How Selena Gomez and Teddy Swims Landed on the ‘Nobody Wants This’ Season 2 Soundtrack

One of the most enjoyable staples of a great romantic comedy? Needle drops – songs defining heartbreak or love. In the case of Nobody Wants This, season two, it’s an eclectic mix of pop and country, and hit artists fitting for the hit series.

Chris Stapleton, Selena Gomez, and Kacey Musgraves are among the artists who help tell the story of Noah (Adam Brody) and Joanne’s (Kristen Bell) romance.

The company behind the soundtrack is Aperture Music. Manish Raval, Tom Wolfe, and Jonathan Leahy are the music supervisors behind Nobody Wants This. The trio previously secured music for shows such as Goosebumps, High Fidelity, and Loudermilk.

Recently, they spoke with What’s On Netflix about securing major artists and tunes for the second season of Nobody Wants This.

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Every day is a new day for you all. What’s a unique day or two in particular, putting together the soundtrack for Nobody Wants This?

Manish: Well, there’s a day when we think we’ve finished an episode, and then there’s a day a week later where we’re opening up the episode and changing music. So, I think up until we went to the premiere, that was the first moment where we thought, okay, we’re done working on this. 

This was a roller coaster of so much music changing at the last minute — past the last minute in many cases. So we took on a very ambitious project of trying to make a big soundtrack with all these exclusive songs. With that comes the ups and downs of having to be on your toes at all times. But relatively speaking, it was nothing crazy to us. It was all fun and games because we were making something really cool.

What were some songs on this soundtrack that were big victories, like, “We made this happen”?

Manish: We have an original Selena Gomez song in the show. That was one of the first things we went into the soundtrack asking for and wanting, just knowing we were going to have our home base, Interscope Records. It took a long time for us to get the track to us and negotiate, and it was a very special track to Selena. I think she was actually going to want to release it herself on her birthday and everything, so we were trying to figure it out, trying to convince her to let us have it for the show and things like that. So, that was one that we really just didn’t know until very late in the game whether we were going to get that song or not.

Any other songs that involved chasing down?

Jonathan: Well, Teddy Swims, I think, was another really key, important one that felt really special. I don’t recall how many songs, but I feel like we got three from Teddy to choose from.

Manish: We got a lot to choose from. We had four or five songs of his that we were kind of going through, and we just immediately settled on “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” in the spot that we put it in. We were like, okay, this is done, winner.

Jonathan: And then some of them — since the question is about things that were tough and took a lot of extra effort — some of them were there from the very beginning. Cuco’s “Homesick” was in the mix from the very beginning, but for reasons that we won’t bore you with, it ended up becoming super, super complicated all the way until the very end.

I actually like those boring details.

Jonathan: I think some of the details behind that headache are things that we wouldn’t want to share publicly, but it was just business affairs headaches that Manish was sorting out — the final logistics of Cuco the night of the premiere, all the way until the end.

For music supervisors, is that common? Do some songs go that far down to the wire? 

Jonathan: Well, like Manish was saying, the reason why soundtracks like this don’t happen is because working with unreleased material is so complex, and you run into nearly unsolvable problems. Certainly, unsolvable on a normal TV deadline. And there are songs on big pop albums that are on Spotify right now where the label still isn’t quite sure who wrote them or what the publishing splits are.

Manish: Including some released songs that we used in the show. We were still trying to clear them, and the publishers were like, oh, we don’t have the splits for this song yet. And it’s on Spotify. It’s like, wow.

Jonathan: So, trying to do an 18-song soundtrack where everything is unreleased just takes a lot of extra effort from everybody.

Cuco, being a California artist, is fitting for the Los Angeles location for the show. Any other California artists you wanted to highlight in Nobody Wants This?

Manish: Well, I think we started with a big net. We quickly zoned in on what Jack Giroux Erin Foster’s taste is, and it’s not too far from what season one was. We loved the music in season one, but it had a very pop-centric soundtrack, so we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We thought that worked great, and she definitely responded more to pop artists — whether we had a bunch of existing songs by Selena and Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter — so we had all of their existing music. 

We just knew if this is the stuff she likes, then coming to her with new stuff makes sense. Then when we are going to get new stuff, we can venture off into Role Model, Teddy Swims, and artists within that world. Cuco is sort of an outlier. He’s a little bit indie, and Royal & the Serpent, that was a little bit of us pushing the boundary of indie rock, alt-rock, which still kind of feels in the same ballpark as what the soundtrack sounds like.

What about pop country tracks? That’s new to the show as well. 

Manish: Simon Tikhman, who is Erin’s husband — who in real life is not a hot rabbi; he’s not a rabbi — he’s actually a music manager and publisher and label owner of The Core. They’re based out of Nashville, and they have a country roster, so he is who we kind of partnered with. 

On the soundtrack, it was a production of The Core and Interscope Records, so Simon brought a lot of the country flavor to the show. I think it’s something that he is always going around the office playing, and therefore probably in their home, and so every now and then, Erin would say, “Simon’s got this artist who I love, Baylee Lynn, and maybe we can try to listen to some of her tracks.” And so, it was one of those things where Simon helped us expand the palette by having a lot of these up-and-coming country artists.

Crew members, whether it’s costume designers or music supervisors, usually have to work hard to stretch dollars. How do you do that on Nobody Wants This? 

Tom: We were lucky. We had a great label partner that helped us and funneled us some great artists and worked with us on fees. It’s always a juggling act. But we were also fortunate that we had a product that people wanted to be a part of. We didn’t have to push hard to get people interested, so that was a big, big help. But it is always a challenge. We did have a hefty budget, but you still had to work within it.

Do they ever write song choices in the scripts?

Manish: I think there were a couple things written in — I don’t think that we used them. I can’t remember what was written in it. There’s a cello player who is playing in one of the episodes, and I think there was some stuff written in for them. We knew at the time what was written in was going to be very expensive. I think it was, like, a U2 song or something. It was one of those things where we just take those as a template for what they want. Jenni Konner, who came on to showrun with Erin, is someone we’ve worked with for over a decade now. Our experience with her is she knows that unless it’s set in stone, we’re not going to write it in. It’s like, you guys will figure it out at some point.

Before wrapping up, I did want to ask about a show that found new life on Netflix, Loudermilk, which was a great show. How fulfilling was it seeing people find that show? 

Tom: Very gratifying. I mean, I think that’s a first for us — where we had a project, it aired, no one saw it, no one was aware of it at all, and then it had a second life on Netflix.

Manish: I mean, none [other] this way. There was Donnie Darko in a weird culty way, but the Loudermilk thing is something that you just can’t explain. Netflix gave it a whole new life.

Is there an album that really brings the three of you together? 

Tom: [Wilco’s] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Jonathan: Maybe that could be it. That could be it. That could be it. That might be it. I was about to say, what’s funny is we each have albums and artists that we tease each other mercilessly about because we’re each weird superfans from old things in the past. And I know the one that they bust me for — they’re basically like, “Do not pitch Pavement for this scene again. Enough. Pavement is not going to work in the show.” And Tom loves Todd Rundgren. If I ask Tom for an idea — “Hey, you got any ideas for this scene on this other project?” — Todd Rundgren. Manish has his own things as well — inside baseball — but we have our own things that we love on a personal level.