Near the end of the first season of FX’s Cold War spy thriller, The Americans, a Soviet sleeper-cell operative played by Keri Russell has an affair with a man wanted for the murder of an FBI agent. Troves of D.C. police are frantically canvassing the area for him while the two hash out his options inside a safe house. Unwilling to run or hide, the man finally slips out the front door, concealing a weapon under his coat.

The dramatic firefight that follows could very well be an earsplitting sonic exclamation point on the season. But fans didn’t hear a single shot. Instead, viewers heard Roberta Flack singing a delicately juxtaposed torch song, “To Love Somebody.”

PJ Bloom Rob Mainord

“One of the things I love to do as a music supervisor–and producers have to be really willing to embrace this concept–is use music completely against the action,” says PJ Bloom, an industry veteran and a music supervisor for The Americans. “It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it makes an incredible soundtrack moment. And I know there was a lot of talk about this particular song moment in the show.”

The Americans garnered talk for plenty of reasons, but chief among them were moments like this created by Bloom and his music supervising colleagues, Heather Guibert and Janice Ginsberg. Out of all the standout sequences, Bloom points to the Flack firefight as his favorite from season one, the love ballad turning a somewhat routine street death into a moment of real emotional significance.

By putting life as a Soviet special op to everything from Phil Collins (“In The Air Tonight” for victim cleanup) to The Cure (“Siamese Twins” for an ugly fight between spouses), The Americans gets away from the over-the-top orchestral bang traditionally associated with pop-culture spies (think Mission Impossible or even Get Smart). Instead, femme fatale seduction happens to Pete Townshend’s “Rough Boys,” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” scores the bad-guy chase scene.

“I think the producers [Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg] wanted it to be real,” Bloom says. “They really make you feel like you were there in 1980s D.C. These are real people with real families fighting for a real cause–that kind of show doesn’t lend itself to big John Barry-type scoring moments.”

Emphasizing this sense of place means a strict aesthetic. The look and feel of The Americans–early ’80s, washed-out colors, with a lack of James Bond-style explosions or action sequences–is meant to reflect the at-times mundane reality of Cold War espionage. So the work of Bloom’s team (and composer Nathan Barr) is to create a suitable sonic landscape, drawn primarily from the narrow time frame the show’s set in.