When Amanda Krieg Thomas started looking for music to soundtrack Ryan Murphy’s new FX series The Shards, there was a lot to work with. The music supervisor had plenty of experience on Murphy productions, from seasons of Feud and American Horror Story
to more recent shows like 9-1-1 and The Beauty. Murphy’s shows often center around music, using well-known tracks to further the plot, whether they’re part of the dialogue itself (what would Glee have been without Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”?) or just setting a mood (nothing could be more unsettling than watching Jeffrey Dahmer make out with a mannequin to KC and the Sunshine Band in Monster Season One).
But The Shards came with an extra layer, thanks to series co-creator Brett Easton Ellis. Ellis, who wrote the autofictional novel of the same name on which the show is based, has a similar relationship with music in his work, incorporating it into both his books and the movies that have been made of them (American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction).
The Shards was no different. Published in 2023, the novel tells the story of a teenage Brett Easton Ellis (played in the show by Igby Rigney) and his group of his fellow glamorous Los Angeles students — including old friend Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber) and newcomer Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) — as they enter their senior year of high school in 1981. Based very loosely on his own experience as a young man coming to recognize his sexuality as he writes his first novel, Less Than Zero, the story also adds a fictional layer of a serial killer that’s preying on teenagers. Like Ellis’ previous work, the book includes plenty of references to the music he listened to at the time — Duran Duran, Blondie, REO Speedwagon. So when it came time for Thomas to start building the soundtrack for the TV adaptation, she had her work cut out for her. “The book is just full of music,” she tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from her Los Angeles home. “I got the first few scripts, and then the next thing that was sent to me was a Spotify playlist of every artist and song mentioned in the book. And it’s like 200 songs. It’s so many songs.”
By this point, Thomas already had a process for working through a Murphy production. First, she finds the songs that are musts — tracks that are written into the scripts themselves. “We had to have ‘Vienna’ by Ultravox,” she says. “Definitely had to have ‘Year of the Cat’ by Al Stewart. [And] we definitely had to have ‘Funky Town.’” And then there was “Icehouse,” by the band Flowers, which they all saw as integral since it’s written into the book as a song that Brett and Susan bond over. “He brings it up more than once in the book,” Thomas notes, “But how that got translated into the show is that song was written into a pivotal scene.”
Once the main tracks were set, Thomas needed to find other songs to round it out. Though much of the show was scored by musicians Morgan Kibby and David Klotz, whose synthy compositions set an ominous mood, as well as featuring new tracks from Troye Sivan, Thomas’ job was to find less-known music to work into the show.
“People have been making music forever, and a lot of it does not get on the charts,” she says, citing bands like Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, Gleaming Spires, and Trout Fishing in America, which she ended up including in The Shards. “So that process is always really fun, to go digging, especially for the little bands.” Since they’re not licensed as often as the more well-known bands, she’s found that the artists are more excited to be featured. “All these uses become so meaningful to them,” she says.
Thomas also worked with Murphy and the rest of the team to make much of the series period-accurate. For instance, several scenes take place at Hollywood’s Hamburger Hamlet, a red-leather L.A. institution that closed in 2011, where Brett and his friends often meet for lunch and a little plot exposition. Growing up on the East Coast, Thomas had never been. To get the “lore,” as she puts it, she had to ask around. “There’s constant music in the Hamburger Hamlet,” she says. “What does that sound like? How do we integrate more music from the book into that? What makes sense and all of that?” She started talking to people who frequented the spot as kids, and found out that the restaurant usually played Top 40 hits; so, she started digging around for songs that would make sense in the background but also convey a deeper meaning, like the Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed,” or the Split Enz’s “Nobody Takes Me Seriously.”
This, she says, is the best part of being a music supervisor on a show like The Shards: The opportunity to tell stories through songs, and create an atmosphere of a time and a place that was so deeply linked to its music. “It was fun, experiencing L.A. through Brett Easton Ellis’ lens,” she says. “One thing I’ve loved being a part of the show is the L.A. vibes, experiencing L.A. in the Eighties, even this loosely fictional version of it.”
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