Entourage's eight-season run began in the heart of the aughts, a pre-Shazaam era when TV soundtracks were a pretty massive source for music discovery. It was a simpler time, when Death Cab and The Killers casually stopped by The O.C., and when Kanye West songs debuted on popular HBO shows about a handsome Hollywood actor and his buddies and not during invite-only fashion week presentations. But Entourage didn't just feature cutting-edge rap. "I always thought the music was a character, like L.A. was a backdrop," the show's music supervisor, Scott Vener, told FADER over the phone. "One of my favorite parts of the show in general was that we were able to play any genre of music—classic rock, new rock, hip-hop, remixes—and it wouldn't feel out of place. That was the thing I was most proud of."
The show's genre-hopping, decades-spanning score certainly reflects the way people consume music today, which explains why, when it came time to pick songs for the long-gestating big-screen Entourage movie, Vener wanted to keep it eclectic: the soundtrack album features Pharrell, Diplo, Tame Impala. But according to show's creator, Doug Ellin, the most exciting song on the movie's soundtrack doesn't actually appear on the disc. At the end of the film, a long-lost Wildflowers era Tom Petty song called "Somewhere Under Heaven"—that was officially released today—plays as the credits roll.
How did that come together? "I was at Rick Rubin's studio with Scott, listening to him and The Weekend do some things together," Ellin told FADER. "Rick mentioned that Tom Petty had a bunch of unreleased songs from when he did Wildflower, and that there was gonna be a second album at one point. So I said, 'Can we hear it while we're sitting here?' So we heard a bunch of Tom Petty songs we'd never heard before." Vener remembered feeling psyched. "It sounded like Tom Petty from 20 years ago, because it was Tom Petty from 20 years ago." When they heard album cut "Somewhere Under Heaven"—an upbeat, road trip-ready guitar tune—they both wanted it for the movie straight away. "We ended up getting it. We've got a great Tom Petty song that closes the movie," Vener said. "It's perfect."
