- As I prepare for first dates I always wonder, is this the one? Is this The Guy whose snoring is destined to wake our newborn baby and of course the sole caretaker, myself. By the time I go back to sleep, the brain has already confirmed the future that is currently happening. The notion of realizing itself is as repetitive as a generic pop song. This is my life. The Guy, my lawfully wedded husband. The condom I should’ve not forgotten. Our contract built family. Fortunately for myself and other future divorcees like me, we are in the era of celebrating complicated, altruistic, unhinged women; and award-winning duo Catherine Grieves and David Holmes, Killing Eve’s Music Supervisors, have provided an accurate soundtrack to our eventual lover’s quarrel.
“There is something about / The way you are / That makes me’ (Sigh)”, in the world of Killing Eve Unloved wear the pants or so they say. The Leipzig band conjures the ominous, broody, charismatic soul that embodies the ‘60s. How else to introduce a character we’re supposed to love-hate - than to counter her sociopathic ways with the resonance that lays the background behind history’s classics. Lead singer, Jade Vincent’s vocals echo throughout season one as the audience learns to accept embracing Villanelle in all of her villainous glory. Unloved wouldn’t be the craft they are without David Holmes and Keefus Ciancia; both transcending the story of Vincent’s vocals and the backing instrumentals to the storm where sexual desire meets reckoning. As we/Eve stare into the eye of the storm, Villanelle’s thoroughly puncturing a hole where blood used to flow, but not prior to confessing her love. And so, we could’ve easily fallen into the narrow destination that is: Eve good, Villanelle bad. However, Killing Eve’s soundtrack goes elsewhere.
Season Two brings us to an area forged by a plethora of talented artists that belongs to complicated men (Breaking Bad’s Walter White , Mad Men’s Don Draper, Bojack Horseman’s Bojack Horseman), and is rarely ever offered to complicated women. It is empathy that Unloved could never access on their own. A space where on one corner lays goth akinned pop (Fireflies), in the midst, Italian classical ballads (Dalida), and in the other corner mystery filled romantic comedy soundtrack memories (Poppy Family). It is the area overflowing with an abundance of sultriness and vulnerability we can’t help but wonder, as Eve does too, are we Villanelle? If Killing Eve’s Soundtracks brought anything, I’d title it as a beam of honesty, of hope. That we may end up lawfully married, but nothing prevents us from accepting who we are and all of our tendencies: an ordinary woman, turned psychopath longing for a romantic assassin.
- Tara Garman.