Theme Tune Investigations transcript
A long time ago - well, 2003 - the Dandy Warhols released the song ‘We Used To Be Friends’, and we hadn’t thought of it lately at all, except for it being the theme tune to Veronica Mars.
JOY: Coming on now, sugar, I'm Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: And bringing it on, bringing on, yeah, I'm Helen Zaltzman.
CHARLIE HARDING: Just remember me when I'm Charlie Harding from the podcast Switched on Pop.
JOY: And you're listening to the thrilling crossover episode of Veronica Mars Investigations and Switched on Pop.
HZ: Breaking down the theme tune to Veronica Mars, The Dandy Warhols' 'We used to be friends'.
JOY: Thank you for letting us trick you into talking to us about the many versions of this song.
HZ: This 2003 classic of popular music.
CHARLIE HARDING: Hmmmm...
HZ: This 2003... music.
CHARLIE HARDING: It is music.
HZ: It's a 2003 music.
CHARLIE HARDING: Yeah, that's accurate.
HZ: April 23rd, 2003, the single came out; a year later, it was slapped on the front of Veronica Mars. Charlie, what first struck you about this?
CHARLIE HARDING: This song for me feels like it's signalling how to be the coolest band possible in the mid-90s, but it's 2003. And it's doing that by - OK, so you have like a sort of grunge guitar orientation, but also these synthesizers, which are sort of like Euro trancy stuff that's happening, like it reminds you actually of the Prodigy. And those things are going tcha tcha tcha, they're stuttering while the rock stuff is happening. And over that, there's a synthesizer that's like really squelchy and fairly unpleasant, that sounds almost like a scratching record. It's not a scratching record. Like I think it's actually like a filter synced Moog or something, or digital synth. But the three of them together: you have the like the alt rocky thing, grungy thing. You have the EDM synthy thing. And then the scratching is trying to reference a hip hoppy thing. And they actually even have a sampled clap in the middle of a song. So you have these three different aesthetics that don't blend at all well together. But it sounds like someone tried to say like this is the coolest, most retro song possible.
HZ: Sort of if the Rembrandts had tried to be the Prodigy?
LYRICS
HZ: Can I refer you to the lyrics for a moment?
JOY: They go on and on and on!
HZ: Well there's only about 30 words in them, including "Yeah".
CHARLIE HARDING: What do we have?
HZ: We have: "A long time ago we used to be friends, but I haven't thought of you lately at all. If ever again, a greeting I send to you, short and sweet to the soul I intend. Come now, honey. Bring it on, bring it on, yeah. Just remember me when you're good to go." And then just variations on those.
CHARLIE HARDING: I like this sort of dramatic British reading of it because I actually feel like it further dates the song, because the grammatic construction is all wrong. Like as a contemporary songwriter, you wouldn't do that. He is intentionally messing with the grammar in order to get the rhyme.
JOY: Right. Now, at this moment in in music, it's all about like what is the most conversational - or in Los Angeles songwriting circles now, the thing I hear the most is, it used to be ‘conversational’ and now it's ‘ignorant’. “How can we make this sound more ignorant?”
CHARLIE HARDING: Well, the reason I say it, it's also because older poetry will do that. There is a certain way of being creative with words, it was a way of demonstrating one's craft that I can play with grammar in such a way that I can land some interesting rhymes. And then that became a certain aesthetic within popular music that it just made it clear that this is for older people and it doesn't sound like how I speak, and it feels inauthentic, because pop music, especially premature privileges, the idea of ‘authenticity’. It's a performance of authenticity. And certainly if you start flipping your grammar around, it's a clear sign that you don't fit in.
JOY: That you're thinking about what you're saying instead of just saying what you are or what you feel.
HZ: “If ever again a greeting I send to you." Yes, in English, you wouldn't really put that verb near the end.
CHARLIE HARDING: You won't even say that.
JOY: “If I ever text you again.”
CHARLIE HARDING: That's a good song. Oh my gosh.
HZ: Get her another platinum disc! The initial lyrics are quite strong: "A long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven't thought of you lately at all."
JOY: Very clear.
CHARLIE HARDING: I think it would be good if the "at all" was not at the end.
HZ: I think it's emotionally maybe interesting because it suggests that they are thinking about them some to have written this thing.
JOY: Maybe doth protest.
HZ: Right. Exactly. But then the rest of the song just doesn't really seem to be at all related to that lyrically.
