There’s rarely a moment in The White Lotus that isn’t filled with music. Beyond composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s iconic theme song and its seasonal variations (he worked with Brisbane-based composer Peranya Visitchantaragoon for Season 3), Mike White’s HBO series is never really silent, moving between its signature “something is afoot” percussive score and a treasure trove of needle drops.
Music supervisor Gabe Hilfer returns for Season 3, pivoting from the Italian finesse he brought to Season 2 to a bounty of Thai pop, disco, and rock songs ranging from the ’60s to the present, music you may have grown up with or perhaps have never heard before.
“There’s a ton of music in this show,” Hilfer tells Mashable, describing music as “fundamentally built into the DNA of the show.”
“I was looking at episode 4 which has 12 songs and then probably another 20 minutes of score,” he says. “It is just so much music, wall-to-wall, and to have that work seamlessly and cohesively in a way where it all feels like you’re in Thailand. You’re also definitely in The White Lotus and you’re hitting the emotional beats of each of the characters and the different story arcs that we’re going through.”
Iconic Thai singer Lek Patravadi in “The White Lotus.”
Credit: Fabio Lovino / HBO
Crate-digging for the sound of The White Lotus: Thailand edition
As soon as The White Lotus Season 3 was confirmed for Thailand, Hilfer says he immediately began the search for the show’s catalogue of music.
“I went through my Rolodex and was looking for anybody who I have ever licensed Thai music from or who has pitched me Thai music, and I reverse engineered it to see who would be a good resource to utilize in that regard,” he says. “I also did some digging into some popular songs in Thailand, historically and currently. I had the very fortunate experience of working on a film about two years ago called The Creator, which took place in an amorphous, non-specific part of Southeast Asia. We did a little bit of the same crate-digging [Editor’s note: the art of tracking down or discovering rare and obscure records through mostly secondhand sources] at that time for vintage, cool, interesting Thai music. So I had a couple resources from there and then I expanded the search outward.”
The very first song we hear in Season 3 after the theme song is Thai rock group Carabao’s iconic 1985 single “เมดอินไทยแลนด์ (Made in Thailand)” — which is now sitting at almost 30 million views on YouTube. According to Hilfer, The White Lotus editor John M. Valerio pitched the song for inclusion in the series after hearing it absolutely everywhere while filming the series in Thailand.
“He had the pleasure and privilege of being in Thailand for shooting, and he was like, ‘There’s this one song. I hear it everywhere. I feel like it’s big. Can we look into this one song ‘Made in Thailand?'” says Hilfer. “After doing some digging and researching, ‘Made in Thailand’ was a huge hit song and is a cultural touchpoint for many people from Thailand. And so it all worked out well.”
Everyone’s Shazamming The White Lotus soundtrack
If you watch The White Lotus like I do (and many do), you spend half the episode holding your phone out and hitting “listen” on Shazam. “A lot of Shazamming going on,” Hilfer agrees. “I would love to know what some of these Shazams are getting on these songs, because I feel like it’s having a cultural impact.” Such is the fame and popularity of The White Lotus that needle drops like Season 2, episode 6’s “Ciao Ciao” moment saw subreddits ablaze around for the 2022 La Rappresentante di Lista song.
The soundtrack brims with Thai artists (and artists who draw from Thai influences) including Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band, Sroeng Santi, Viparat Piengsuwan, Hongthong Dao-udon, Rewat “Ter” Buddhinan, Carabao, Charan Manophet, Nantida Kaewbuasai, Khruangbin, and more, with each song tailored to specific scenes.
If you haven’t already found it, Hilfer has been working with HBO to update The White Lotus‘ official Spotify playlist, which you’ll notice isn’t exactly complete for a reason — the songs are often owned and distributed by independent local labels. “Unfortunately, a lot of the songs are not on Spotify because they’re under the radar and with smaller Thai labels that haven’t uploaded them. For the ones that are, we’ve been putting as many on Spotify as we can to help shine a light on this awesome music.”
This zoom.
Credit: Fabio Lovino / HBO
One song I madly Shazammed as the show played arrives in episode 4. Before the guests board Greg’s yacht, there’s an outrageous zoom shot on the Ratliffe family (Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Sam Nivola) strutting in slow motion down the dock, paired with the outstanding use of The Impossibles founder Rewat “Ter” Buddhinan’s 1985 track “มันแปลกดีนะ”.
“They had that shot and edited, and that was one that John Valerio and I really went back and forth a lot on,” says Hilfer. We talked about and tried a bunch of different things here, until we landed on this. And this was clearly the winner.”
Achieving authenticity with Thai music in The White Lotus
Notably, Hilfer recognised the challenge of achieving authenticity and the right vibe within The White Lotus‘ soundtrack as someone who didn’t specialise in Thai music.
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“Similarly with Italian music, I would not consider myself an expert in those things before the project, but then the nature of the job is you immerse yourself in the culture and the music and figure out what resources you need. There’s some phrase that’s like, ‘knowing what you don’t know is half the battle,’ so figuring out where I could plug the gaps in my knowledge of that region’s music was important from the beginning.”
During the course of Season 3, many Thai users of social media have praised the music choices, something deeply important to Hilfer.
