90s bands hit the right note on ‘Elle’ playlist

To capture Seattle’s music scene, the show team channeled its own dial-up days.

- By ANGELINA MAZZA

When Laura Kittrell began building the soundtrack for Prime Video's “Elle,” the series’ unlikely premise was still under wraps: In 1995, a teenage Elle Woods is uprooted from Bel-Air to Seattle after her father botches a high-profile client’s nose job.

“It makes me laugh to think of Olympia bands like Team Dresch getting an email like, ‘We're using your song in the “Legally Blonde” prequel,’” Kittrell says. “I’m sure some of them were like, really?”

To root “Elle” in Seattle’s ’90s grunge scene and nearby Olympia’s Riot Grrrl movement, Kittrell, co-showrunner Caroline Dries and executive producer Lauren Neustadter brought in music supervisor Brienne Rose, whom Kittrell had previously worked with on “High School,” Prime Video’s Tegan and Sara-inspired series.

“We didn't want to fake it,” Rose says. The team looked at what bands were cool and what labels were on the rise at the time. “We also talked about what this transition feels like for Elle,” she adds, “what it’s like to be a teenager — isolated, disconnected from the place you're in. Seattle creates this amazing juxtaposition with Elle's personality, and it was fun to show how her tastes might evolve the longer she’s there.”

Kittrell hopes the series will reintroduce viewers to artists who don’t get the same attention as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, like L7 and Spin Doctors. “We leaned into our own nostalgia,” she says. “I want other people who lived through the 90s to think, ‘I remember exactly where I was when I heard this song for the first time.’”

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