The Bear, the FX series about chefs trying to create fine dining in Chicago, is propelled by needle drops — songs by an eclectic collection of artists that in Season 3 includes Beastie Boys, Giuseppe Verdi, Kate Bush, Kool & the Gang, Talking Heads, Weezer, Van Morrison, Radiohead, Taylor Swift, and Nine Inch Nails. (There’s a lot of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.)
Executive producers Josh Senior and Christopher Storer serve as the show’s music supervisors, and you can tell that there’s a lot of personal passion in the mix for these songs, a blend of propulsive and/or moody tracks that often have deeper significance to the show as a whole. Thus, below is a comprehensive breakdown of every song featured this season, episode by episode.
Senior and Storer, it should be noted, pack a lot of music into this season, but deserve to be commended for how often they really let a song play out over the course of an episode — sometimes, needle drops can be blunt or hastily incorporated into a soundtrack. But these tracks below all get a welcome amount of time in the spotlight, while simultaneously underscoring the show’s funniest/most dramatic/most tense/all of the above moments.
[Editor’s note: The following contains mild spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The Bear, “Forever.” Hear where these needle drops appear by watching The Bear on Hulu.]
Episode 1: “Tomorrow”
The Bear (FX)
• Nine Inch Nails – “Together”
While the season premiere of The Bear credits its score to “Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross,” the music used to score this 30-minute look inside the chaos of Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) mind is, specifically, this 10-minute track from NIN’s 2020 album Ghosts V. It’s a fine reminder that the Ghosts albums, not to mention 1999’s The Fragile, were early indicators of how well Reznor and Ross would take to the world of film and TV composition. And an FX representative confirms that Reznor and Ross did customize the song specifically for its use as score in this episode.
Episode 2: “Next”
The Bear (FX)
• Eddie Vedder – “Save It for Later”
• Radiohead – “(Nice Dream)”
Eddie Vedder’s new cover of English Beat’s “Save It For Later” is featured a lot over the course of this season, with an almost ethereal sound mix in comparison to the original version. In this episode specifically, it serves as theme music over a traditional opening credits sequence (typically The Bear episodes don’t have opening credits like this, but once a season or so they break that rule). Compared to other episodes, this one’s relatively music-free, but Radiohead makes another appearance on the soundtrack (Season 1 used “Let Down” from OK Computer) for the end credits.
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