“We want to make it cool, for sure, and the resources that we’ve used, we’ve found really great stuff. But, I mean, I do not speak Thai and so I’m not always 100 percent sure what these songs are about. I just know that creatively they work, and they fit, and they embody the mood and the vibes that we’re going for. So that’s my priority within the framework of making them authentic and real. So when I hear that people from Thailand are also agreeing with me, that’s like the biggest compliment I could get.”
If you’re not an expert in Thai music yourself (hello), some of the songs you might have recognised immediately are the covers in the show. In episode 1, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) makes her first appearance at the pool to a gawking Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) to Sroeng Santi’s “Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng,” an absolutely killer cover of Black Sabbath’s 1970 classic “Iron Man.”
Ignore the man in the pool, Chelsea.
Credit: Fabio Lovino / HBO
“At the very beginning when we were putting together a big pool of music to choose from, we were thinking, should we do some covers?” says Hilfer. “John [M. Valerio] and I had a conversation and that one came up. There’s another one in episode 1, it’s a little less obvious, there’s a Thai cover of ‘Black Magic Woman.’ We were like, let’s lean into that, because to the Western audience the Thai songs are not particularly familiar so if we can do a couple very strategic touchpoints that the musicality and the songs are big enough where a Western, English-speaking or non-Thai speaking audience is familiar with the songs and the melodies but not necessarily with the covers it would be cool. It would be cool to bring it home and make people feel a connection to the music with a little bit more familiarity.”
There’s another cover in episode 4; as Greg’s (Jon Gries) $18,800,000 Spacecat yacht cruises around the islands in the same episode, Molam and Luk Thung singer Hongthong Dao-udon’s “ฮ่วยอะบานิบี” plays — it’s a cover of Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta’s “A-Ba-Ni-Bi,” which was Israel’s winning entry to Eurovision in 1978.
“That song was in one of the big batches of music that we had culled early on and we loved it,” says Hilfer. “They edited to it and as we were getting into the clearances of it, the people who own it were like, ‘Great news, we’re happy to approve. But just so you know, this is a cover.’ We were like, it is? Because I wasn’t familiar with the source material.”
The real music icons in The White Lotus Season 3
Not contained to the soundtrack, however, The White Lotus Season 3 is also brimming with real music stars including Blackpink’s Lisa (credited on the show as Lalisa Manoban), who performs a gorgeous Ram Thai dance as Mook in episode 5.
Lek Patravadi’s 1987 song gets two renditions in “The White Lotus.”
Credit: Courtesy of HBO
And one of the musical highlights of the season, iconic Thai singer Lek Patravadi (who also goes by Patravadi “Lek” Mejudhon) plays glamourous hotel owner Sritala. Through conversations with Patravadi in pre-production, Hilfer and The White Lotus team managed a pretty special plan with the artist, a performance of a song Patravadi performed on her own TV show in 1987, which appears in episode 2.
“She re-recorded that song for us in episode 2,” says Hilfer. “We had her do a couple other songs, and she recorded them for us, but we didn’t end up using them…They were great, her versions were incredible, but the way that that whole sequence got edited down, it lent itself to only having that one song in there.”
But it’s not the last time you’ll hear the song this season. “I’m not really spoiling much, but later on that same song, we hear it at another point in the show from the original performance that she did on TV,” Hilfer says.
The White Lotus score includes samples and repeated instrumentals
Throughout the series, Hilfer and his team also repeat small segments of songs they’ve found in their music sourcing as emotional markers. A sample of Imade Saputra’s “A Thai Wedding” is used a few times in Season 3: in episode 2, when Rick (Walton Goggins) finally finds weed, and in episode 4, when Laurie (Carrie Coon), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb) pile into the car for an adventure with Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius).
“We would never want to repeat ourselves with a lyrical song, but an instrumental song is different, because it’s almost intentionally supposed to remind you of the emotion you felt when you last heard it in the show,” says Hilfer.
Texas band Khruangbin, who draw significant influence from Thai pop, see their 2018 banger “Maria También” used twice in the show in episodes 1 and 2, almost functioning as an unofficial theme for the show’s early chapters. It underlies the first moments we get a tour through the White Lotus and the Ratliff family’s sprawling villa, and as we join the guests for breakfast in episode 2.
“Those are two different versions of that song too,” says Hilfer. “In episode 1, it’s from their Tiny Desk show on NPR, and on episode 2, it’s the album version. Khruangbin obviously brings a lot of their influences from Thai music, although they are not a Thai band. We had messed with it, tried with it, and it felt great.”
Hilfer describes The White Lotus as a show that treats music “like a character in the show, not a secondary afterthought.” Notably, he praises The White Lotus creator White, explaining how involved the writer-director is with music selection for the series during the edit.
“The genius of Mike White is just unparalleled in the way that he is able to, every season, replicate the same level of tension and the same level of intrigue without repeating himself, and without it feeling like well treaded territory,” he says.
“I’ve been doing this long enough to know how much of a privilege it is to work with somebody who knows what they want, has great taste, and has overseen something from its inception to its completion, and to just be a small part of that musically is honestly a real gift.”
