Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and three-time Grammy nominee Andrew Bird wasn’t even familiar with The Pitt when he was cold-called by the show’s composer, Gavin Brivik, with an invitation to collaborate on a song for one of the series’ most heartbreaking and gut-punching moments. But once Bird binged the HBO Max show — particularly an early version of that scene, in which fan-favorite character Louie Cloverfield, the lovable alcoholic with a heart of gold, dies with only the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center staff by his side — the lyrics for “Need Someone” came quickly.
“I’ve done this before where I’m asked to write a song for a show, and more than half the times I’ll take the song back. I won’t give it to them, because I write the songs as if they’re my own songs, and so I feel a certain ownership over them,” Bird confesses to Gold Derby. “I’ve got to really think about it before I hand it over. But with this one, I knew for sure that this was it. It takes everything you’ve learned over a whole lifetime to sit down and write a song in an hour. … I absolutely wrote [“Need Someone”] for that scene. Every word.”
Bird was partially inspired by the 2020 pandemic — not just society’s shared post-COVID trauma, but the lack of appreciation of healthcare workers, whose harrowing experiences are depicted in The Pitt with an unflinching accuracy never quite captured in past hit hospital dramas like ER (which featured The Pitt’s star and co-executive producer, Noah Wyle) or Grey’s Anatomy. And while Bird has a long list of screen-composing credits, including The Muppets and Baskets, it was writing for The Pitt — which leads this year’s Emmy Awards with 25 nominations, including Original Music and Lyrics for “Need Someone,” Bird’s first Emmy nod — that gave him a true appreciation for television as an art form and a force for good.
“I really didn’t realize, until I started watching [The Pitt] and got involved, what an important show it is. Honestly, growing up watching TV as a kid, just it being ubiquitous in childhood as a sort of mind-numbing thing, I never thought TV was important,” Bird admits. “I don’t even have a TV in my house now, and once I became an artist, it wasn’t interesting to me. So, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, this can really do a lot, almost more than any other medium, to help us figure out what the hell just happened [during the COVID-19 pandemic].’ To think of TV as being healing and important to a culture wasn’t something I’d really thought about until this came along. I quickly realized what an important show it was, and I really put everything I had into this.”
Bird is currently focused on an orchestral tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of his landmark album The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and is working on a new studio album due in 2027. But he also has nine songs on the soundtrack for I Play Rocky (Peter Farrelly’s biopic about Sylvester Stallone’s making of Rocky) out this fall — so there may be more nominations in his near future. He doesn’t even rule out acting again (after making his acting debut in Fargo Season 4), if the right role comes along. In the meantime, he chats here with Gold Derby about his once-in-a-lifetime experience with The Pitt.
Gold Derby: First of all, congratulations on your very first Emmy nomination! I imagine you’re very excited.
Andrew Bird: Thanks! I was told that we had a pretty good chance, given The Pitt‘s profile … but I’m not one who’s usually on the Grammy or Emmy circuit, probably because of genre being kind of elusive in what I do. So, [award nominations have] never really been on my mind much. I was really happy.
Well, you mentioned that the show has a high profile, with a rabid and invested fanbase. Were you a fan of The Pitt before you were enlisted for “Need Someone”?
No, I wasn’t at all. I was aware of it, but I just thought it was another medical drama in the style of ER or Grey’s Anatomy, which never really piqued my interest. This was kind of a cold call from Gavin. But I’ve always said that I enjoy doing song for picture, like lyrics for picture. I like the challenge of it; it uses everything I’ve got to offer, I think even more so than instrumental score. And so, I quickly binged Season 1, and it all happened. When these things come to me, I jump on them right away. If I want to do it, I get excited about it. I have to do it right away. Everything has to go to the side. It’s first idea, best idea, kind of knee-jerk and really fast. I think what helps is I embrace ambiguity in my lyrics sometimes, so that’s good for picture.
I wanted to reflect what was happening with the characters in the show, but you have two verses and a chorus to do that, so you get to decide how explicit you want to be. But I had little references to things, like Dana getting assaulted and “absorbing all the blows.” All these little things are kind of dropped in there, but it’s not explaining what’s happening in the scene exactly. It was written very fast. The binging, the writing, it was all very new to me. And plus, I’m getting the scene out of context — it’s Episode 6 and they’re all standing around Louie, and that’s the first thing I see. When Noah drops that line about Louie losing his family and everyone kind of looks at the floor like, “Oh, s–t,” I had to get more context to write a song for that, because I wasn’t exactly sure what everyone was feeling.
