'I love your song from "Grey's Anatomy"': How the ABC medical drama's soundtrack changed these artists' musical careers

Within two minutes of the Grey’s Anatomy series premiere, Rilo Kiley’s “Portions for Foxes” begins to play, and immediately the tone is set. We see Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), a surgical intern, locking the front door of her family home in Seattle, before driving along the highway until she arrives at Seattle Grace Memorial Hospital. There, she steps into an operating room, where she’s met by a group of strangers, her fellow interns Christina Yang (Sandra Oh), George O’Malley (T.R. Knight), Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) and Izzie Stephens (Katherine Heigl), each sizing up the other.

Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis sings “I’m just bad news, bad news, bad news,” as Meredith realizes just how grueling the next five years of her residency will be.

A drama, comedy, romance and soap opera wrapped into one, Grey’s Anatomy has long used music to underscore its most meaningful moments. With more than 440 episodes and counting, the series, which premiered on ABC on March 27, 2005, is known for its ability to pack an emotional punch.

Season 1 of the show revolves around the hospital’s interns, residents and attendings. The staff deal with life-or-death cases on a daily basis at a top-tier trauma facility, all while trying to keep their perilous workplace romances and friendships from boiling over into their work.

Ask any Grey’s fan and they’ll likely be able to recall one song, if not a handful, that reminds them of a particularly affecting scene from the show, like Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” playing as the interns walk out of their first shift or Butterfly Boucher’s “Never Leave Your Heart Alone” punctuating the moment Alex realizes he lost his first patient. Maybe it’s the opening chords of Tegan and Sara’s “Where Does the Good Go” or hearing the sisters belt out, “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t find me attractive,” while Meredith and Christina dance it out for the first time.

Music in Grey’s Anatomy has always been a focal point. For that, we have Alex Patsavas to thank.

Patsavas, who served as the show’s music supervisor from Season 1 through Season 16, selected the songs featured in each episode. During her tenure on the series, 2000s indie rock and pop was her bread and butter. (Patsavas didn’t respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment.)

For artists, both up-and-coming and well-known, primetime placement on the hottest medical drama on broadcast television at the time was career-changing.

Singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb, whose song “Fools Like Me” was featured in Season 1, Episode 3 of Grey’s Anatomy, told Yahoo Entertainment that she’s grateful when her music becomes “part of the story.”

The track plays over the episode's final montage when Meredith and Derek share a sweet moment in the hospital’s locker room. They’re fresh into their forbidden workplace romance, and Derek admits to Meredith that he’s into her.

“It isn’t about the chase. You and me,” he told her, as Loeb’s song swells in the background.

“Especially in the digital age, I feel like being on a TV show like that, where people can just focus on a song and the scene — it really connects with people in a whole other way, which does end up making an impact,” she said. “Especially when it’s placed like that, where the song helps the scene, but the scene also imbues the song with some meaning as well.”

When the episode aired in April 2005, Loeb had already established herself as an indie pop darling. Her breakthrough hit, “Stay (I Missed You),” was featured during the credits of 1994’s Reality Bites. Since then, her songs played in television shows like Party of Five, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While Loeb admits the song itself isn’t actually romantic — it’s about a woman whose affections aren’t being reciprocated — there is a glimmer of optimism.

“It goes on to still celebrate what love is, and I’m still open to looking for it,” she said. “I think that’s the part that probably connects you with the Grey’s Anatomy story. The part that, no matter what you go through, maybe you’re a fool but you still believe in love.”

Grey’s Anatomy remains the only show “Fools Like Me” has been featured on.

“When I play concerts, people will say, ‘Oh, I love your song from Grey’s Anatomy,’” she said. “I think there’s an authenticity and a closeness to the performance. I think the song is able to show a full picture of love. It’s not just a happy-go-lucky song about love. It’s the time that people feel the worst, but they need to have a bright side.”

Ivy, an indie pop band from New York City, was also featured in the first season of Grey’s Anatomy. The trio, which consisted of members Dominique Durand, Andy Chase and Adam Schlesinger, was initially approached to write the show’s theme song. While their demo wasn’t selected, losing out to Psapp’s “Cosy in the Rocket,” their music still appeared on the show.

“I think she was a big fan of ours,” Chase told Yahoo about Patsavas. “She used a lot of our songs for a lot of her different shows she was working on, so she contacted us and said, ‘Would you guys be willing to be on [Grey’s Anatomy]?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.”

