Making the pilot, Shonda and I really felt it was important to have a sound you hadn’t really heard on television up until now,” says Grey’s Anatomy executive producer Betsy Beers. She and Shonda Rhimes, along with former music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, are largely responsible for the show’s distinctive soundtrack. They wanted, she says, “a musical style that reflected the characters—a bunch of young, scrappy, ambitious, focused, confused people—all of whom are learning what they’re doing, and they’re getting good at it, but you’re watching them make mistakes. And Alex had access to exactly what we wanted: young, scrappy people who were musicians. In a television show with so many characters, one of the easiest ways of tracking thematically is if you place a song behind it, which actually wasn’t…
