If a single quotation can distill an entire subset of pop culture in the 2000s, these 12 words work pretty well: “You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life, I swear.”
Most millennials can immediately identify Garden State, Zach Braff’s indie phenomenon from 2004, as the source. For some, the quote is a nostalgia portal, bringing their bygone youth into focus. For others, it’s naive, cringe-inducing corn. But two decades ago, it was kind of the hipster way to trumpet a semi-obscure track like the Shins’ “New Slang” as a metamorphic experience. It was the heyday of Pitchfork, MisShapes, mix CDs, and Seth Cohen. You gotta hear this one song epitomized a generation transitioning from the sovereignty of MTV to the curatorial power of Myspace. Braff loaded Garden State with the sort of in-the-know music recommendations that had become currency.
The movie hails from a steady wave of hip, successful soundtracks. The 2000s were full of them. Almost Famous, Love & Basketball, Marie Antoinette, Juno, (500) Days of Summer, and Twilight picked up where Singles, Waiting to Exhale, Romeo + Juliet, Trainspotting, and Cruel Intentions had left off in the ’90s. If you were a teenager or college kid (especially a white teenager or college kid) when Garden State came out, you probably had a copy of the album in your CD storage tower or at least knew someone who did. Maybe you loaded it onto your shiny, new iPod. You might have also read the blog Braff started as part of Garden State’s promotional campaign, where he dropped additional music suggestions, such as Ben Harper’s “Waiting on an Angel” and the Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.” (It was revealed just this week that another blog, in 2005, from future vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, described the soundtrack as “so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc., made me want to tear up.”) No matter how anyone feels about the film or its moody needle drops today, it was an irrefutable touchstone. An aura of cool hovered around the whole thing.
“What I think worked about the soundtrack was that you could put the tracks in order, so you could sort of experience the film through the music,” Braff tells The Ringer 20 years later. “This was back in an era where people actually listened to a full album, as opposed to just picking tracks like we do on streaming these days.”
For a Sundance breakout made by a sitcom star at a modest $2.5 million, Garden State surpassed every expectation. Miramax and Fox Searchlight paid a joint $5 million to acquire the film, which eventually grossed an impressive $35.8 million in just a limited release. The soundtrack—also featuring the likes of Coldplay, Simon & Garfunkel, Iron & Wine, and Thievery Corporation—went platinum without releasing any stand-alone singles. This is the story of how the album came together.
Part 1: “A Bunch of Friends Making a Mixtape”
Before Garden State, Braff was known as the goofy guy from Scrubs. He wrote the movie’s first draft in 2000, at which point he’d appeared in the films Manhattan Murder Mystery and The Broken Hearts Club. The NBC hospital comedy premiered the following year. What Braff calls a quarter-life crisis inspired the story of a depressed TV actor named Andrew Largeman who returns home to small-town New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. In the course of a few days, Andrew reconnects with old friends, meets a quirky love interest named Sam (Natalie Portman), confronts his emotionally distant father (Ian Holm), and more or less figures himself out. (The film was initially titled Large’s Ark, and the script included other story lines that Braff later cut. “It was the first screenplay I’d ever written. I didn’t know anything, really,” he says.) Garden State was part of a fertile subgenre fixated on suburban ennui, fitting in with contemporary releases like The Ice Storm, Happiness, American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides, and Ghost World.
Zach Braff (director, writer, and actor): It was sort of a fantasy—not only fantasy for the romantic relationship, but fantasy that I would have these breakthroughs that were keeping me from being myself. It was a very vulnerable thing to do. When I put it out there, I had no idea that it would resonate so much. No one did.
Dan Halsted (producer): I was an independent producer at the time, and I was consulting with Gary Gilbert, who was a new financier in Hollywood looking to put some money into scripts. He had met Natalie Portman at a charity function somewhere, and he said, “I would love to do anything with Natalie.” So I called up Natalie’s agent at CAA, and he said, “I’ve got this script by a guy on Scrubs; Jersey Films, Danny DeVito’s company, is involved, and they’re looking for financing.” I sent it right to Gary. Gary calls me the next day and goes, “I want to do this.” Zach was kind of a genius in that he sent a CD with the script. In the script, he had music cues saying, “Play this song here.” It was pretty much the final soundtrack.
