True Blood’s Music Supervisor Gary Calamar Talks ‘Bad Things,’ The Soundtrack, And The New Season

How do you capture the musical hearts and souls of vampires? Ask Gary Calamar, the Grammy-nominated music supervisor on HBO’s hit drama True Blood, and he’ll tell you there’s no real formula, but it does involve plenty of creative “freestyling.”

Thanks to Calamar’s infallible ear, the dark, swampy atmosphere of the fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana is represented with pitch-perfect clarity in each scene, due in large part to backing tracks from authentic Bayou State natives like Lucinda Williams, CC Adcock, Allen Toussaint, and the legendary Dr. John.

When Calamar isn’t hunting down songs for True Blood, Dexter, and House (to name a few), he’s busy juggling a radio show on KCRW; The Open Road, and writing a book about record stores across America. Lucky for us, he took some time out of his non-stop schedule to talk about what it’s been like to work on his second Alan Ball show (the first was Six Feet Under), what his process is for choosing those steamy backwoods tunes, and what musical highlights are featured in the the recently-released True Blood soundtrack, all in time for Sunday night’s season two premiere.

I heard that Alan Ball found the opening title song, Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ on iTunes, and you weren’t particularly taken with it at first. Yeah, it’s not that I wasn’t taken with it. It was almost too easy, or too perfect. It gave me the challenge to go out and try to find something even better.

Were there any runners up? We could never really come close. At the end of every conversation we never really got any better than what we had.

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