JOY: You mean when he says "yeah" and "come on"?
HZ: "Come on now honey. Bring it on. Bring it on. Remember me when you're good to go." Why would you want your ex-friend to remember you when you've already established that you have been estranged for some time? How is this relevant to either party?
JOY:]It's all very mysterious.
CHARLIE HARDING: Do you think they chose this song as the opening solely because of the "we used to be friends" line, which sounds like a sort of like somewhat pettyish high school thing to say?
JOY: Oh my gosh, Charlie, wait! You don't even know what's happening on Veronica Mars! A long time ago, Veronica Mars used to be friends with a bunch of the popular rich kids at her high school. But then they had a falling out because her best friend, the sister of her boyfriend, was murdered mysteriously and nobody knows who really did it. But at the time of her death, Veronica's dad was the sheriff who accused the father - oh my gosh - of both Veronica's boyfriend and her dead best friend of the murder. However, this man was very popular in town. He made everybody in town millionaires when his streaming video company went public -
HZ: Too much detail! Too much detail!
JOY: Well, anyway, Veronica used to be friends with a bunch of people and she's kind of not anymore.
CHARLIE HARDING: You know what this has taught me is like as a songwriter, is we should probably sit around and think about lines that perfectly serve any narrative structure for film or television.
JOY: Sure. That is actually a great idea.
CHARLIE HARDING: Because the Danny Warhols song, if we go deeper into it, really, it's one line really that connects it: "We used to be friends" and then some “wooo oooh ooh ohh”. That's it.
HZ: How about: "At some point in the past, things were different to how they are now, which is a predicament"? What do I win?
CHARLIE HARDING: ‘Predicament’! Do you think the word 'predicament' has made it into a top 100 song in the last fifty years?
HZ: I think Courtney Taylor-Taylor would put it in in order to have a slightly tricky end of line.
CHARLIE HARDING: That's a good word to fit in. It's hard. It's not a pretty word.
HZ: "At some time in the past, things were different. But now they're not. And it's quite the predicament."
CHARLIE HARDING: The phrasing -
HZ: It's just the first draft, Charlie.
CHARLIE HARDING: It's not your fault. I don't think anybody. That's a difficult word.
HZ: I can fucking do it. Mate, you're setting a challenge.
JOY: Can you make it sound more ignorant?
HZ:"I don't know what the word 'predicament' means, and I don't even give a shit." How about that?
CHARLIE HARDING: We're getting somewhere.
HZ: I can do this.
JOY: Love it. Love it.
CHARLIE HARDING: Yeah. I think we just made a hit.
HOOKS
JOY: In your expert opinion, using all of the musical knowledge that you have at your disposal, can you explain how a song that goes on and on forever and has kind of like very little dynamically changing, the chords just kind of like are more or less in the same world the whole time…
HZ: It doesn't build to anything.
JOY: Yeah, no dynamic shift really to speak of.
HZ: It's like purgatory, really. You don't go anywhere.
JOY: This song is kind of like purgatory. But how could it be that a song that is so unremarkable in its full length could be made so compelling by being edited down to 30 seconds? I think the edit they managed to make for the credits of Veronica Mars just feels like a fully realized "Aha!" And it feels like things happen and you're on a journey and then it's over and Veronica's wearing her 1980s weather woman in Florida outfit walking in slo mo. And you're like, of course, this all feels very right. But then when you have only heard it that way, and then you listen to the full song or, like we just did, watch the entire music video, it just feels so wrong.
CHARLIE HARDING: Yeah, well, I think it's all about hooks, right? You know this as a songwriter, it's like you want every section of your song to have a hook. And I think sometimes people will confuse the terminology of a hook and sort of think that it's synonymous with the chorus. But a hook really anything which is just inherently catchy and it sounds like you're gonna leave the room and 10 minutes later or ten days later is just gonna pop back in your head and it could be any section of that song. I think that they found the rare hooks that exist in the song and then pieced them together in a much better edit, because the other thing that a great song needs to do is have very clear control of its energy. And this song has no idea where its climactic arcs are. So after the verse, there's just like a dead long interlude before the chorus comes in, and so you've established this sort of interesting narrative - and then you have bars of nothingness. And I'm just spacing out, wondering what I'm going to have for dinner during that section and then oh, there's the chorus. They cut out all of that dead space and they just smash together - they actually cut the second half of the first verse and they cut out the instrumental interlude before the chorus and then just took the interesting narrative part from the verse and smacked it together with the best part of the chorus. And the two hooks work together.
