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The new FX series Alien: Earth, as Consequence is currently tracking every week, features some eclectic music choices, including Nina Simone and TV on the Radio needle drops and end credits songs from Metallica, Black Sabbath, and more. But one of the show’s mysteries (until now) is a haunting invocation of the Cream song “Strange Brew,” which is heard for only a few seconds as the opening stinger at the beginning of each episode — serving as the show’s main title theme.
The Cream cover, it turns out, is an original piece created by series composer Jeff Russo and show creator Noah Hawley, the latter performing the vocals. As Russo tells Consequence, Hawley had mentioned that the “Strange Brew” lyric “kill what’s inside of you” was “very apropos of what we were doing, feeling-wise” while they were discussing how they’d open each episode. So then Hawley’s request became finding a way to mash the original Cream song up with the tone Russo was otherwise establishing with the show’s original music.
Hawley was in a band called Base Nation early in his career, and Russo says that “one of the reasons why we have such a great musical vernacular between us is because he has that vocabulary, so we can talk about music in ways that I can’t talk about with other filmmakers — unless they happen to be musicians.”
Russo immediately consulted with music supervisor Maggie Phillips to figure out how to get approval from Cream to cover the song, a kind of request she’s used to receiving from the two men. “Jeff and Noah, whenever they get into the studio and do this, it’s always the chicken before the egg, because I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know how I’m going to do it, clearance-wise,'” Phillips says. “But it all came together like magic for this one.”
To make sure they’d be able to get the “Strange Brew” rights, the production team had Hawley write a letter to Eric Clapton, a letter which included details like Hawley having been born the month that “Strange Brew” was released and the specific lyric that inspired their request: “Kill what’s inside of you” being, as Phillips puts it, “the monster inside of the characters in [Alien: Earth]. That was the lyrical tie-in, and the impetus for using the song for the main title sequence.”
In addition to the very short burst of song that opens each episode, Russo and Hawley have created a full-length “Strange Brew” cover that will be released on August 29th, which Phillips says is totally standalone. Phillips says that she wasn’t sure how the full cover would work: More specifically, she was wondering how they were going to make it sound Alien-y without making it sound as ’60s psychedelic as the original song. “Which is really not in the musical vernacular of the show,” Russo says. “Not even in the songs that we use, it doesn’t really appear.”
For Phillips, the full cover was ultimately a successful effort. “I was very, very wary. Like, the lyrics work for the main title sequence. But then to take it to the full standalone song — how are you going to translate it?” she says. “And then Noah sent it to me like two days later. I was like, holy fuck, they figured it out.”
It’s far from the first time Hawley and Russo have collaborated on music for an FX series: In 2018, they released It’s Always Blue: Songs From Legion, which featured covers of songs including The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl,” and another Cream song, “White Room.” Hawley and Russo also collaborated on a cover of “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby” (a song previously covered by Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch for the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?) that was featured in Fargo Season 2.
Russo refers to it as “our side project band — we have this band where we make these songs, and a lot of times, I think we both have absolutely no idea how we’re going to do something or what we’re going to do. I’d just sort of go in the studio and figure it out and—” Russo takes a moment to find some wood to knock on. “—And we’ve been quite lucky in hitting it on the head.”
“And I always feel like the manager of the band, trying to keep everybody in line,” Phillips adds.
Russo laughs at that. “It’s a really great analogy.”
New episodes of Alien: Earth premiere Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET on Hulu and at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on FX.
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