“I write to music”: the band Emerald Fennell listens to the most
It was the trailer we’d all been waiting for. When Emerald Fennell‘s trailer for the new Wuthering Heights dropped, there was a foggy moment of pause around the world. Was that, no, it can’t be, Charli XCX in the back of a literary adaptation helming from the 19th century? Has Fennell ever listened to music before 2025? Turns out, she knew exactly what she was doing.
The gothic, lascivious, and mercurial tendencies of Fennell’s direction are now considered mainstream. Think Saltburn, the phenomenon that saw Barry Keoghan fucking a grave and dancing naked in a mansion to ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’. Think 2012’s Anna Karenina, all the yearning and the pining caught in dazzling and dark mirror images.
Fennell doesn’t achieve this on her own; she looks elsewhere for inspiration. Elsewhere, Fennell has insisted that “I think music is so important to me, and it’s so important to my writing process because so much of my writing, almost all of my writing, is just done in my head in a kind of daydream, sort of fugue state, over the course of years. I always am listening to music.”
Although Fennell’s genius is derived from mental silence, it must draw foundational influence from some external stimuli. How else would it have such influence if not by naturally critiquing, echoing, or at least responding to the cultural events that precede it?
With this in mind, I challenge you to guess exactly what Fennell might listen to. It’s a task more difficult than you think. If it’s all Charli XCX and Dua Lipa, how does she paint that eerie heart at the core of her stories? If it’s all The Cure and Joy Division, for example, how does she get the kitsch, neon hyper-happiness of Barbie? Complex films certainly make for a complex taste.
But if forced to pick one artist, Fennell had an immediate and clear answer: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. It almost immediately makes sense: take the yearning, heartbreaking chorus of ‘Into my Arms’, where Cave wills, through confession, for a love to last forever. Take ‘Red Right Hand’, inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s shadowy, sultry, sinister.
In Fennell’s words, she admitted, “I write to music, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are the band I most frequently listen to while I do. Cave’s lyrics are just as much a pleasure to read as they are to listen to. Gothic, violent, and beautiful.”
It’s a great choice from a director who chose to include the woeful, ear-splitting bars of ‘Mr Brightside’ in Saltburn. The reader might ask themselves why Fennell didn’t opt to invite Nick Cave on board for the highly anticipated Wuthering Heights adaptation. While Cave often sings of the timeless moral discrepancies between good and bad, interrogating biblical symbolism and ageless questions of grief and desire, Charli XCX situates all this in the here and now, the lime-bike, neon-sign orange of a modern evening.
But this might be a better outcome than we could’ve previously hoped: While film-aholic Charli is on the soundtrack, Cave is in the writing. I don’t know about you, but I definitely prefer it that way around.