CHARLIE HARDING: Having just watched the full length song, I'm a little irked. But the nice little twenty second version -
JOY: It's so great.
CHARLIE HARDING: It’s fine, yeah.
HZ: It was a chart hit in Britain; it got a lot of airplay on the radio. I suppose the lyrics are fairly obviously referring to Veronica's alienation from her former social group. But other than that, how did it earned its place on this? It seems like an odd choice because it did not chart in the US.
CHARLIE HARDING: Maybe it was cheap.
JOY: Yeah. That seems right.
CHARLIE HARDING: I don't know what the budget was of the opening of the first season or the pilot.
JOY: Based on the wardrobe, it can't have been high.
CHARLIE HARDING: But also, I'm so surprised the song was a hit, because before coming here I was looking at what was happening on the Billboard. And the only other thing that was kind of like a little bit in that world was the band Godsmack had a hit.
HZ: I'm not familiar with their oeuvre.
CHARLIE HARDING: You don't want to be.
JOY: Is it ‘I Stand Alone’? Is that Godsmack?
JOY: Oh, yes. Godsmack. ‘I Stand Alone’, baby. Released in 2002. So whatever was on the chart in 2003 either was like a long holdover or something else.
CHARLIE HARDING: This music, I think, fit more in the mid and late 1990s. By the way, my expertise here is that I did work at an alt rock radio station, I think like 2005-2006 I was working at the alt rock radio station. And I remember it was because I wanted a job working in music, but I was like, “does anybody still listen to this music?” was the attitude I went into being at that station, because it just wasn't as relevant in a large scale popular culture sort of way; like, I didn't understand that there was still an audience. Again, no hate to people who enjoy that music, but it didn't hold cultural cachet. So this song feels dated upon arrival.
HZ: Do you think that was deliberate though? Because if you make something sound dated, it doesn't then become out of date and it taps into people's kind of slight nostalgia for things. It feels familiar. And then they fucking buy it.
CHARLIE HARDING: I think your point is absolutely spot on. Television is supposed to make us feel a little bit comfortable. And so referencing something which is known and already happened is one way of doing that. And it could have for a lot of folks sitting down and watching Veronica Mars for the first time, like, oh, that feels like maybe you want a high schooler -
HZ: Do you think it's like what 40-year-old showrunners would think that teenagers -
CHARLIE HARDING: Right. That's what's going on. Or maybe like even the audience for the show was like a few years older than her age group or was it for her age group that she plays in the show? Is it for people in their early 20s who've already gotten through high school, so then they're referencing things that sounds like when they were in high school and makes us think like we're cool, but actually we're not cool because all the kids are wearing backpacks with two straps, not one strap? (That’s a 21 Jump Street reference.)
HZ: I suppose also, as Jenny said earlier, as a theme song, it really cuts through when you've got the cold open. And then you've got this kind of screaming noise that just punctuates it. And it doesn't put you at ease because it sounds like you're being harassed.
CHARLIE HARDING: It's an interesting question: does the song raise enough emotional tension that you're like "I need the resolution of the show" or you're just like "I'm changing the channel"?
SEASON 3 VERSION
HZ: Are we going to take the plunge into the Season 3 iteration of this song?
JOY: Do we have to? We should. While we're here.
HZ: We've committed to this, Jenny. We can't turn back now.
CHARLIE HARDING: This is an interesting question. I feel like there seems to be in the room a clear preference for season four. Season one it's like they have Frankensteined the song to succeed. And so is the question is season three in the middle somewhere?
JOY: It feels to me like a big dip.
CHARLIE HARDING: It's worse than the original?
JOY: I think it's worse than the original because it neither bumps nor transcends the original.
HZ: Like Season 3 itself.
JOY: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like a mark missed, again like a sort of unrealized meshing of disparate things. It just sounds like more soup.
CHARLIE HARDING: And that's the thing you really don't want to do in pop music, because pop music is always balancing novelty and familiarity. And one of the ways that you get novelty is sort of mashing up two unlike things into a new context. And it sounds really exciting. But if you do it wrong, it tastes terrible, and then you're like, oh, this was made in a board room. That's when people get really upset, like "This music is completely inauthentic." And so I think that you can have the same kind of reaction to any kind of scoring as well.
