5. The Heartless Bastards, Live in Austin

**Appearance: **Season 4, Episode 6

Another one of Julie Taylor's charming youthful indiscretions: sans her parents' permission, she plans a weekend getaway with high-school love Matt to Austin; after Mama Taylor firmly shuts her down, Julie wordlessly slips out anyway, hitting the road with Matt without informing him he's an accomplice and turning off her phone to avoid her mother's increasingly frantic calls.

The impetus for the road trip—a chance to see the Austin indie rock band The Heartless Bastards—points to one of Julie's redeeming personality traits: Whatever her shortcomings, she has always had pretty faultless musical taste. An early episode revealed a Liars poster on her bedroom wall, and she slips Matt Saracen a Jose Gonzalez CD early on in their furtive courtship. Did Richardson have any conversations with the writers to figure out what kind of musical taste Julie should have? "I don't know if we actually talked about it, but we were all on the same page," she says. "A lot of 'Friday Night Lights' was just plain old feeling. We all kind of intuitively know the characters, and know what they'd be into. But there were times when she'd say to Matt Saracen, 'Hey, do you wanna go see The Decembrists?' And that probably established early on that she's an indie kid. You know, she's a smart, cool chick."

As for the Heartless Bastards? "Initially, the show-runner wanted Wilco for that scene, but they weren't available," Richardson says. "I am personally a huge fan of the Heartless Bastards, and I'm really psyched that worked out."

6. A.A. Bondy, "Killed Myself When I Was Young"

**Appearance: **Season 4, Episode 8

A.A. Bondy, like Explosions In the Sky, pops up so repeatedly on "Friday Night Lights" that towards the show's end, the entrance of his wry, subdued country-folk can loosen up Pavlovian waterworks all by itself. "Killed Myself When I Was Young" plays too many times to count; my personal favorite is the "Toilet Bowl" episode, when the downtrodden East Dillon Lions notch their first victory, with former Panthers booster Buddy Garrity sportscasting ecstatically.

"He was somebody I felt was just perfect for our show and it turns out that [show editor] Angela [Mitchell] just kept using him over and over and over and over again!" laughs Richardson. "I brought it to the table, but Angela fell in love with him." Like "Devil Town," the song's lyrics, which wryly recollect the punishments visited on a youthful body in pursuit of something larger, resonate with the show's theme, but to hear Richardson tell it, such echoes are mostly happy accidents: "I'd like to say that was a deep, premeditated thing, but oftentimes, you're just trying music against picture, and when something clicks, it's just like, "Oh my god!' ... I do keep copious lyric notes, but I find that I don't use them that much. If you find the right mood for a scene, you'd be surprised at how often the lyrics work."

7. Kashmere Stage Band, "Zero Point"

Appearance: Season 2, Episode 7

In Season two, bad girl Tyra Collette and moon-eyed goody-goody Lyla Garrity find themselves in the unenviable position of planning the Dillon Panthers pep rally together. Tyra's solution—to draw upon her sister Mindy's professional knowledge and teach the boys to strip—plays out in a pep rally over a particularly obscure slice of 1970s funk by a little-known group called the Kashmere Stage Band.

"They were a high school stage band from Houston in the 1970s, when that scene was really big," Richardson explains. "This particular band, from Kashmere High School, just took over; they won all these competitions, they traveled the world, and they were just hot. And during that time, Stones Throw reissued their album, so it was on my mind. I played it on my show constantly at the time. We needed a big marching band sound for that show. Even thought it obviously wasn't credible or realistic that this '70s high school band would be playing at the pep rally, we cut it into the sequence, and it worked; it was totally Texas, and it just made sense musically. Another example of an amazing editorial job, to make that song feel right."