Thomas Golubić has picked the songs for some of the most acclaimed television of the last two decades: Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Six Feet Under, The Walking Dead, Poker Face, and Apple TV's Silo. He's a four-time Emmy nominee, a two-time Grammy nominee, and a former president of the Guild of Music Supervisors, and he runs the Los Angeles-based supervision company SuperMusicVision.
On this episode of Soundstripe Sessions, Thomas sits down with Jeff Perkins to talk through his winding road into the job (film school, a stint as a war correspondent, a volunteer radio gig at KCRW), an underground project where he secretly rescored full movies for club audiences, how he landed Six Feet Under, and the real story behind picking "Baby Blue" for the Breaking Bad finale. He also breaks down what actually makes a sync licensing brief work, which is a question every composer and catalog trying to get a song placed on a scripted show should sit with for a minute.
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A Boston childhood, a Kubrick obsession, and the pull toward art
Jeff opened by asking Thomas about his path into the industry, and the conversation started years before he ever thought of it as a job.
Jeff Perkins: Let's start with a little bit about your origin story. Where did you grow up, where did you go to school?
Thomas Golubić: I grew up in the Boston area. My dad was a marine biologist and a professor at Boston University, so I grew up around academia. He's from Croatia, part of former Yugoslavia, and left in the mid-'60s for Germany, where he met my mom. She's from the north of Germany but was living in the south at the time. They fell in love, had a long-distance relationship, and eventually he got an opportunity to teach at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, which is where I was born. We moved to Princeton, New Jersey for a while and then ended up in Boston. We also spent a few years back in Germany, in Hamburg, where I went to school and learned English when I moved back around age six. I've been faking my accent ever since.
That upbringing turned me into a movie and music obsessive. When I was ten, my dad took me to the tenth-anniversary screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at a small theater near Boston University. I was completely mesmerized. I asked to see it again immediately afterward, which was probably an early sign something was wrong with me at that age, because it's not an easy movie. But I loved the experience of being hypnotized, and how the music and the images danced with each other. I didn't understand most of it, but I knew somebody really smart was doing something really interesting.
Jeff Perkins: There's probably no song more memorable as part of a movie than the music from that film.
Thomas Golubić: Are you thinking of "The Blue Danube," or the main theme?
Jeff Perkins: The main theme.
Thomas Golubić: That film is still a guiding light for me. Stanley Kubrick hired Alex North to score it, and then never used the score, because he felt it couldn't compete with the songs he'd used as placeholders. So what you're watching is really his curatorial ability, and his interest in avant-garde music mixed with something like "The Blue Danube," which was a waltz used in polite society for men and women to have a romantic interchange. To use that piece for two space capsules doing this slow, sexual dance is sheer genius. It's the kind of exciting thinking good filmmakers do, and to me it's still a benchmark for the exciting use of a needle drop.
That moment didn't immediately translate into "I want to work in movies," though. Thomas's parents were both immigrants, and there was an implied pressure that he needed a responsible job. Art was a hobby, not a career.
Thomas Golubić: I kept drifting more and more toward art and culture, especially movies, especially international and independent film. It was the late '80s, Jim Jarmusch was making interesting movies, and there was a sense that ordinary people who weren't in Hollywood could make interesting underground films and actually make a living at it, or so it seemed. So I went to film school. Halfway through, I got pulled toward journalism instead, because the war in the former Yugoslavia was happening and I was actively writing about it.
I went to Boston University and graduated with a film degree, but by then my heart had moved elsewhere. I don't think the faculty at BU at the time had many great filmmakers teaching. It felt more like people who had tried and failed. Some were genuinely interesting, though. One professor, Ray Carney, was deeply into John Cassavetes and introduced me to his work, which really drove my interest in making movies. But when you grow up with immigrant parents, you take a more practical approach, and at the time journalism seemed more practical.
From war correspondent to KCRW: how a radio gig became a way into music supervision
Jeff Perkins: What brought you back into film and entertainment from journalism?
Thomas Golubić: I drifted around a lot. I worked as a journalist in former Yugoslavia from '91 to '92, which was a pretty extreme experience. When I came back to the States, I lived in New York for a year and looked into diplomacy, then a law degree. I took the LSATs and actually walked out partway through. I realized that wasn't the world I wanted to be in.
I worked as a consultant for a while, trying to help explain what was happening in former Yugoslavia, and I was pretty disappointed by how little curiosity there was. Everybody wanted me to reinforce their existing biases, and I began to realize that was the climate of journalism at the time, especially for international stories. So I pivoted. I worked in Portland, Oregon doing copywriting and ad agency work, then moved to Los Angeles to write a book, a pretentious comparison of the fall of Rome to the end of the American empire. It was god-awful, and I abandoned it, thankfully.
