Collaborating with creatives: Becca Gatrell on how the music of Feel Good was curated

Feel Good (streaming on Netflix) is a semi-autobiographical British comedy-drama starring Mae Martin as themself and Charlotte Ritchie as Mae’s girlfriend, George. The show was written/created by Martin and Joe Hampson and produced by the independent production company, Objective Fiction.

Rotten Tomatoes described Feel Good as, “An intimate portrait of addiction and love…at once sweetly charming, uncomfortably complicated, and completely worth falling for.” Season One initially aired on Channel 4 in Britain; the second and final season was a Netflix exclusive, produced and written by the original team.

We spoke with Becca Gatrell, Feel Good music supervisor and founder of record label and publishing company Wow & Flutter Music, about her experience working with the team and helping to craft the perfect soundtrack to such a personal story.

“When I watched the entire show after working on Season One, I really loved it,” Gatrell told us. It’s a special thing when reality meets fiction, and I think Mae Martin does that so brilliantly.”

Beyond being a show that Becca would watch in her own time, she told us, “The real and raw characters in Feel Good explored themes close to my heart as a trainee in analytic psychotherapy. Working your way through things is all we can do”.

The creative and collaborative process

Selecting Feel Good’s music was highly collaborative. Being a huge music fan with a specific sonic vision for the show, Mae Martin, along with director Luke Snellin and co-writer Joe Hampson, attended the music meetings and worked closely together with Becca throughout the process. They also did spotting sessions for every episode with the composers, Charles Watson and Rob Jones.

The first season was almost finished when Becca joined the team. “It was a UK indie production and at that point, the production company was clearing music internally as the budget was so tight. I think they got near the end and realized they might need some help. I am glad they found me! For Season One, my job was to get the administrative licensing side straight and help with any creative holes that were left. We took a very different approach from the beginning with Season Two. Mae sent a long playlist of songs she loved and had been around during the creative process, which is a really good creative place to start.”

As a music supervisor, it’s good to be a part of the team as early as possible. It’s much harder to come on at the end and try to pick up pieces. In that scenario, there can be tracks that won’t clear or aren’t affordable and it’s often too far into the edit to find alternatives that ‘bed in’ as well.

Becca added, “I always read the script before working on a show if I can. I want to get into where the show is, what the series is about. If there’s any music performed on set, it’s good to be on top of that before they shoot the scene. It makes it much easier to know what you’re trying to achieve if you’re in it from that very early stage.”

Music searches & selections

Although Mae had a very clear vision about what they wanted for music, Becca found searches to be valuable in the end. She explained, “There were a couple of songs we couldn’t clear — they were either too expensive or not quite right. It was useful to have search results to fill those gaps.”

She continued, “We found some great tracks. One was new to me — “Smooth Operator” by Pottery in the game show episode. That resulted from sending a brief out, getting loads of tracks back, listening to them, cherry-picking some good options, and Mae landing on that one. It’s nice when that happens — when a music supervisor can be helpful on the creative end too. I think everyone was pleased how well the song worked in the scene.”

The opening track of the first episode in Season Two is “How Could You Disappear?” by AJIMAL, released on Becca’s label, Wow & Flutter Music. She shared, “I was concerned about the conflict of interest, but when we talked about it, Mae knew the artist anyway and it was all cool. A good song that works is a good song that works! I was thrilled to have a track from my label in the show. TV spots are so valuable for emerging indie artists seeking new fans. The number of people you reach and the Shazams can really help spark an international fanbase from a TV show like this.”

In Episode 4 of Season 2, the entire track “No Halo” by Kevin Morby is featured, which is fairly rare. “When the song worked so well at the end of the episode and played through the action just brilliantly, we wanted to keep the mood and song going into the end titles,” Becca said. “Title Music is getting lost, especially with UK budgets, as bleeding into titles can increase the cost significantly and because people skip through on streaming, it can make the titles feel like a weird place to spend money. But when it plays out the drama significantly and creates a certain mood, I think it can be important to hold the emotion there for a while if people want to indulge in it.”

One of the challenges faced by Becca and the team was using production music where appropriate without replacing too many songs. “There are a plethora of brilliant writers who are moonlighting as production music writers and some great music out there,” Becca said. “It can often be dismissed by show creatives, and it can be hard to keep saying, ‘I think we should replace it with production music’ with the budget always in mind, but it is very possible to find some great creative options, as well as making the figures add up. There’s a big scene in Episode One where they’re at the school disco with quite a few tracks in a short scene. To license four known disco songs would have been a big chunk of the budget for a show like this so we used the production libraries to get the right moods and feel here.”

