Music¶

Chase personally selected almost every piece of music in 86 episodes.

There is no score. That's the first thing to understand. The Sopranos has almost no original underscoring — the music is all source cues, chosen individually, and it does the work a score would.

How it worked¶

David Chase selected the tracks himself, with music producer Martin Bruestle and music editor Kathryn Dayak, occasionally consulting Steven Van Zandt.

This is unusual. Most showrunners delegate to a music supervisor. Chase treated song choice as writing, and the budget — HBO money, no advertiser sensitivities, and a show important enough to clear expensive rights — let him get almost anything he wanted.

He was a musician before he was a writer, and it shows.

The closing song¶

The show's signature device: a different song over the end credits of nearly every episode, chosen as a comment on what just happened.

Sometimes it's straightforward. Often it's ironic. Occasionally it's a joke that only lands a season later. The habit trained a generation of viewers to sit through credits, and it's the single most imitated thing about the show's music.

A few of the best:

"Thru and Thru" (The Rolling Stones) over the end of "Funhouse" — Big Pussy dead, Meadow's graduation party, the crew going about their business. Chase has named it as a favorite.
"Living on a Thin Line" (The Kinks) in "University" — after Tracee's murder, over the Bing.
"Black Books" (Nils Lofgren) at the end of "Long Term Parking."
"Comfortably Numb" (the Van Morrison/Roger Waters version) closing "The Test Dream."
"Space Monkey" (Placebo), "Glad Tidings" (Van Morrison), and a great deal of Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and Otis Redding.

"Woke Up This Morning"¶

The main title: Alabama 3's "Woke Up This Morning (Chosen One Mix)" — a British acid-house-blues group, which is a strange provenance for the most recognizable television theme of its era.

The song predates the show and was written about a real case: a woman who killed her abusive partner. Chase heard it and used it essentially unchanged.

The title sequence is Tony driving from the Lincoln Tunnel through Newark and Jersey City and out along the Turnpike to the suburbs — the whole show in ninety seconds, a man leaving the city his father worked in for a house that money bought.

The World Trade Center appears in his side mirror for the first three seasons and was removed after September 2001. Some streaming versions carry the original; some don't.

"Don't Stop Believin'"¶

Tony selects it from a tabletop jukebox in the final scene. It is the last thing anyone hears before the cut to black, and it stops mid-word.

It is not the joke people assume. The common reading — that Chase chose a naff arena-rock anthem ironically — doesn't survive contact with his own account: he has said the ceiling he was going for was don't stop believing, simple and on the nose.

Two other things worth knowing:

Journey's only condition for licensing was that the scene contain no violence and no deaths. Which, depending on your reading of the ending, they either got or very cleverly didn't.
Chase reportedly considered a number of alternatives, and the choice was made late.

The song's own subsequent life — karaoke, sports arenas, Glee — has made it harder to hear as Chase intended, which is an accident of history rather than a flaw in the choice.

The Italian music¶

A separate and deliberate strand.

Dominic Chianese is a genuine singer, and his performances on the show are real — most memorably the Neapolitan song "Core 'ngrato" at a wake, which stops the episode dead.

Italian and Italian-American music recurs at funerals, weddings, and the restaurant scenes, and it's always doing the same job: marking the gap between the culture these men claim and the New Jersey suburb they actually live in. See Italian-American Identity.

The soundtrack releases¶

Album	Year	Peak
The Sopranos: Music from the HBO Original Series	1999	#54 Billboard 200
The Sopranos — Peppers & Eggs (double)	2001	#38 Billboard 200
The Sopranos: Music from the HBO Series — Vol. 3	2006	—

The influence¶

Before The Sopranos, television drama scored itself. After it, needle drops became the default grammar of prestige television — Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Leftovers, Atlanta, and essentially every HBO drama since.

The specific innovation wasn't using pop songs. It was treating the closing song as the last line of the episode.