SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of Season 2 of HBO Max‘s The Pitt.

Season 2 of The Pitt features an original song in episode 6. “Need Someone” plays when a recurring patient named Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.) dies. Songwriter Andrew Bird sang and played the song with composer-songwriter Gavin Brivik during a panel presentation at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Television, then shared how the song almost never even existed.

Brivik said the producers were just going to license an existing song for the scene. “I begged the showrunners just to give us the opportunity to pitch a song,” he said. “I had no clue who was going to sing or collaborate. I just had these rough instrumental sketches.”

Brivik sent the notes to Bird as a long shot. What Bird sent back sold it.

“Andrew sent a voice memo back just singing on top of it,” Brivik continued. “I synced the voice memo up to the scene and pitched the showrunners and begged them to use that. It had to go up the corporate ladder, like every exec.”

Bird had not watched the HBO Max medical drama. He binged the first season to prepare.

“To write a song for a scene is the ultimate challenge,” Bird said. “Just something about it being another voice and lyrical aspect of it really excites me. So I jumped on this right away and binged the first season to get a sense of what the characters had been through.”

The assignment has made Bird a fan of The Pitt, where each season follows a 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room in real time.

“I feel like what the show is doing is helping us talk about things we don’t talk about, especially with the trauma of Covid,” Bird said. “There’s so much amnesia collectively as a people about it. It’s dealing with all the mental health issues we need to talk about.”

Not only is “Need Someone” the first original song The Pitt has featured, but it is pretty much the show’s first overt music. Brivik said the episodic scores are designed to blend into the hospital setting. “My pitch was what does it sound like if the medical machines make the score?” Brivik said. “It’s like pulsing EKG machines.”

“Need Somebody” was a moment that Louie earned. Louie was admitted twice in the first season, which is the same day in the show’s season. The third time, in Season 2, deals with a much more serious, and ultimately fatal, liver failure.

“This was a little bit of a departure but it felt like it was the right time,” Brivik said. “For those who’ve been watching, Louie’s arc created a moment for this, so I truly think it was just a beautiful, happy moment in the show that we were lucky enough to get a chance to pitch a song for. It was probably the one time they created a space for it.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.