Explosions In The Sky inspired Friday Night Lights’ emotional score

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs we’ve discovered via TV shows.
Explosions In The Sky, “Your Hand In Mine” (2003)
I started watching Friday Night Lights despite the football premise and stuck around because it was so much more than a show about sports. The shooting style aimed for a natural, organic feel—producer Jeffrey Reiner described it as “no rehearsal, no blocking, just three cameras and we shoot”—and it worked. Aiding the very lived-in feeling of Friday Night Lights was the score, which many believe was done by instrumental band Explosions In The Sky. “Your Hand In Mine” is credited all over the Internet as the show’s opening theme song, but listen closely and you’ll realize it’s not quite. The actual song over the credits, called, appropriately, “Friday Night Lights Theme,” is composed by W.G. Snuffy Walden and sounds so much like an EITS song it might as well be. The show’s producers originally wanted an EITS song for the theme, but the band turned them down. “They asked us for one of our songs for the theme song, and we said ‘No way!’ Boy, were we dummies,” guitarist Munaf Rayani told The A.V. Club Austin in 2011. “We got a few chuckles when we heard the theme song they used… They ask you for something, and you say no, and they’ll just rip it off.”