There’s a small but especially tearjerking detail when Emma grabs Louie’s hand, right as Dr. Robby is telling them about how Louie had lost his eight-months-pregnant wife and their unborn child in a car accident years ago. Apparently hospitals leave a deceased patient’s hand out from under the blanket so that a loved one at the bedside can hold it, but Louie only has the hospital staff, who’ve sort of become his honorary family, with him when dies. This goes perfectly with your lyric about how “you need someone who is gonna cry for you.”
Yes, I absolutely wrote it for that scene. Every word. The scene made me think about is how a lot of times, the last people that someone sees before they die are healthcare workers. And often at end-of-life care, that’s who’s really there for them. We don’t like to think about it very often, but what’s more fundamental than the fear of dying alone? That’s where the chorus came to me. Also, this show does not stop until this moment. There are not very many reflective moments; it’s so frenetic and there’s so much multitasking going on.
And that’s the point: that everyone stops for a second to reflect on what they’re all doing. I didn’t realize at first, until this job came up, that the show was actually a reaction to ER and trying to set the record straight or correct things that were traumatized for entertainment value. Noah [Wyle] built his career with those type of shows, but he felt he wanted to capture a more reality-based experience with this show. I guess maybe it was weighing on his conscience a little bit.
I understand the COVID-19 pandemic was weighing on your mind when you wrote “Need Someone.”
Yes, the backstory has hints at the pandemic and the mental health and struggles of healthcare workers. I mean, that’s all still not dealt with; we as people have swept it under the rug, and there’s collective amnesia about it. … I’d have conversations fairly often with people that say COVID wasn’t that big a deal. And I’m like, “You do realize there were refrigerator trucks full of bodies, because the ERs were overflowing? And that emergency room doctors were committing suicide?” And they think I’m being hysterical or something. It’s like, wow, man, it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe they weren’t paying attention, but geez. And yeah, the show deals with a lot of things we don’t want to look at. A lot of people actually avoid the show simply because they’re too squeamish. But on a bigger-picture level with this stuff, end of life, people don’t want to talk about that and the pandemic. It’s kind of remarkable.
I understand you and Gavin collaborated on “Need Someone” by exchanging voice memos.
Yes, he had a template for the end credits, which is where most of the music you hear in the show is, and there were five or six things he sent me and I chose. It was just guitar, bass, and drums. I learned the chords and just started with that. He brought me the opportunity, so I felt an obligation to use his template. I came up with the lyrics and the melody and the chorus within about an hour of choosing that template, and then recorded that and sent it back to him. And then he had to pitch it up the chain.
This was Gavin’s idea; it wasn’t the showrunners’. Apparently they were wary of songwriting — understandably, because they’re going for a reality thing. They don’t want to push people’s buttons any more than they already are with music; it might feel somewhat intrusive. But he had no problem getting the showrunners to like it. They watched [the song paired] with the scene and cried. But then we had to go up the whole executive ladder. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it would go [in the scene]. But there was no, “Hey, maybe it could be a little more like this….” There were no notes, really; it was just as-is. And I’ve done enough score work to know that that is extremely rare.
This is interesting, because you mentioned ER and Grey’s Anatomy, and Grey’s Anatomy was one of the first big network TV shows to have syncs that really boosted bands’ careers and turned songs into hits, like with the Fray, Brandi Carlile, and Snow Patrol. After that, the floodgates opened. All the record labels and publishers were pitching the studios, and every artist wanted to get a placement in a hit show. But since The Pitt was always intended to be more documentary-style, there’s hardly any music in it all. So, to have your song in The Pitt, especially in such a key scene, must have been a real honor for you.
For sure, especially when I realized how important the show is. I’ve done this before where I’m asked to write a song for a show, and more than half the times I’ll take the song back. I won’t give it to them, because I write the songs as if they’re my own songs, and so I feel a certain ownership over them. … “Cracking Codes” was written for a kids’ show, and the show wasn’t very good. It was fine. I don’t think anyone remembers the show. I don’t even remember what it was called; it was kind of a Malcolm in the Middle-type of show. I feel like I’ve got to really think about it before I hand [a song] over. But with this one, I knew for sure that this was it. It takes everything you’ve learned over a whole lifetime to sit down and write a song in an hour.
You says that when the showrunners saw the scene with “Need Someone,” they cried. How did you react when you saw the finished scene?