Around that time I started volunteering at KCRW, the public radio station in Los Angeles, doing freelance writing and graphic design to get by. I also started an internet magazine that went belly up. It was too early, and there was no economic model for it. So I found myself volunteering at KCRW, which led me deeply into music. I was broke, which turned out to be a gift, because I couldn't afford to go home for the holidays. All the other DJs would travel and leave me to cover their shows. I studied what they did carefully and found ways to both honor what they were expressing and add my own flavor to it. It was a wonderful experience.
Thomas says he was always into music, not just once he got the radio gig. He and his high school friends still run a podcast today where they debate deep cuts across different eras.
Thomas Golubić: When you have a music addiction, it's kind of a lifelong problem. It's like being around somebody doing drugs for the first time and realizing you have a different relationship to it than they do. Music is sort of my problem.
His first records were a Star Wars disco remix and an ABBA record, but the albums that really shaped him were Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album, gifts his father brought back from long stretches away for work.
Thomas Golubić: Those records were like being given a Bible. I studied every part of them. I could play every instrument in my mind. I think it was also a way of processing a missing dad. It filled in a space somehow.
That story led Jeff to bring up Aaron Sprinkle, one of Soundstripe's own composers, who first heard the Beatles on a friend's Walkman as a kid and says he was never the same after.
Thomas Golubić: The Walkman is actually really important for a certain generation, and I was that generation too. Before that, you had a little suitcase record player you'd flip over, and you couldn't go anywhere with it. Once the Walkman showed up, you were painting your world with music everywhere, which I think is a key ingredient for storytellers. It might be one of the most important instruments in the development of music supervision.
He and Jeff also talked about what's been lost in the move from vinyl and record stores to total accessibility. Thomas didn't grow up with much money, so buying a record in Boston meant a twenty-minute walk to a bus, a train into the city, and a real gamble on $4.99 you couldn't easily spare.
Thomas Golubić: You were so invested in hoping it was great, because you'd spent real money on it and only had so much to spend. When you're a kid today, everything is the same value, streamed for free, and I think there's something disappointing about that. It applies to movies too. There's something powerful about having to work for the experience of art. I think that's one of the shames of what tech companies have done to ownership and value in music, and I hope younger people find a way to adjust.
Bootlegging movies: the story behind Synchronize
Before music supervision became a career, Thomas spent a stretch DJing full feature films, an underground project that eventually caught the attention of studio lawyers.
Jeff Perkins: Before you got into music supervision, you were taking full feature films and rescoring them live and then screening them. Tell me about that.
Thomas Golubić: It was really successful until lawyers began to get in touch. The project was called Synchronize. It started when a couple of friends showed up at my place in Beachwood Canyon, extremely high after a party got broken up by the cops. I put them in front of my TV, turned the sound off on a movie, and started DJing it live. They were completely mesmerized and asked if I could do it again with other people around.
This was around the same time as Six Feet Under, when I wasn't getting hired much and was frustrated by that. I thought a good experiment would be to study films I loved and figure out how the music actually worked in them: where it breaks, how it fits, what makes it effective. I'd mark time code in and time code out, matching cues to picture, and use my skills as a DJ and my analytical sense of storytelling to reinterpret the film with entirely different music. I was doing something similar on a KCRW radio show called The Great Escape, building imaginary soundtracks for films using dialogue samples and music that was never actually in the movie.
Synchronize became a club residency. It started with twenty people, then forty, then a hundred, until a lawyer called and told him to stop. He'd shut it down for a while, then start again. Over a couple of years, he rescored around thirty-two different films this way, always live, never recorded.
Thomas Golubić: If I did my job well and you'd never seen the film before, you'd never know anything had changed. I love a bakery, because a bakery knows that tomorrow all those beautiful things are going to be stale. If you saw it, you saw it. If you didn't, it didn't happen. Also, honestly, for copyright reasons. I never asked permission for any of it.
Among his favorites: a Willy Wonka rescore built around hip-hop beats matched to the Oompa Loompa songs' tempos, a Road Warrior mashup of Prodigy-style rave tracks against Deep Purple-style guitar rock, an ambient and electronic pass on Blade Runner, and a version of The Graduate that swapped in contemporary artists like Arcade Fire and Kings of Convenience for some of the film's second half. He still does the occasional rescore overseas, now mixed live in Ableton rather than on turntables.
