The soundtrack to Bill Hader’s life: “Really important”
Every famous person has thought about it. What would the soundtrack to your life be? Beyond the fact that it’s better to have a niche answer prepared, rather than admitting the last thing you listened to was Ed Sheeran, it’s a pertinent question: What typifies the way your world spins? One celebrity who has this down is Bill Hader.
The American actor, comedian, writer, and director has had a vast and varied career that shows no signs of slowing down, which first took off on Saturday Night Live, on which he was a cast member from 2005 to 2013, earning four Primetime Emmy Award nominations, and forget playing a different character across different projects; try playing four or five different roles a night, which begs the question: how do you summate a wildly extravagant experience like that, both on and off the screen?
Turns out, Hader doesn’t need to speculate: He knows. Luckily enough, he was asked to delineate a soundtrack for Pitchfork. The finished result includes seven albums from musicians across a wide span of genres, like rap, heavy metal, and folk. The first pick goes all the way back to the sonic palette of his childhood: the swaggy 1980s fashion, the neon lights at the fair in Tulsa, the boom in hair metal bands, and back then, Hader would listen to Hysteria by Def Leppard “top to bottom”, seemingly only pausing the onslaught of slamming guitars to re-adjust his rat tail.
Hysteria might have been the only tape Hader listened to, but it certainly wasn’t the only album, because the actor had one record on his Walkman, and it was a slight turn away from the heavy arena rock of Def Leppard, and quite different, in fact, was the second album by The Breeders, Last Splash, haunted by the vocal harmonies of Kim and Kelley Deal. If we were to picture the scene this tune soundtracked, it’d be outdoors, in a garden: Hader revealed of the record, “I used to earn money mowing lawns […] as I mowed, I would listen to Last Splash.”
Finally, when he left Tulsa behind, Hader branched out into a different kind of groove. Like most of us, he first associated Radiohead with the band that performed ‘Creep’. Thankfully, he moved to Arizona for community college; it was when driving around with a friend that he first stumbled on OK Computer.
You could go so far as to say that Radiohead made Hader’s career, with him writing, “I was at a turning point in my life, too: Am I going to be fake, or am I going to be genuine?”, and in reckoning with the unknown, Hader experienced a new kind of fear, which is “probably why Radiohead was really important.”
Fast-forward, finally, to the SNL years; more specifically, when John Mulaney had just joined the show. Mulaney was a “massive Bob Dylan” fan, in Hader’s words; out of camaraderie, Hader began to investigate the cultural icon. Though his soundtrack list nods to records like Blonde on Blonde and Desire, Hader’s favourite album is Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s 1975 album that expanded upon the notion of a break-up album.
Hader then chose another artist he deemed just like Dylan: Kendrick Lamar. He wrote: “I was listening to Kendrick’s Good Kid, MAAD City a lot. It was kind of like listening to Bob Dylan – Kendrick is just someone who can get to finite humanity, to the very basic thing.” When Lamar performed on the show, Hader recalls being horribly shy, throwing a half-hearted compliment his way before scurrying off into the shadows of the back-stage shenanigans. Lamar’s hip-hop groove will forever soundtrack that time, no matter if the pair aren’t quite friends.
Two other great choices lead us to the end of Hader’s list: David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. What does Hader’s soundtrack tell us about his world? One word comes to mind: Cinematic.
The soundtrack to Bill Hader’s life:
- Hysteria – Def Leppard
- Last Splash – The Breeders
- Radiohead – OK Computer
- David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
- Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
- Kendrick Lamar – Good Kid, MAAD City
- Bob Dylan- Blood on the Tracks
