#FORTNITE FOR THE DAMAGED CODA TV#

In each case, this placement has resulted in an outsize spike in interest in the song. Rick and Morty’s co-creator Justin Roiland (Dan Harmon is the other) has also chosen unexpected tracks by bands like Belly, Mazzy Star, and Chaos Chaos for emotional, episode-ending sequences. “The rest of your career you just struggle to make good records, go on tour, then one thing like this has more impact than anything.”Īcross its three seasons. “It really makes you feel like you have no say in what happens in your career,” says Blonde Redhead’s drummer, Simone Pace. Makino says a friend’s 12-year-old daughter in Italy told her that kids in her class sing the wordless melody at each other when someone makes a mistake, and they don’t even watch Rick and Morty. “For the Damaged Coda” also became a meme, playing over clips of Fortnite fails and dopey characters getting clowned on SpongeBob SquarePants. The most streamed song by punk godheads Fugazi, whose member Guy Picciotto co-produced Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, is at just over 16 million. For some more perspective, the most streamed song on Spotify by Sonic Youth, the indie rock pioneers and the band that Blonde Redhead was most compared to in 2000, is at close to 18 million. Today, “For the Damaged Coda” has been streamed over 27 million times on Spotify, which is 23 million more times than the second-most streamed Blonde Redhead song.

#FORTNITE FOR THE DAMAGED CODA TV#

Over the course of their career, the music of Blonde Redhead has been used in movies, commercials, and TV shows, even getting a coveted placement on Grey’s Anatomy back in 2007, but none of these syncs had a cultural impact anywhere near what happened with Rick and Morty.

15 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart, 17 years after it was first released.

In the following weeks, “For the Damaged Coda” was streamed and downloaded so many times that it reached No. Then during last year’s third season, after Rick and Morty had amassed a now fanatical fan base, “For the Damaged Coda” played once again as it became clear that Evil Morty had engineered a conspiracy to get himself elected as the leader of the Citadel of Ricks and murder anyone who might challenge his power. The song soundtracked the revelation that (okay, bear with me) an Evil Morty was the mastermind behind a plot to travel across alternate dimensions, killing Ricks and kidnapping other Mortys to get the attention of the show’s central Rick, and now that Evil Morty was roaming undetected in the Citadel of Ricks, an intergalactic society governed by the Council of Ricks. Makino says she only vaguely remembers being approached to approve it. Once that’s done, you realize, ‘Wow, this is actually going to go out there.’ And beyond that, basically it’s out of your hands.”įourteen years later, “For the Damaged Coda” was used in the final moments of an episode of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty during the cartoon’s first season. Just over two-and-a-half minutes long, it was named “For the Damaged Coda.” Thinking back to that late night in the studio, Makino says, “Because you’re in such a cocoon, you have this very strong sensation that no one is going to listen to this music. This new song would become the album’s eleventh track, so it went unlisted on the back of the packaging. Makino figured they’d probably end up with ten songs, so she wrote out a convoluted run-on sentence and chopped it into ten parts for the track titles. The project had been behind schedule, and earlier in the recording process, their label Touch & Go told them they needed to get the album art done. Instead they layered about 20 takes of Makino doing it herself, becoming, as she says, “an army of my voice.”

Makino originally envisioned it being done by a choir with lots of children, but they couldn’t afford that. Then either Makino or her bandmate Amedeo Pace - they can’t remember which - had the idea to add wordless vocals of the song’s melody: aaaaah-aah-aah-aah-aaah-aah-aah. They’d also recorded a more dramatic, extended piano vamp for the song, but weren’t sure what to do with it. They had already finished a melancholy song called “For the Damaged” where co-lead vocalist Kazu Makino sang resignedly over delicate piano and a sparse acoustic guitar. The New York–based indie rock trio were almost done making their fifth album, Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons. Late one night in early 2000, the members of Blonde Redhead were in a barn outside of Seattle that had been converted into a recording studio.

Fortnite for the damaged coda