Landing Six Feet Under
Jeff Perkins: So you get through Six Feet Under. That's probably your big break. What comes next?
Before that break, though, Thomas spent time interning for music supervisor G. Marq Roswell, then worked as a coordinator on independent films alongside his friend Gary Calamar, a fellow KCRW DJ. He went out on his own for a documentary about burlesque, then a small indie film that unexpectedly made it to Sundance and got picked up.
Thomas Golubić: At the end of that, I got lucky and heard about a script for a new HBO series. The assistant editor on that project had watched me navigate a genuinely brutal situation between a director and a producer who'd been best friends and started fighting, firing each other, both calling me at night to say they wanted to start from scratch. I tried not to take sides and just be practical and helpful, and she was impressed enough to say she thought I could be right for this thing. That turned out to be Six Feet Under.
I did everything I could to get that meeting, and even though I didn't have much experience beyond one independent film, I made the best pitch I could. I was listening to a lot of contemporary music at the time, and the show was set in Los Angeles with a family spanning different generations, so it clicked. When I realized I couldn't do it alone, I called Gary and asked him to do it with me. I'm glad I did, because we were very yin and yang, with different approaches to music, and I think battling it out between us over what we wanted to present was genuinely valuable. That was the beginning of the music supervision career.
Even with a hit show under his belt, work didn't follow automatically.
Thomas Golubić: Nobody would hire me after that. My former partner Gary was working on True Blood and getting projects left and right, and I was miserable watching that happen. I ended up not working very much for a couple of years and struggling. Luckily I don't come from money, so I'd already learned to live with really bare means, which I think is one of the great lessons for anyone who wants to work in this industry: keep your expenses low, because you don't know how long it'll be until the next check comes in.
An AMC executive eventually reached out about a new show set at an ad agency. Thomas put some ideas together and helped a little with the main title, but the network hired Alexandra Patsavas to supervise. That show was Mad Men. When AMC's next project came around, they invited Thomas in.
Thomas Golubić: I was one of the last people they met with, and I think I was the only one who didn't compliment the temp music already in the pilot. Vince asked what I thought of the episode, and I said it was one of the best hours of television I'd ever seen. He asked what I thought of the music, and I said I didn't like it at all, that they should get rid of all of it and start from scratch. He was taken aback by that. I think sometimes being honest is what helps you connect with brave people, and Vince is a very brave person. We've had an incredible collaboration ever since.
That show was Breaking Bad.
No temp music: how Vince Gilligan's shows actually get scored
Thomas has now worked with Vince Gilligan across Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Pluribus, and he says the process looks different depending on the project.
Jeff Perkins: How does the collaboration work between you, the directors, and the showrunners? How much give do you have?
Thomas Golubić: It's different for every project, but one thing that's always been important to me is that I don't advocate for one choice. My job is to present as many options as the production is willing to review, but a handful that I genuinely think are creatively interesting and contributing to the storytelling. The important part is that they make the choice that works for them. If none of the options land, I want them to say so, and I'll go back and present more. I don't believe in fighting for one answer being the right one. Art is collaborative, and everyone has to feel like they're arriving at the right solution together.
Vince is a very confident leader with a clear vision, and he likes people around him who'll speak their minds. I'm not an advocate the way some people who work for licensing companies are, pushing a specific song because they love the band. My job is to be a storyteller and to honor the story and the characters, working closely with the editor, the writer, the producer, the director, and the showrunner. I want to give people five strong options I can articulate a reason for, whether that's a lyrical detail or, more often, an emotional value: what does this bring out of the story, out of the characters, out of the scene? Is my job to mute a moment, sit in the background, or take a forward role and articulate a deeper subtext?
To me, cleverness is the worst part of music supervision. If it's really good storytelling, it should feel invisible, the same way good editing does. A lot of times, awards go to the loudest choice, not the best one, and the best choice is usually the invisible one.
For Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Pluribus specifically, there's no temp score and almost never a placeholder song in the cut.
Thomas Golubić: Vince's belief, which I strongly agree with, is that temp music lets editors make lazy choices, because you can use music to paper over a bad transition or a lack of chemistry between two actors. Cutting clean forces you to find the right way to deliver the story without leaning on music to hide a problem. That's when I actually know what I can do with music.
We review a very clean cut together in long spotting sessions, five or six hours for a one-hour episode, with sound design, score, a music editor, and an editor all in the room, having an open conversation about the best way to tell the story. Because we're that precise about what we deliver, everyone knows their role by the end of that session. Other shows are more conventional and carry a lot of temp music in the cut, which means a lot of my job becomes stopping editors from going to YouTube and finding something completely unaffordable or unclearable. They'll find a young Russian singer from 1963 and have no idea it's never going to clear, or drop in the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" without realizing it's both unaffordable and has been used a hundred times before on better projects.
