Better Call Saul’s music: five great songs from a nostalgic soundtrack

Better Call Saul“class =” com-link “data-reactroot =” “> On February 8, 2015 it was released Better Call Saul, the spin-off from Breaking Bad cocreado por Vince Gilligan y Peter Gould, and there was a wonderful turn within the universe: the drama did not try to repeat any formula but to build its own story, with the character of lawyer Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), and with his past and present amalgamated with a cadence that had little relation to the one he proposed Breaking Bad.

However, having Gilligan as showrunner, and occasionally as director and scriptwriter of some episodes, Better Call Saul logically it was related to its mother series in the perfectionism with which each of its chapters was constructed. This prequel does not have a sequence, a character, a comma from its script. By extension, neither its soundtrack fails: each song has a reason, and it can hardly be dissociated from the sequence in which it is included.

Here, five unforgettable songs from Better Call Saul, that says goodbye next year with its sixth season.

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The second track on the album Swedish group ABBA, Super Trouper, Released in 1980, it has a hint of literality to its inclusion, but only on the surface. The song can be heard in the last episode of the fourth season, precisely titled “Winner / Winner”, one of the best of the series, with a devastating ending. The sequence in which it sounds places us in an unusual scenario for Jimmy and his brother Chuck (Michael McKean): a moment of happiness shared between the two, crowned with a karaoke where they sing the song ABBA, at the initiative of the youngest of the McGill. It is a beautiful memory but, through it, Gilligan and Gould remind us that this complex relationship between them was always on the edge of being cut, as it eventually did.

There are no winners or losers in Better Call Saul, not much less in the rivalry of those brothers. There is that gray terrain in which both, with their antagonistic positions, are right and wrong at the same time. The brilliance of the series is its ability to navigate those grays, that not knowing where to stand. It is no accident, then, that the episode ends with Jimmy becoming Saul using his brother’s memory to achieve it. What was genuine in your speech to get the license back? Perhaps the answer lies in that fleeting moment of complicity. Maybe not.

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One of the many re-readings of the song “My Way (Comme d’habitude)”, written by Claude François and Jacques Revaux, was made by the Gypsy Kings in 1988, and in Better Call Saul gives goose bumps when flamenco enters its microcosm for one of its usual masterfully edited montages. In this case, the protagonist of the sequence is Kim Wexler (the great Rhea Seehorn), but not the Kim Wexler of the first season but the one of the second, who decides to twist her destiny and leave that descent to the document review room to earn the respect of the HHM firm. To do this, start calling old colleagues and colleagues, and writing data to those post-its that mirror Jimmy’s colorful neckties. Nothing is randomized, not even the title of the song.

“In my way” is the equivalent of “you don’t save me, I save myself” that Kim tells Jimmy, a kind of preview of his evolution that culminates in a fifth season in which we learn a little more about his wife’s past. by Goodman, a fascinating woman with a script to match, a character who is never underestimated.

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Each season Better Call Saul open with a flashforward, with the black and white Jimmy post-Breaking Bad working at a Cinnamon branch in Omaha, Nebraska, as he himself predicted in his farewell to Walter White (Bryan Cranston). “Mabel”, the first episode of the third season, begins with the sweetness of the voice of Nancy Sinatra interpreting “Sugartown” by Lee Hazelwood while Gene fulfills his work routine marked by monotony, with that clock that is shown in motion, but that has no correlation with what he experiences: that life that is not life, that life in which he is not Saul, that life of time stopped.

Nostalgia for that past returns in the form of a theme that works by contrast: what seems comforting ends up being melancholic. Indeed, that look at the protagonist’s colorless daily life culminates in him collapsing on the floor after wanting to help a young man arrested by the police, shouting “Get a lawyer!” In a few minutes, as with every flashforward, He reassures himself that, whether or not he changes his name, tries to forget or prefers not to, there is something that is not debatable: Jimmy misses his work and looks for any excuse to go back in time.

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The song written by Carson Parks and popularized by Frank and Nancy Sinatra gives its name to the seventh episode of the fourth season, but with the voices of Yael Shoshana Cohen and Gil Landau, the originally Israeli pop duo Lola Marsh -then band-, summoned to perform the cover by the music supervisor of Better Call Saul, Thomas Golubić. The choice, once again, is undeniable for one of the best montages in the series. The split screen shows us how the bond between Jimmy and Kim deteriorates over the months, while she is still recovering from her accident and he begins to delve into the criminal world, the true point of no return.

The end of this montage, with the couple on opposite sides of the bed, is one more example of how the drama chooses a song that seeks to make the viewer feel in a certain way so that, in juxtaposition with the images, they suffer something else: in this case, that distancing that contrasts with the repeated “I love you” that are heard in the deliberately duller voices of Cohen and Landau. Special mention for the great work of the director Deborah Chow for that memorable intro, which culminates with the inevitable and symbolic fade to black of Kim’s bedside, which allows focusing only on Jimmy and his gaze into space.

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“I was not thinking of any particular song to start the series, whose first episode I was fortunate to direct, but it is true that all the openings have a nostalgic tone that certain songs deserve, that there is a certain melancholy in the scenes because Saul Goodman is in that state of mind: looking back on the days that are gone, the best days that are past, “Gilligan told the magazine. Rolling Stone regarding how it was decided what was going to be the opening theme of the series. The chosen one ended up being “Address Unknown” from the vocal group The Ink Spots.

The audience’s reunion with Saul Goodman is as melancholic as Gilligan and Gould wanted, but also shocking, with that self-fulfilling prophecy of the character working as manager of the Cinnabon of Nebraska, and with that entrance to his new home where he has another identity for his protection. , but which he rejects every time he sits on the couch, takes a particular VHS and does not stop looking at what it contains. Saul looks at the colorful publicity from when he emerged as the famous eccentric lawyer, the “criminal lawyer” as Jesse Pinkman describes it. (Aaron Paul) Walter White in the world Breaking Bad.

In the world Better Call Saul, on the contrary, longing reigns for those moments that vanished, with the tears that fall from the edges of the glasses of Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman / Gene Takavic, that man who, from the first chapter, with that unknown direction as He advances the title of the song, he is pushed back to his golden age.

Where to see it. All five seasons of Better Call Saul are available on Netflix.

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