasty irony in the form of “Brighter Tomorrow,” a classic bit of Northwestern call-and-response soul that gave the abused jailbird Celia a brief jolt of hope while wallowing in a pit of despair. As Celia wilted with her black eyes and “Franken-cha-cha” hairstyle, the ladies wail, “There’s a brighter tomorrow for those who build dreams/ Don’t get discouraged/ Just do your thing/ It’s an out of sight world/Don’t let it pass you by.”
I cant believe she left andy and moved in with the mob boss.I laughed so hard when they went to the teachers house and used the baseball bat. WAY TO GO. No shit to be taken!