So a lot of my job is reading scripts ahead of time, spotting where music could live, and sometimes building a set of counterintuitive source-as-score opportunities, a song that could bridge a sequence or turn a scene where the dialogue isn't critical into more of a montage built around gesture. By the time editors get the dailies, I've already got a folder of ideas ready for them to try against the footage, which also lets me get a jump on clearance if there's going to be a problem.
Thomas Golubić: My thinking is always that it's our job to service each department with whatever they need. It's important not to put a thumb on the scale, to treat each department with respect and care, and to actually listen to their feedback rather than being an advocate for what I personally think is right.
The story behind "Baby Blue"
The Breaking Bad finale needed one of the most consequential single needle drops in the show's run, and the choice wasn't Thomas's.
Jeff Perkins: You went with "Baby Blue" by Badfinger for the finale. How did you land on that song?
Thomas Golubić: Full disclosure, that was Vince Gilligan's choice. We thought we were going to get cancelled literally every season through season three, so it was only in season four that there was real confidence we'd get another season. By the time we reached the end, we knew we were doing something special and we knew we had to close it in an exciting way.
I'd spent years pulling together my favorite songs that never made it into the show, tracks that felt like part of the culture we'd built. I was about to send those off to the editors before we'd even seen any footage, hoping to build a whole sequence around one of them, when I got a call from Vince saying he thought he might have found the song. He said he'd heard it on his treadmill. I honestly didn't get it at first. It read as a straightforward love song, and I didn't understand what he was doing with it. I asked if he was still open to other ideas, and he said absolutely, send them over.
Before I even got feedback on those other options, the footage came in. When I saw the overhead shot of Walter White touching the boiler, I understood immediately: it's a love song, and that's exactly right. The first line is "I guess I got what I deserve," which is such a typical, perfect Vince Gilligan landing. I never in a million years would have guessed that would be the song, but once I saw it against picture, I knew.
I think Vince is a little like Stanley Kubrick in that he can do everyone's job, but doesn't have time to, so he hires people he hopes will surprise him once in a while. That was 100 percent Vince, and I love it to death now, partly because it wasn't mine. I love presenting five ideas and then having it be out of my hands. It's a choice, and that choice helps me understand the next one. I don't feel like I need to look back on it negatively. Everything that's there was meant to be there.
Asked whether he has a single favorite placement across his career, Thomas said no, for a related reason.
Thomas Golubić: Once you've finished a piece of art, it's done. You don't need to relitigate it. On Pluribus, Vince loves hearing other people's interpretation of what the show is about, and I feel the same way about music choices. I'd rather hear what you thought of them. I just feel lucky to serve. I don't think a chef ever thinks, "I wish we'd done a better fish that night." You just know that when someone leaves the restaurant smiling, that might have been the best fish they've had.
What Good Fellas gets right about music and character
Thomas pointed to two projects outside his own work as models for how music should function inside a story.
Jeff Perkins: Is there a music placement you didn't do that you wish you had?
Thomas Golubić: Good Fellas is one of the perfect examples of music supervision to me, along with The Sopranos. The music in both doesn't feel like the esoteric choice of a director with a specific fetish. It's the characters. It's what the characters would actually sign off on. The Sopranos never pretended those guys were cool or cutting-edge. They weren't. But the music that played meant something to them, and that authenticity is really valuable.
Good Fellas opens with Tony Bennett, and it's a rags-to-riches story: starting with nothing and moving toward something. Tony isn't Frank Sinatra, the slick winner. He's the guy around the block with a nice voice, and that's what those characters felt like they were. Later, in the cocaine sequence, the music turns ragged and aggressive, Muddy Waters, an unusually hard-edged Harry Nilsson track, cut in a way that's exciting because editor Thelma Schoonmaker lets music be a texture that's big and bold in the middle of a scene. Music follows character there, and it can be ragged, surprising, and messy in a way that's still transportive. Done the wrong way, that same instinct becomes indulgent and dumb.
Thomas Golubić: No offense to The Bear, but I don't love the music in that show, because it feels like somebody's favorite mixtape rather than something that has to do with the world of the characters. I know there are a lot of Chicago bands in there, but it takes me out of it. It's not bad, it's just not my thing. It feels indulgent, like someone jammed all their favorite bands into the show rather than telling a story with them.