HZ: I think when we reach season three of this podcast, it would be really funny to do a shit mix of our theme tune. And then come roaring back for season four.
SEASON 4 VERSION
JOY: In 2019, season four of Veronica Mars came out, and with it by far the best version of this theme song and also the best version of the credits. And it's Chrissie Hynde singing, and it's so like spooky and exciting and lush and dark-sounding. I feel like it's the dream that the person had who came up with the noir version for season three. What they dreamed in their dream was the season four credits and what they woke up and recorded was the season three version. But the Season 4 version is so awesome.
HZ: Well, awesome for this song.
CHARLIE HARDING: Whoa whoa whoa. No, no, no, no, no. Go back and listen, it's sick.
HZ: Sick for this song.
JOY: Something that I think is worth noting is that in the Dandys version, the chord progression that's happening is basically B F# A E. Right? "A long time ago, we used to be friends." There's a bit of a reversal where it starts the progression in the middle once we get to "Come on now sugar. Bring it on. Bring it on, yeah. Just remember me when"; and then it loops back to the "We used to be friends."
CHARLIE HARDING: The tiniest variation to pretend to sustain interests doesn't work.
JOY: It's like, is it even a variation or is that just like where the chords were when they like edited the song down, is my question. But what they do for the Chrissie Hynde version, which is a whole step down, is they just pedal between A and C, but they put it over G. They invert it. So we have "A long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven't thought of you lately at all."
HZ: Request for Jenny Owen Youngs to do the theme tune to Season 5.
JOY: Sure sure sure, and I'm available, but I'd rather listen to Chrissie Hynde's version, which I think they made such great choices in the instrumentation and also leaving out, essentially, if the Chrissie version was in the Dandys key, it's the same first and third chord. They're just leaving out - It would be like B to A over E instead of B to F# to A to E. The bass movement is the same because in the Dandys, it's like the B going down a whole step to the A, and in the Chrissie version, A going down to G.
CHARLIE HARDING: But it's an inversion, they changed the actual chord structure. And what's going on here is mixed modality, where it's borrowing a chord from the relative minor of the key. When we're talking music, most songs are in a key and they're usually major or minor; and major we associate with happy and minor we associate was sad. These are subjective things, but they're pretty well reified in western music. And so here what makes this so potent is that when she goes to the second chord, it's this chord that doesn't exist in the key of A. It exists in the key of A minor. And all of a sudden has this very spooky quality. Which is why as soon as you went to the C, you went into my low husky voice. That's what it wants. It's really smart scoring. The Dandy Warhols song originally was needed for that one line about having been friends and potentially for the hip 1990s references of all these different EDM, all grunge and hip hop, all kind of like mashed together, but that's super now old and that doesn't resonate. And so why not just orchestrate it in a way that makes it more film music?
HZ: This reminds me a bit of if the Yeah Yeahs Yeah in a mellow phase were doing it. I suppose you can hear the Chrissie Hynde influence on Karen O and then coming right back to her.
CHARLIE HARDING: That's the thing. Maybe like all the people who are nostalgic for the new season of Veronica Mars placed their hip identity back when any music was cool, right?
HZ: 2003, Yeah Yeah Yeahs were taking off.
CHARLIE HARDING: This is the same phenomenon, I reported a piece about how, if you will, go into hip restaurants in LA and Brooklyn, that they all have the exact same playlists. And it's like LCD Sound System, the Strokes.
JOY: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karen O...
CHARLIE HARDING: And you're gonna be in there thinking, I'm still really cool.
JOY: “I'm still so young!”
CHARLIE HARDING: “You used to be cool. Nobody listens to that any more except for you.”
HZ: "A long time ago, we used to be cool."
FRIEND BREAKUPS
CHARLIE HARDING: I don't want to be unfair to what this music was trying to do and accomplishing in its time because it it may have... you know, I think it was intentionally doing what it did and it obviously connected to people and so it probably worked in the moment. I think that there's some sort of looking back on it now, which it doesn't hold up for me, and especially you hear the whole song. And I think that the sort of overall point we're making, it's like it's amazing that there is a jam, there is a diamond in the rough. And the season four really shows that you like if you take an interesting idea and you transmute it, you get somewhere really productive. There's ways of improving it - what's the what's the extended metaphor? It's like they've shined the gem.
JOY: Right. Keep polishing, kids.