I didn’t cry. … I guess sometimes I’ll do score work and I’ll get the script first, read the script, and even if I don’t end up doing the score, if I’ve read the script and I go to the theater and I see it, I can’t be moved at all by it. Anything where I know the structure of it or the outline of it, it’s really hard to be affected by it. Something about being privy to the writing mindset of it really turns you off to the emotions of it. … But there have been other parts of the show that have caused me to well up, like the young mother with terminal cancer. That’s a really painful one. The show has moved me in a lot of moments.
I mentioned that The Pitt has this very intense fandom. What feedback have you gotten from Pitt fans about “Need Someone”?
It was all very positive and effusive, except the only negative thing was that they wished it was longer! So, I wrote a bridge, because we were going to release the song and it was pretty damn short, a minute and change. I felt as a standalone piece, it didn’t really go anywhere to justify coming back to the chorus; you’ve got to have another bridge to take you away from something, in order to come back to it. So, I wrote this bridge about “sometimes you feel like someone is testing us, and you wonder how much you can take.” And then we rerecorded the song with my band, and that’s what’s out there now.
Have you performed “Need Someone” at a public gig yet?
I’ve been doing it at [Los Angeles nightclub and theater] Largo, and we’ve been talking about tacking it onto these orchestra shows I’m doing. … Ernest Harden Jr. [the actor who portrayed Louie Cloverfield on The Pitt, and is nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series at this year’s Emmys] actually came to a show at Largo, where I did a benefit for healthcare workers’ mental health. It was amazing.
How did he react to seeing you play the song live?
I mean, I did a song for his death; it was kind of intense! But he just said, “You’re so talented,” and he was so sweet and just so delightful. He’s loving every minute of this whole ride. He’s been a character actor, like smaller roles, for most of his career, and here he is on this run right now. It’s awesome to see how much he’s enjoying it.
I hope you are enjoying this run as well! Before I let you go, I know you’ve been on the other side of the television camera: You played funeral director Thurman Smutny on Fargo a few years ago. How did that come about? Wasn’t that character written specifically for you?
Yeah, [show creator Noah Hawley] cast me on the spot after seeing me play in Austin. Backstage, he said, “Do you want to play this character in Fargo?” And I said, “How do you know I can do it?” And he said, “You can do it.” But it was nerve-wracking, because I’d never really given any thought to acting. I’m friends with John C. Reilly, so I thought, “I’ll ask him, ‘How do you act?'” John said, “Don’t underestimate the power of editing.” And that was it. I don’t know what I expected him to say. How can you replace years of coming up through Chicago theater, working on your craft, to me just coming in cold? It got me really thinking about actors who want to be musicians and musicians that who to be actors, and the human-nature impulse to be binary about these things.
When I was on set, one of the first people I met was [Fargo actress] Jessie Buckley. I didn’t know of her at all at the time, and the first thing we talked about is music and how she’s a musician. So, then I see her act and I’m like, “Oh, she must just have this savant ability, to [also] be an amazing actor!” Just because my first impression was “she’s a musician,” so I’d categorized her as that. I still to this day think, “How does Jessie do that, when she’s a musician?” It was a whole exercise in how we have a bias about these things. Why shouldn’t you be able to do both extremely well?
It’s been my observation that there are more musicians who can act well than the other way around.
It depends. Like, in certain songs the ’50s and ’60s, the singer would start reciting something, like an Elvis kind of thing or an old country tune where they start talking instead of singing. Those are moments where you can tell if that performer can act or inhabit a character. Something gets triggered when you do that, a switch gets flipped. I’ve got certain songs that have a theatrical element, where I have to inhabit something and recite something to the audience in an off-the-cuff sort of way.
But I tried really hard to learn my [Fargo] lines as if they were lyrics, trying anything to stay within my comfort zone. It wasn’t a tough role to play; it was a pretty narrow range of emotions that Thurman had, by design. That’s why [Hawley] knew I could do it. There was no “why hath you forsaken me,” crying-in-the-rain kind of moment. Thurman was a pretty buttoned-up, nervous man, which was what I was! … I definitely had impostor syndrome and I was a nervous wreck, but by the last episode I was like, “OK, I get it. Put me in, coach.”
So, did Fargo give you the acting bug? Is there more acting in your future?
I’d like to do it again, but the only offers I’ve gotten have been horror movies. And I don’t think that’s really going to be me.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
