Tegan,
How much of the television show Grey’s Anatomy have you watched? According to the internet, there are 18 seasons and 388 episodes. Can you believe that? Incredible. I found this color-coded chart mapping the life cycle of the main cast and series regulars on Wikipedia that reminds me of the Periodic Table.
In 2005, when our career was blooming thanks to college radio play of our song “Walking with a Ghost” and a tour supporting the relatively new but explosively popular band The Killers, what really changed our lives, arrived in a padded envelope. Inside was the pilot episode of a yet-to-air show about a group of doctors in Seattle. We’d never been presented with a financial opportunity that could change our lives overnight. It wasn’t winning the lottery and retiring kind of money but, it was a down payment on an apartment kind of money. There was no debate. Though I do recall you insisting that we send the DVD to J. so she could review it and tell us if it was legitimate. (J was in medical school, and is now an OBGYN)
Grey’s Anatomy would go on to license many of our songs from So Jealous, but it was the connection viewers made to Where Does the Good Go that stood out.
The decision to let our music be licensed became a regular topic of conversation with fans at concerts and much discussed in interviews with the press. “Selling Out,” was still a thing people were concerned about back then, though we did all we could to dismiss the notion. As teenagers, we’d discovered Juliana Hatfield watching My So Called Life, so we knew firsthand how powerful a musical moment on television could be.
Where Does The Good Go has now been used in multiple seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, and even covered by other bands for the show. Eighteen years later it still has legs. When we launched our Tik Tok account last year, one of our first videos was a simple 60-second answer to a question about Grey’s Anatomy. It has almost a million views. Thank you, Shonda Rhimes and Grey’s Anatomy devotees!
This is why doing an annotation for the lyrics of the song felt super strange. It was almost like the history of the song completely changed (or was overshadowed?) I did my best, check it out.
Sara
PS. Until this afternoon I had never seen this episode. So funny to see Sandra Oh dancing to your song!
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