How to write a music brief that actually gets used
Soundstripe's music team flagged Thomas as someone who writes especially strong briefs when pitching for placements, so Jeff asked him to walk through what actually goes into one.
Jeff Perkins: What's the secret to writing a really good brief for music companies, so they can supply the right songs from their catalog?
Thomas Golubić: Music supervisors are dependent on their licensing partners, because most of the time we can't afford whatever the showrunner or editors first fall in love with. We need real economic parameters, and we need to work with people we trust, where if we say we have a certain budget all-in, they can tell us honestly whether that's realistic. In the early days, I built most of what I needed from my own collection, but as you take on more shows, drawing only from your own collection runs into too many clearance and cost problems. You have to lean on a wider ecosystem of people.
The problem is that if you don't articulate what you're looking for clearly, and I'm sure you've seen briefs like this, "spunky but also kind of depressed," people have no idea what that means. We try to road test ideas ahead of time. If we've already had a spotting session, I'll ask a lot of questions about the tonal qualities we're after and throw out reference ideas to get feedback. Then I can say, here are three or four songs that capture three or four different approaches. One might be very literal lyrically. One might be in another language, which signals we have permission to go there as long as the tone holds. One might be purely instrumental. If it's a period piece, I'll say we need to stay within a specific time window. Links help too. On our website, we keep a record of everything that's gone into a season once it airs, so people can go look at what we used on a comparable show and understand the register we're working in.
Thomas Golubić: The people who really put in the effort deliver strong ideas, and over time we naturally stop sending briefs to people who consistently send us things that clearly have nothing to do with what we asked for, because it's wasting everyone's time. I work on a lot of projects simultaneously to keep two people on staff paid, so if a brief goes out too broadly or too vaguely and people are digging through material and getting frustrated, or I have to reject a round and ask for another, that's a real cost. So we try to do our job with a lot of detail and clarity, with enough range that people understand exactly which directions they have permission to explore, and then we actually judge what comes back carefully.
We also ask people to limit how much they send. If I say I want ten songs, there's no chance you have more than ten viable options in your catalog for this specific ask. Sticking to that means you're respecting my time and my team's time. And getting the metadata right is its own form of respect. If it's put together properly, I can come back to a song years later, know the songwriters, know the licensing company even if it's changed hands, and follow up. If you don't do that, you're not respecting my time or my energy.
Advice for music supervisors starting out
Jeff Perkins: If you could go back to eighteen-year-old Thomas at BU trying to figure it all out, what's one piece of advice you'd give yourself?
Thomas Golubić: Always figure out how you can help. A lot of young people I meet who are interested in music supervision, or film and television generally, come in with a sense of "what can you do for me," and I think that's a huge drawback in this industry, maybe a generational one. The briefs my team writes now are strong because they've internalized that same instinct: thinking about what someone else actually needs and figuring out how to deliver that. I think that's the key to success across pretty much the entire entertainment industry.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Thomas Golubić?
Thomas Golubić is a Los Angeles-based music supervisor and the founder of SuperMusicVision. He's a four-time Emmy nominee and two-time Grammy nominee, and a former president of the Guild of Music Supervisors. His credits include Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Six Feet Under, The Walking Dead, Poker Face, Pluribus, and Apple TV's Silo.
Why don't Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Pluribus use temp music?
Showrunner Vince Gilligan prefers to cut scenes without a placeholder score or songs in place. According to Thomas Golubić, this stops editors from leaning on music to paper over a rough transition or weak chemistry between actors, and forces the strongest possible cut before music is added. The team then reviews the clean cut together in long spotting sessions before any music is chosen.
Who chose "Baby Blue" by Badfinger for the Breaking Bad finale?
The choice was Vince Gilligan's. Thomas Golubić has said he'd built out a different set of song options before any finale footage existed, but once the footage came in, including the overhead shot of Walter White in the finale, he understood why Gilligan's pick worked: it plays as a love song, which lands with the episode's imagery in a way no one on the music team had anticipated.
What was Synchronize?
Synchronize was an underground project Thomas Golubić ran before his TV career took off, where he DJed full feature films live, muting the movie's sound and playing his own music against the picture in sync with the story. It ran as a club residency in Los Angeles for a couple of years and covered roughly thirty-two different films before rights holders' lawyers shut it down.
What makes a good music brief for a TV show or film?
Per Thomas Golubić, a strong brief gives real economic parameters, clear tonal direction instead of vague descriptors, and a defined range of options rather than an open-ended ask. He recommends supervisors request a capped number of songs from each pitch (for example, ten), provide reference links or examples of what's already worked on the show, and expect accurate, complete metadata on every submission.
