Who is on Elle Woods’ playlist? ’90s bands like No Doubt and Sleater-Kinney

When Laura Kittrell began building the soundtrack for Prime Video’s “Elle,” the series’ unlikely premise was still under wraps: In 1995, a teenage Elle Woods is uprooted from Bel-Air to Seattle after her father botches a high-profile client’s nose job.

“It makes me laugh to think of Olympia bands like Team Dresch getting an email like, ‘We’re using your song in the “Legally Blonde” prequel,’” Kittrell says. “I’m sure some of them were like, really?”

To root “Elle” in Seattle’s ’90s grunge scene and nearby Olympia’s Riot Grrrl movement, Kittrell, co-showrunner Caroline Dries and executive producer Lauren Neustadter brought in music supervisor Brienne Rose, whom Kittrell had previously worked with on “High School,” Prime Video’s Tegan and Sara-inspired series.

Review

With ‘Elle,’ don’t think twice about ‘Legally Blonde.’ You’ll still have a good time

Lexi Minetree stars as Elle Woods in Prime Video’s series that revisits the ‘Legally Blonde’ protagonist as a 16-year-old high school student.

July 1, 2026

“We didn’t want to fake it,” Rose says. The team looked at what bands were cool and what labels were on the rise at the time. “We also talked about what this transition feels like for Elle,” she adds, “what it’s like to be a teenager — isolated, disconnected from the place you’re in. Seattle creates this amazing juxtaposition with Elle’s personality, and it was fun to show how her tastes might evolve the longer she’s there.”

Kittrell hopes the series will reintroduce viewers to artists who don’t get the same attention as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, like L7 and Spin Doctors. “We leaned into our own nostalgia,” she says. “I want other people who lived through the ’90s to think, ‘I remember exactly where I was when I heard this song for the first time.’”

For Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree), life is exactly as it should be. “Elle” opens with her 16th birthday party, where she’s surrounded by friends and family, flirting with her crush, “Hot Josh” (Logan Shroyer), and making plans for a perfect junior year with her best friend Madison (Jessica Belkin). That sequence is soundtracked by Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” a song Rose felt Elle herself might have chosen. “A lot of things that felt poppy and fun for the era really felt like Elle to us,” she says. “Mariah Carey was our starting point.”

The search for the opening song stretched into the final weeks before filming, with Kittrell, Dries and pilot director Jason Moore trading ideas over text. “He would text Caroline and me at like midnight every night: What about this for an opening song?” Kittrell says. They briefly considered Ace of Base, but kept coming back to “Fantasy.” Once they saw it paired with the footage, there was no question.

“Elle is literally talking about how she has the perfect life, the perfect friends, and the perfect world,” Kittrell adds. “Then the fantasy of that life bursts at the end of this scene, when her parents tell her they’re moving away. It felt the most on theme.”

“I’ve talked about rain on this show more than I have in my entire life,” Kittrell says.

It was a constant consideration, both on set and in the writers room. Weather became a way to distinguish Elle from those around her in Seattle. The locals never carry umbrellas; Elle shows up with a pink one.

“We had a writer from Seattle who always said the city gets a bad rap because of the rain,” Kittrell says. “But the rain is what makes it beautiful — it makes Seattle green.”

Elle entering the halls of Rainier West High School with her pink umbrella.

(Kimberley French / Prime Video)

That philosophy stayed with the writers, later showing up in a line Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), Elle’s crush, says to her, and ultimately leading them to Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” as the show’s theme. “We were like, of course,” says Kittrell. “This is what we’ve been talking about the entire time.”

The song was originally meant to end the pilot. “Then we decided we should just be hearing it in every single episode,” says Neustadter. (The pilot instead uses Radiohead’s “Creep,” which also bookends the series.) The main title sequence, an animated “saga sell” from the studio Shine, tells the story of Elle’s move from Bel-Air to Seattle.

“We’re constantly reminding the audience of the contrast between Elle’s essence and the world she’s now in,” Neustadter adds. “There’s an optimism to ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ that feels very Elle Woods. And the irony of it is so delightful.”

