10 best needle drops in Reservation Dogs (so far)

This one is significant mainly for the lyrics and vibe. It plays during a flashback to 1984, and we’re looking at a classic car picking up a hitchhiker. And this is a classic sort of song. It’s also a road song, with plenty of references to traveling and the like, and of course we’ve got the “Midnight Rider” herself right there in the chorus. In this case, that would be the character later identified as Deer Lady. (She appears again in the third episode of season three in a flashback to a tragic backstory involving the horrors of forced assimilation at the hands of “Indian Boarding Schools.”) The organ sounds and driving guitar lick make you feel like you’re on the road yourself—or at least watching this whole transaction go down from the woods, like young Big did in the ’80s.

A lovelorn song with big orchestral swells, backup singers, and a warbly lead vocalist is the right choice the scene in which “Point Of No Return” appears: a moment in which Bear’s ass gets left behind. It’s humiliating, too. Leading up to the opening bars of this tune, Bear is saying goodbye to Willie Jack and Cheese, to his mom. He packs a sad little bag and everything. The music cues up when he’s sitting on the curb, pouting a little, looking up and down the street for his friend’s car to pull up. It’s a good call to use a spurned lover kind of ballad for a juncture like this one, because Bear is seriously hurt by this rejection. And off Elora and Jackie ride into all kinds of adventures, without him.

“This summer I went swimming / This summer I might have drowned/ But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around.” Don’t those lyrics encapsulate the experience of going out there, messing up, and figuring it all out while being kind of a goof about it? Swimming can be purely a leisure activity, warranting the playful treatment of a song like this, but it can also have some serious consequences if you don’t pull it off quite right or an accident befalls you. It kind of feels like what the gang is out there doing, always. Sometimes their antics are harmless, even light. Other times, they find themselves in pretty serious danger, having stolen things, or having had things stolen. Here, at the end of this episode, their exploits are scored by some appropriately perky banjo pickings and Wainwright’s twangy voice.

Link Wray is such a noted Shawnee badass of a musician (the father of the power chord, early adopter of distortion and tremolo) that it seemed inevitable that he would show up in this series. And what a cool track to have chosen. If you don’t know him by name, you’ve probably heard his song “Rumble” in Pulp Fiction, among other things. This song, “The Shadow Knows,” is the sound of Bear getting his ass kicked by the NDN Mafia as a bicyclist looks on, before shoving a snack in his mouth, shaking his head, and pedaling off. The tempo is languid, the tone is ominous, and we don’t hear it in this clip, but the lone repeated line is the song’s title: “the shadow knows.”

Samantha Crain, a Choctaw artist from Shawnee, Oklahoma, has won herself some fans through this show. And it’s easy to understand why when you check out scenes like this, with her heart-wrenching vibrato making this song feel less like some overplayed radio hit and more like a revelation. In fact, it scores a sort of revelation: It plays as Daniel’s mom Hotki, now incarcerated, finds it in her heart after some coaxing from her persistent niece Willie Jack (ahem, Wilhelmina Jacqueline) to add her to her list of visitors. Hotki’s spirit guide nods approvingly, then disappears, her quest suggested in an early scene from this episode apparently complete. Without Crain’s rendering of the song that accompanies this moment, it just wouldn’t land the same.

Jackie and Elora may be “going on a run,” as this song that opens this episode suggests, but they are not going to “have a little fun.” Guys in a truck are after them, shooting into the air with guns and everything, so they’re running for their lives. The jaunty tune that accompanies this frankly terrifying scene keeps things light, like the needle drop equivalent of the grandpa from The Princess Bride telling the grandson “[Buttercup] doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.” It works, and Buffy Sainte-Marie can really play that Mouth Bow. (To go down a fun rabbit hole, check out her demonstration of how to play one for the horse puppet Red on Sesame Street.)

Samantha Crain is back on the list, babies! This time she’s singing with the band Ya Tseen (fronted by Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin), and they’re here to punctuate yet another emotional scene: Elora’s grandmother Mabel, who raised her and has recently passed, appears as a spirit (calling her a “shit ass” even from that realm). This cover tune is of an indie staple rather than a radio hit, originally written and performed by Kyle Field whose musical project Little Wings has amassed a sort of cult following. (His version appears in season two’s sixth episode, “Decolonativization.”) The lyrics are unchanged and pretty playful, yet Ya Tseen’s version with Crain feels less breezy and heavier than Field’s, with plenty of grief and some gospel flavor.

It’s a pretty punk move to don some black bandanas and steal a truck full of chip bags, and that’s exactly what the Rez Dogs are doing as we hear Iggy Pop blaring over the scene. Is it on the nose that the song is called “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and that it plays over the first scene of a show with “dog” in the title? Nah. They needed to demonstrate, immediately, what kind of show they were making, and this song handles that job quite nicely. Plus, it sounds cool and adds an element of reckless fun.

Good god, the payoff of this scene and song. Luminous guitar tone and a breathy, maternal sort of vocal enter in as the gang hugs, standing knee deep in the Pacific Ocean, crying and congratulating themselves on having made it to California. But then, in a moment like clouds parting, their departed friend Daniel is in that group hug with them, smiling and laughing. They tousle his hair, look right at him, and tell him they love him (bitch). And as our eyes are welling at the sight of it, Black Belt Eagle Scout (Swinomish/Iñupiaq artist Katherine Paul) is right there to soothe us and support them.

A little girl drags her giant, silver boom box behind her, plops it down, and puts in a tape with “Cookie’s Hot Mix” scrawled onto it (recordings from the radio, no doubt). She and several friends get into formation, and they dance, almost in sync with each other, but not quite because they are children here. She is Cookie, and in this moment, she is every nineties girl with a friend or two to teach some choreography. Oh is this ever resonant for those of us who lived this in childhood. And maybe it resonates all the more when this song comes back later, and those girls (now grown up, except for Cookie herself, sadly) get high and hallucinate a perfect, sparkly performance to it on a boozy night during the annual IHS conference.