You might love, hate or be wholly indifferent to Lena Dunham's highly polarizing and thinkpiece-baiting HBO series Girls, but it is hard to deny that Dunham and the show's music supervisors have a stellar track record of incorporating poignant scenes where their cast of characters - relatively unconventional twenty something millenials struggling to 'make it' in Brooklyn - process their thoughts, emotions, actions and evolving worldview with music. Viral traction online would probably have familiarized music listeners who were not following the show with the apt use of Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" in episode 3 of season 1 and Icona Pop's "I Love It" in episode 3 of season 2.
With the airing of the penultimate episode last month, Dunham created yet another memorable instance where music complements character development. In the episode ("Goodbye Tour"), Dunham's character Hanna Horvath comes to terms with making the difficult decision of leaving the life she had always imagined for herself in New York City to pursue a new job and a new home in upstate New York as a professor of 'internet culture and prose - and as a single mother. The uncertainty of Hannah's future is made starker by her attendance at Shoshanna’s unexpected engagement party, where the main cast realize that the time has come for them to go their separate ways (in an emotionally devastating 'group meeting' in a bathroom).
The episode features a transition from Julia Michaels' "How Do We Get Back To Love" (as the four friends make the best of their remaining time at Shoshanna's party) to 'dark R&B' Californian singer-songwriter BANKS' "Crowded Places", which Hanna sings along to as she drives (alone) to her new life outside New York City, away from most of the intense social connections she cultivated there throughout the entire series.
Sparse, intimate, and inspired by "social anxiety and falling in love", BANKS' rhapsodic vocals beautifully evoke Hannah's vulnerability and the tentative steps she's taking towards maturation, independence and the self-realization she has always been striving for:
'Cause I've been scared of crowded placesCome with me, I'll take you home'Cause I've been scared of crowded placesCome with me, I'll take you home'
Lyrics: Genius
