Playlists for Normal People: Building a Character Through Music
by Tallie Gabrie — graphics by Aneta
★
“Now you’re living in my memories, living in my mouth, living in the four fucking walls of my house,” Orla Gartland sings in indie-pop bop “Did It To Myself.” The tune plays as fictional character Marianne Sheridan applies makeup and inspects her appearance before heading off to hook up with her schoolmate, Connell Waldron, for the first time in BBC/Hulu’s beautiful recent release, Normal People (based on the novel by Sally Rooney).
As the camera focuses unwaveringly on Marianne’s eyes, you’re almost left with the impression that the lyrics are Marianne’s secret inner thoughts — and they might as well be. Gartland’s ability to express her emotions through song make up for Marianne’s inability to articulate her emotions; the lyrics evoke a sense of loneliness and angst that I’ve already begun to associate with Marianne. The show's music supervisors, Maggie Phillips and Juliet Martin, have curated a score that often sounds like it’s coming straight from the characters’ innermost feelings.
Marianne and Connell are both complex and often frustrating characters, navigating the familiar young adulthood aches of first love, an on-and-off-again relationship, and family struggles. Much of the action in the show is spurred by feelings the characters are afraid to talk about out-loud; those kinds of deep-dive emotions that music harnesses so well.
Part of what makes the story of Normal People so enrapturing is its intimacy. Nothing about Marianne and Connell’s relationship is hidden from us — so it feels right that we should be privy to their musical preferences too. Making a playlist and sharing your favorite or most meaningful songs is an inherently intimate activity. It’s no wonder mix-tapes are one of the most personal ways to confess feelings to a crush — giving someone access to the music that exposes your deeper feelings or picking out songs that remind you tenderly of them is like sharing a bit of your soul and hoping for dear life that the recipient will accept and love it as you do.
In creating and sharing these characters playlists with us, the show’s creators invite us even further into the most personal parts of Marianne and Connell; into the special, delicate shared secret that is their love story.
“Finding out about the playlists felt like being offered a free slice of cake and glass of dessert wine after finishing a decadent meal at a new favorite restaurant.”
The genres on these playlists range from tender singer-songwriter to hip-hop to trad Irish folk — because, after all, a well-rounded and multifaceted person makes a good character. Authors and screenwriters risk falling into the trap of making characters too one-dimensional by giving them only one musical taste. Rarely will you find a person who’s only a fan of jazz, or alt rock, or EDM, etc. Likely, someone will listen to a genre or two when they’re sad, something different when they’re energetic or getting pumped up, something else when they just want some nice chill vibes on in the background, and so on. While you may be able to claim a favorite genre (I’ll vaguely say “folk” when someone asks me, for example), it’s still probably not all you listen to, and writers crafting characters as if that’s the case has been a recurring pet peeve of mine. (The way Stephen Chbosky gives Charlie a love of “The Smiths” in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” as if he’s never heard any other music gets old — fast). Giving Marianne and Connell multiple musical interests made them feel like real young adults, rather than explorations of tropes. It would have been easy to drench the whole story with a stream of only indie sad-songs, but I was pleasantly surprised to find rap, lo-fi, and delicate instrumental tracks nestled amidst the more predictable (though wholly satisfying) Elliott Smith and Big Thief tracks.
The show’s smart, poignant score was one reason I was so delighter to learn that the show’s two main characters have playlists on Spotify, curated by the music supervisors and the actors themselves. There’s something magical about Marianne and Connell—despite their flaws, I couldn’t get enough of living in their heads both when I read the book and watched the show. I drank in Marianne’s spectacular outfits in the show and Connell’s poetic writing style in the book, and then I was granted access to their musical tastes? Finding out about the playlists felt like being offered a free slice of cake and glass of dessert wine after finishing a decadent meal at a new favorite restaurant. It was such a delicious surprise and allowed me to luxuriate at the table a bit longer, since I was definitely not ready to leave and go back to real life yet.
The playlists are a cathartic device on their own. Normal People is so captivating to young people for a few reasons: Many of us are familiar with what it’s like to be fully consumed by painful and angsty relationships that act as the developmental infrastructures and building blocks of our hearts. We learn lessons in self worth and the importance of communicating (and communicating well) from our first all-absorbing loves, and at the same time, it’s hard not to compare later relationships to those first powerful fires, even if they did grow wild and burn down every semblance of sense in their paths.
“The … ordinariness of the protagonists reminds us you don’t have to be outstanding or “special” to be worthy of bone-aching affection. You can be completely normal and still find yourself absolutely, irrationally adored.”
There’s another reason Normal People is so addicting: whether we’ve had a Marianne or Connell in our lives and see similar version of ourselves echoed back at us through the characters, or whether we’ve only fantasized about being so wholly consumed by another person, the story’s title and the ordinariness of the protagonists tell us that you don’t have to be outstanding or “special” to be worthy of bone-aching affection. You can be absolutely normal and still find yourself absolutely, irrationally adored.
I left both reading and watching Normal People with a deliciously sad, bittersweet ache that I couldn’t quite shake, and I’ve heard similar experiences from other readers and viewers, so full and human and messy is the heartache of the story. The playlists serve as an outlet to process the feelings one might experience from the story — you can dance out your frustrations about the characters’ terrible communication with one another to London Grammar’s “Hey Now - Arty Remix” and CamelPhat’s “Breathe,” then cry it out or lay on the floor and reflect on heartbreak to Damien Rice’s “Accidental Babies” or Anna Mieke’s “Warped Window.” One of the magic powers that music possesses is its ability to connect people who have all manner of different life experiences, hopes, losses, priorities, and morals through a common emotional language. Listening to music that elicited such a cathartic response made me feel even closer to the story, and perhaps especially seen by the author and actors who managed to touch so magnificently upon many nuanced, relatable human emotions.
As someone who gets easily sucked into the worlds of books and TV shows and empathizes with characters perhaps to a fault, the playlists also served as a lovely way to allow myself to live in the sentimentality of a great story ending and say goodbye to its protagonists gradually, over the course of a few listen-throughs. A great character begins to feel like a good friend — someone you’re not quite ready to let go of once the final credits roll or you turn the last page. Marianne and Connell’s playlists make it so you don’t have to just yet.
