Soundtrack elevates 'I May Destroy You'

The first time Ciara Elwis read the script for "I May Destroy You" — the rapturously received HBO series about a young London woman attempting to piece together the murky details of a sexual assault — she immediately took note of what she called a red flag.

Elwis had just signed on as the show's music supervisor, collaborating with its creator and star, Michaela Coel, to select and procure the rights to use the various songs that would make up its soundtrack. The red flag was a pivotal scene in which Coel's character, Arabella, stumbles out of a bar after having been drugged — or, rather, it was the fact that Coel wanted to set the scene to "It's Gonna Rain," a decades-old gospel tune by the Rev. Milton Brunson.

"Straightaway, I knew: OK, right, this is going to have to be approached very carefully," Elwis said.

In an age of dwindling record sales and fraction-of-a-penny streaming royalties, an offer of cash is often enough to get an artist to license their material. But this case had a moral dimension as well: Elwis wrote a long letter to the song's rights holders (Brunson died in 1997) explaining what Coel was trying to accomplish in the series, which the actor based on her own painful experience; she even had Coel, who'd spent a portion of her life in the Pentecostal church, add a few personal words to make clear how critical "It's Gonna Rain" was to the scene.

The song's owners initially balked. But Elwis, a veteran of challenging British TV shows including "Sex Education" and "The End of the F — World," persisted in arguing Coel's case, and eventually they agreed to its use in "I May Destroy You."

Juxtaposed against Brunson's crisp choral harmonies, the harrowing scene is unimaginable without the song — just one of the many instances in "I May Destroy You" where music adds surprising emotional depth...