HZ: I think there's a couple of things that are in this song's favour. And one is I don't think it has dated that badly. And that might be somewhat to do with it being kind of out of time at the time of release. But if you said to me it came out in 2014, I wouldn't be surprised.
CHARLIE HARDING: So there's like a return of pop punk, which is kind of in that world a little bit.
JOY: I mean, he did have a mohawk.
HZ: Yeah. And the other thing is that I kind of admire the bitter sentiment of it. We used to be friends and screaming is the take home message of this song. And you don't necessarily get songs about friend break-ups in the charts.
CHARLIE HARDING: This is exactly why the original doesn't work, though. This is a song about a friend break-up, and it's all major chords. And that's why the remake for season four is so much better because I think I think a break-up of friends is actually really complicated bittersweet thing.
HZ: It's rotten. But do you think it's in major chords to suggest that he's on top in this break-up? He's got through it and he wants to put on a confident, unassailable guise so that the friend doesn't know that he's still wounded beneath?
CHARLIE HARDING: I mean, the culture of masculinity of the 90s and not actually showing your true emotions and sort of like just walking off with a great bravado? Yeah, why not, sure. It achieves that. But how utterly boring. A great song should reveal some deeper pathos.
HZ: Well, we didn't say this was a great song. I don't think this song reveals anything. And if it's bravado, then it is covering things, isn't it.
CHARLIE HARDING: Yeah. And there's a huge tradition of just bravado as the raison d'être for a song and people get excited about it.
HZ: Oasis were a very big band in Britain for a long time. So bravado works for people.
SHOVE IT UP YOUR JUMPER
HZ: My husband has a different lyric that he sings every time we watch Veronica Mars. It's not a good one. I'll just preface this with just the word ‘jumper’ in British English means a sweater. And whenever the theme tune came on, he would get up and start dancing around and singing, "Come on now, honey. Shove it up your jumper," and pulling his jumper out like it was a little heartbeat.
CHARLIE HARDING: That's the cutest thing.
JOY: What a good Martin.
HZ: Sort of. But I just can't really shake that association now. But it doesn't really make less sense than the song, does it? "Come on, honey. Shove it up your jumper."
CHARLIE HARDING: I think it actually escalates the bravado. I feel like I can now jump on a stage with my jumper.
HZ: And shove things up it. What would you shove up a jumper? I think the only things I've really seen people shove up the jumpers is like balloons if they wanted to look like they had a fake beergut or pregnant belly. But it doesn't really make sense in the context of the song that that's what you would do.
CHARLIE HARDING: We've established the song doesn't necessarily make sense, so we could go anywhere.
HZ: Maybe you would shove your emotions up your jumper and keep them there.
JOY: Yeah. Keep them hidden.
HZ: Keep them encased in wool.
CHARLIE HARDING: Good reading.
CREDITS
HZ: That was a VMI/Switched on Pop crossover.
JOY: Next, we’re back recapping episodes of Veronica Mars, so watch season 2 episode 1 and join us in a week to investigate it.
HZ: Find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @VMIpod.
JOY: The website, where the show lives shoved up a jumper, is vmipod.com.
CHARLIE HARDING: I'm Charlie Harding. I'm the co-host of the podcast Switched On Pop. And we've just released a book called Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why It Matters. It's the essential musical anthology to know, paired with the 16 pop songs of the last 20 years that we think are the absolute best. The Dandy Warhols did not make it on there. If you are a fan, that's totally cool. I think there's some other fun stuff on here you're going to like. You can check us out at switchedonpop.com or anywhere you get your podcasts.
JOY: I’m Jenny Owen Youngs, and you can learn more about me at jennyowenyoungs.com where you can hear some of the music that I make, and you can also listen to me talking about another petite blonde protagonist over at Buffering the Vampire Slayer, the podcast.
HZ: I’m Helen Zaltzman, and you can hear the other podcasts that I make, the Allusionist at theallusionist.org and Answer Me This at answermethispodcast.com. Noises to quell your anxiety!
JOY: The music that wasn’t by the Dandy Warhols is by Martin Austwick and me, Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: This episode was edited and mixed by me, Helen Zaltzman.
JOY: The sheriff of this town is Hrishikesh Hirway.
HZ: The show is distributed by PRX.
JOY: Until next time, who’s your daddy?
HZ: Who’s your daddy?
JOY: Courtney Taylor-Taylor-Taylor-Taylor-Taylor.