The band’s song “Edge of the Ocean,” released in 2000 on the band’s third studio album, Long Distance, was featured during Season 1, Episode 5. The track plays as a blissfully drunk Meredith dances alone on her porch as a house party rages on inside. In this moment, she doesn’t have a care in the world — and Derek can see that. He’s been watching her, sweetly, the whole time. They eventually sneak off and have a rendezvous in his car.

“They’re at a party and it’s romantic,” Durand recalled of the scene. “He’s looking at her while she’s dancing and then they’re having sex in the car, and it’s just the perfect song for it. It just kind of works.”

Prior to Grey’s, the song was featured in a number of notable projects, including Roswell, Alias and Veronica Mars and the 2001 film Shallow Hal, which Ivy scored. The track remains the band’s most commercially successful single to date. They were “more of an intimate kind of band,” said Durand, so placement on primetime television shows was crucial to putting them on the map.

“Grey’s Anatomy brought our song to a pretty wide, diverse audience, maybe even more than had it been in a movie in theaters,” Chase said. “So for a band like us, it really gets its fanbase from simply touring and movie and TV show placement. That was almost the peak of our career in the mid-2000s, and that really helped kind of push us up this hill. Even today, sometimes we get fan mail and they say, ‘I just discovered the band because I was rewatching Grey’s Anatomy.’”

When selecting music for the series, Patsavas didn’t limit herself to solely American artists. She often looked across the pond for lesser-known indie artists, like Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann of the British electronica band Psapp.

“I grew up in the 1980s and my focus was definitely on the great music coming out of the U.K. at that point, so I think I have a special love for it. But, with work, the important thing is not where music comes from; it's more about where it fits,” Patsavas told the BBC in 2008.

Psapp’s unreleased track “Cosy in the Rocket” was used as the Grey’s Anatomy theme song for the show's first two seasons. Members of the Grey’s fandom can likely attest to the fact that the dreamy, lullaby-like opening is an earworm 20 years later.

“It was quite early on in our writing career that we wrote that,” Durant told Yahoo. “But I do like the song, and what I really like about it is that we found loads of music boxes and we isolated all the individual twangs from the music boxes and sampled them. That was one of the first times that we did something like that.”

The primetime placement of “Cosy in the Rocket” led to what felt like immediate success in the United States for the duo. They found themselves suddenly immersed in a world of music supervisors and production companies in Los Angeles that wanted to feature their music. For Durant and Clasmann, the sudden catapult to fame was surreal.

“We were a bit like a fish out of water,” Clasmann said. “It wasn’t quite what we were doing. It’s quite flattering that so many people hear your music and love the song, but everything around it sort of didn’t quite fit because we were still sort of [an] underground little band from the U.K. In some way, I’m quite impressed that they chose our song for a big TV series.”

The duo has since parted ways. Durant is now an illustrator and graphic designer, while Clasmann is a sound engineer and producer. But their collaborations live on in the numerous television shows their music was featured in, like Roswell, Nip/Tuck and The O.C., which Patsavas also worked on.

As for “Cosy in the Rocket,” Durant describes herself and Clasmann as the song’s “surrogate parents.”

“To me, it kind of doesn’t feel like it’s ours anymore,” Durant said of the song. “It feels like it’s sort of owned by Grey’s Anatomy a little bit because it’s had its own kind of momentum. We sort of set it free as soon as we’d written it.”

The international recognition that comes with being featured on Grey’s Anatomy also took Kieran Scragg, the lead singer of the British band the Buffseeds, by surprise. The band’s song “Sparkle Me,” was featured in Season 1, Episode 5.

It wasn’t new to American audiences, who first heard the track on an episode of One Tree Hill in 2004.

In Grey’s Anatomy, “Sparkle Me” plays during the ending monologue. The moment is somewhat revelatory for Meredith, who, up until that point, had loathed the responsibilities of being an adult. Suddenly she’s grateful to have grown up.

“It’s a love song. It’s kind of this thing for my future wife, as it were, at the time,” Scragg said about the track. “But it ended up on the end of the show, and they based the whole sort of final scene around it. It’s really strange to see.”

After the Buffseeds broke up in 2004, Scragg and his writing partner, Neil Reed, wrote the song “Heart of Stone” for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part Two. From there, Scragg founded My Hart Canyon Music, which composes trailer music for television shows, including Netflix’s The Crown and The Witcher.

“Having something on Grey’s was an enormous thing. It still is now,” he said. “So we can kind of trace that direct lineage of having a presence and having all those contacts and having that success early on to where we are now. It’s true to say that it’s life-changing.”

For Scragg, as with many artists whose songs were featured on Season 1 of Grey’s Anatomy, the opportunity remains once in a lifetime.

“It’s brilliant,” he said. “You feel like you’re winning the lottery, being in this situation.”