She added, “Clearing ‘Jealous Guy’ – written by John Lennon and performed by Donnie Hathaway – was an important moment. Such a big song comes with financial considerations that have a knock-on effect on what else is possible in the show but we established this song was incredibly important and we could make sacrifices elsewhere. We were very happy when we received the approval.”

Using DISCO

Becca told us “I always use DISCO now, after years of terrifying iTunes accounts with missing tracks, thousands of copies of things, and no titles…and trying to endlessly catalog CDs! It feels like a million miles away! I can’t really believe it. I remember the days of supervision when to find something, you’d call HMV, ask them to hold the CDs, go down there, get them, listen to tracks, mark up with post-its and bike them to the editor to try some stuff!”

“Fortunately, a lot of companies are using DISCO to send their samples around, which I always add to my library. If I’m browsing ideas, I’ll also use Spotify and my own playlists, as well as those submissions I saved on DISCO,” she added.

“It’s such a brilliant way to send a brief out too. You can have all of your submissions right there in one place and go through each one, then put it into your selects playlist and always have that reference list as well. The ones I choose aren’t necessarily the right ones for the director but I find I usually need to narrow things down a little bit. The time it takes to listen to songs is the limiting factor for everyone, but it [DISCO] is such a great system for streamlining the process and allowing more time for listening. I’m not sure how I’d work without it now. I’m like how on earth did we do it?”

Drafting briefs for searches

Becca shared that her briefs were often asking for clearance and offering not much money. She said, “I wish it wasn’t like that. I run an indie label and a publishing company and I’m all for the fees being appropriate; it’s such an important area of income for writers and artists. But budgets are really hard now. There is money behind TV production, but there’s this disparity between how big a TV show is, how it’s being broadcast worldwide, and the kind of fees that are expected.”

“I try to keep briefs as open as possible within any very clear guidelines of mood or era or instrumentation I need. Scene descriptions are also important when searching for specific moments but it’s not like only one song could soundtrack any minute of your life! I like to get other people’s ideas about what they think would work. When possible, I send reviews of the previous season and links to any reference tracks from the director or editor to help the process.”

She added, “Quite often at the beginning of projects, I’ll send a note to select indie labels I think are relevant saying, ‘I’m working on this project, I think you might have some tracks that will work’ so I have a little bank of interesting things to listen to and share as we’re working through it.”

Music supervision in UK vs US

We asked Becca to tell us about how music supervision and licensing differs between the UK and the US and other markets around the globe. She shared, “The big difference is that UK budgets have not caught up with American budgets — there’s a different understanding of what things are worth. The amount of money you have as a supe affects a lot of things, like whether you can license whatever you like within reason, which is obviously more likely to happen in America. It can also affect things like how long you are on the project; you might be brought in at the very end if the budget is low.”

She continued, “A lot of music supervisors in the UK do their own creative work and their own licensing which are quite different skills. My experience is that in the USA, there is often a licensing department that will work with the music supervisor and take care of some of the administration things, especially at the end of the project which is always more admin than you think!”

Blanket licenses in the UK

In the UK, blanket licenses can be used to clear music for television. Blanket licenses can be a bit confusing; Sentric provide a good run down here.

Becca explained, “In the UK, we used to — and sometimes still do in specific circumstances — use blanket agreements for television. Historically, sync fees for shows broadcast in the UK were set [at] low rates and collected by the collection agencies MCPS/PRS and PPL. It’s taken a long time for some UK TV production companies to catch up with the idea that they need to budget some serious money to license songs because the blanket is not going to work and they need a worldwide clearance for all media, excluding theatrical, due to the prevalence of sales to global streaming services.”

It’s difficult to use blanket agreements for internationally broadcast shows, especially for artists/writers based in the US. Even if the blanket license works for the UK and some territories, you often need a separate publishing or master agreement in the US and Canada, for example.

Becca added, “Not every company is the same, either. So it’s not just like, okay, here’s what you do. You have to pick it apart, and it becomes more burdensome than anything to use the blankets and be sure you have covered all the rights. The blankets are still there, but you can’t really lean on them as an easy option for UK drama television.”

You can watch both seasons of Feel Good on Netflix.