Twelve Songs Discovered From TV Shows… From Movies… (And Heck, Even From Commercials)

I’m pretty sure we’ve all had those moments when we are watching a show or movie:

Maybe that song became an instant favorite and it was the start of a beautiful friendship, or maybe it was lost to you for years, as Contributing Author Link Crawford talked about in a recent post here. 

Here are a few songs that I first heard in a movie, tv show, or yes, even a commercial, that grabbed my attention. What are some of yours? Keep in mind that I’m limiting this to pre-existing songs, not ones that were created specifically for that in which they are featured.

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In Season 2, Episode 7 of Gilmore Girls, Rory is told she needs to make more friends in school and ends up in a scary secret society with near disastrous results. The episode ends with Rory, sitting content and alone in the cafeteria, listening to this reassuring bop of a chorus on her Walkman (Discman?). The song had a retro 60s spy feel to it and I loved the little snippet we get to hear. Years later I did an internet search and found the song, by a Swedish band named after a Polish film score composer.

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I was recently watching the 2023 film American Fiction. As someone who has been on and off deep diving into 70s funk, soul and disco for several years, this relatively unknown sophisticated, funky gem pulled me into its orbit. The classical string intro is gorgeous, and the bass-fueled groove is infectious. 

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I Am Not Okay With This was a bizarre Netflix teen drama about a girl with unwanted destructive powers that are triggered by extreme emotion and cause great devastation. It unjustly only lasted one season, due to the Covid shutdown, and ended on a cliffhanger, where the unknown, mysterious man that’s been following her finally reveals himself. The scene is accompanied by this song, a wonderfully creepy country/cheesy jazz-pop hybrid whose existence feels like a miracle. The artist, Spence Bare, is somewhat of a shadowy figure himself, and appears to only have four recorded songs to his name.

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Season 2 of Outer Range recently dropped on Amazon Prime –finally. In one of the episodes, there is a dive bar scene where a song is playing that sounds like Jimi Hendrix, if he was actually Deep Purple. 

Turns out it’s by a very obscure band called Stonewall out of New York City. They recorded one album in 1972 that was never released and came out as a bootleg in 1976.  The guitar riffs are undeniable and the whole song just cooks in a down and dirty way that perfectly encapsulates early-70s hard rock.

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In Season 2, Episode 5 of the Netflix show Trinkets (2019-2020) about three girls addicted to shoplifting: The character Tabitha is showing off her new braids, and this monster of a funky track with its popping bass riff is accompanying her joy. Amber Mark is not a household name, but she’s getting some notoriety in the R&B world and made an appearance on one of Obama’s summer play lists, which is something. This song literally slaps.

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The Lincoln Lawyer is a current Netflix show that debuted in 2022. Lawyer Mickey Haller does his best work out of his car (various Lincolns), and his preferred soundtrack includes Latin-infused 60s-era jazz, a love that he picked up from his father. While I am very familiar with Mongo Santamaria, I had not heard this song until it appeared in Episode 2 of Season 1. It’s a keeper.

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At the end of the 1991 film The Doctor starring William Hurt (an excellent movie), this Cuban jam can be heard blasting in the operating room as the main character is performing surgery. I loved it and never heard it again.  I looked up the title just recently and listened to it.  Yeah, it still goes hard.

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This was inexplicably featured in an Apple iPhone 7 commercial in 2017. The Monks were a very odd mid-60s experimental rock band made up of American GIs that would dress up as Catholic monks when they performed.  This song is short, disjointed, weird, and great.

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I first heard this dreamy, wistful ballad in a 2021 commercial for Downy laundry detergent and fabric softener. I really liked it and brought it up in the comment section of The Number Ones. Another commenter replied that the song was originally written as a jingle, sung by Anka, for a Kodak commercial in 1975. Anka decided to record and release it as a single shortly after, and it went to #7 on the charts.

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I first heard this in a 2017 commercial for the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator, where a kid is walking around his house in an astronaut space suit. It charted in the UK, but not here in the U.S. My wife’s sister was surprised I had not heard it, as it is one of her favorite ELO songs, and the album on which it appears, Time, basically sound tracked her college days in Poland.

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This was featured in a 1997 commercial for the Volkswagen Golf, which is where I first encountered it. I loved it right away for its ridiculously simple chorus and the instantly recognizable sound of a bottom-of-the-line Casio keyboard, being that I owned one at the time.

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This one has come up in a previous article. The first release was by Gloria Jones in 1965, as a B-side. The song would have gone virtually unnoticed were it not for the early 70s Northern Soul club scene in the U.K., where people danced to obscure fast paced R&B records from the U.S. 

Because it gained newfound popularity there, she rerecorded an edgier version of the song in 1976. 

This recording of the song really shook me, particularly toward the end, where she really lets go and expresses the tortured pain of the lyrics. I had known that Soft Cell’s 80s hit version was a cover but had never heard either of Jones’ versions. I’ve come to love both.

Okay, your turn!

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