One “Legally Blonde” scene kept coming up in the writers room: the bunny costume incident, when Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) shows up to what she thinks is a costume party only to realize she’s the only one dressed for it. She panics briefly, then gathers herself and finds her confidence. For Kittrell, the question was what came before that. “We wanted to see her in a similar situation but with a different reaction,” she says. “What gave her the confidence to do the thing she does in the movie?”

That idea plays out in Episode 3, “You’re Not the Girl I Thought You Were,” when Elle arrives at what she believes is a pool party in a revealing pink bikini top, and finds no one else in swimwear. She retreats in humiliation until her new friend Liz (Gabrielle Policano) pushes her to stop worrying about what other people think. By the end of the episode, she’s back in front of a crowd — this time on a karaoke machine with her friend Dustin (Zac Looker), belting out No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” with newly unlocked confidence.

“We created an entire pop culture and current events timeline in the writers room,” says Kittrell, which is how they realized No Doubt’s album “Tragic Kingdom” had come out exactly when “Elle” begins. “It’s what all of Elle’s friends would be obsessing over in L.A.,” she adds, “but it’s also a bridge to the Seattle kids. It’s not straight-up pop or straight-up rock.”

The song also featured heavily in the series’ promotional materials. “When you hear a song a million times, you kind of start forgetting what it’s even about,” Kittrell says. But revisiting the lyrics of “Just a Girl,” she realized it mapped neatly onto Elle’s arc. “It’s telling the story of the show.”

When meeting potential music supervisors for “Elle,” Kittrell, Dries and Neustadter asked candidates to submit playlists that captured their high school selves. Rose’s mix included Tori Amos’ “Cornflake Girl,” which ended up in Episode 4, “I’m Not Afraid of a Challenge.”

“When you put a song into a scene, it’s almost like trying on a shoe,” Neustadter says. “You want to see if it fits and feels comfortable.”

Amos’ moody 1994 track about betrayal and shifting loyalties within female friendships doesn’t immediately suggest a homecoming sequence. But it proved an unexpected fit, soundtracking a cross-country race with Elle cheering on her crush, Miles, as he crosses the finish line, while standing beside Shannon (Danielle Chand) — her new friend and, complicating things, his ex.

“I would have never in a million years thought to put that song here,” Kittrell says, “but it’s so perfect. It made us so happy.”

In Episode 5, “Trust Me, I Can Handle Anything,” Elle’s best friend Madison visits Seattle and presses play on the CD player in Elle’s bedroom. The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” comes on. “This is what you’re listening to?” Madison asks, horrified.

After learning that her friend Shannon’s mother has died in a car accident, Elle is suddenly facing her first real encounter with grief and, unable to sit with it, throws herself into planning the memorial, down to selecting the music.

“In high school, when something dramatic would happen, I would search for the right music to articulate what I was feeling,” says Rose. “For Elle, in that moment, Susanna Hoffs’ voice is so feminine, so emotional. With ‘Eternal Flame,’ we’re reaching back to the ’80s to show how her taste is evolving, and how she’s learning to tap into that sadness.”

“Elle” also features several on-screen performances, from the fictional Seattle band Bob’s Your Uncle — brought to life by Vancouver group Piss performing songs composed by Anna Waronker, a collaborator of Kittrell and Rose on “High School” — to the finale, titled “What, Like It’s Hard,” which delivers what Kittrell calls her “biggest make-a-wish moment”: an original Sleater-Kinney song performed by Liz at the school’s “winter informal.”

“I was big into the Riot Grrrl stuff,” says Kittrell. “In high school, Sleater-Kinney was my No. 1 everything.” The team knew early on they wanted Liz to perform an original song, and Sleater-Kinney was their first choice to write it. Once the band came on board, Kittrell walked them through Liz’s season-long emotional arc on a Zoom call, using Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal” and the band’s early work as tonal reference points. They came back with “High School,” which Policano then recorded and performed on screen.

“Having Sleater-Kinney write for us was surreal,” Kittrell says. “It really was the cherry on top.”