Sharp-eared viewers of Monday night’s episode of “Fargo” might have noticed a fun homage to the 1996 Coen brothers movie of the same name when Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy performed a cover of José Feliciano’s “Let’s Find Each Other Tonight.” Feliciano performed the song live for the 1996 film, in the scene where Steve Buscemi’s ratty kidnapper takes an escort to a show in the Carlton hotel.
That’s not the only Coen brothers musical reference this season in the acclaimed FX series. For just one example, the end of the premiere episode featured “Go to Sleep, You Little Baby” from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Showrunner Noah Hawley made a conscious decision to integrate covers of songs from Coen movies into his show. “I got it into my head that would be something interesting to play around with in our flirtation with the Coens’ body of work,” he says. So he and music supervisor Marguerite Phillips went to work coming up with potential musicians -- among them, Tweedy.
Hawley didn’t have to do much convincing to get Tweedy on board with providing a cover. Tweedy was a fan of the first season of the tundra-bound crime drama, which followed budding detective Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) as she worked to solve a series of connected murders in Bemidji, Minnesota. In fact, Hawley gave Tweedy the creative equivalent of carte blanche, simply asking for any song from any Coen brothers movie, and Tweedy came back (“brilliantly,” Hawley points out) with “Let’s Find Each Other Tonight.”
(Hawley would have liked a Tweedy-performed version of the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” but, not unlike a character in another Coen brothers movie, Tweedy isn’t particularly fond of the Eagles.)