Braff: The hardest thing in the world to convey with a screenplay is tone. One thing about putting songs in and giving people a mix CD back in the day was that I hoped I could convey the vibe.
Cary Brothers (“Blue Eyes”): Zach and I met in college at Northwestern. I was playing at the Hotel Cafe in the singer-songwriter scene in Los Angeles, and Zach got the funding for Garden State. He came to me and said, “Hey, can I put ‘Blue Eyes’ in Garden State?” At the time, it was a very independent film that was really under the radar.
Braff: Musicals were what got me into the business. My father loved musicals. If I had any leg up at all, it’s that since I was a tiny kid seeing so many musicals, I was aware that the right song in the right place could give people goose bumps.
Chad Fischer (composer, Garden State score): I played drums for Colin Hay, the singer from Men at Work, in the early ’90s, and we cowrote some songs together. Zach and all his buddies would come and see Colin play at Largo [in Los Angeles]. This is the late ’90s, early aughts. That’s how Zach fell in love with Colin’s solo acoustic music, and that’s how “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” made it on the soundtrack.
Colin Hay (“I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” speaking to Stereogum in 2022): I had that song, I think probably ’96 or something like that, on an album called Transcendental Highway. And it wasn’t until 10 years later, when Zach put it in the film and then Sony released it as part of the soundtrack, that people started to really notice the song. It gave me faith in myself in a way. Because I thought to myself, “Well, I was right. It was a good song, and people did like it if they were exposed to it.” And that’s what Scrubs and the Garden State film did. It just helped youngsters discover that they liked some of these tunes I was doing.
Brothers: I played that Coldplay record [“Don’t Panic”] for Zach for the first time because my roommate worked at Capitol Records, [Coldplay’s U.S. label]. I was just such a music nerd. There were a few of us who were friends who would go up to Zach’s house with stacks of CDs. He would describe a scene, and we would throw out a bunch of ideas. It had the energy of a bunch of friends making a mixtape. Nobody was telling us what to do.
Halsted: Zach wrote to all the artists and gave them a whole point of view and said, “Look, I only have this amount of money.”
Robert Kraft (former president, Fox Music): I recommended explaining that he couldn’t afford the prices he was being quoted but desperately wanted their songs. This was a Baz Luhrmann hack that I borrowed.
Braff: When I had my initial Sundance cut of the movie, you can pay a fee for the music just to use it at a festival. I remember being told, “Don’t get too attached to all this music. You’re not going to get Coldplay. You’re not going to get Simon & Garfunkel. You’re not going to get Nick Drake. We just don’t have the money for that.” With the help of [music supervisor] Amanda Demme, who did the business side of all of these deals, little by little we started getting them.
Halsted: We paid maybe $2,500 to $5,000 a song. Back then, a soundtrack song was probably a minimum of $25,000 to $50,000.
Part 2: “It Changed My Life”
Aside from some vintage tracks that were included, the album gave upstart indie acts an unexpected golden ticket—particularly the Shins, thanks to those gigantic headphones blaring “New Slang” that Portman places over Braff’s ears when their characters first meet. The folksy ballad, which James Mercer wrote as a kiss-off to his hometown, was the lead single from the band’s 2001 debut album, Oh, Inverted World. It also became the movie’s defining music cue, as parodied in a 2007 Saturday Night Live sketch starring Braff as a high school student trying to convince his classmates of Garden State’s life-changing power. Initially, Braff says, he wasn’t sure what song he’d use for the scene.
Braff: I think the script must have said, “This song will change your life,” and I just knew I had to find a killer song. How do you pick a song that’s going to work for the highest percentage of the audience? It’s a really tricky thing to do.
James Mercer (The Shins, “New Slang” and “Caring Is Creepy”): We were in our Ford van on tour during the first year of being signed when Zach reached out to [our label], Sub Pop.
Braff: [“New Slang”] was used in a really small moment in Scrubs. It wasn’t really highlighted, and I remember hearing it and being like, “What is this band, and why are you guys using it in such a small moment? This is a fucking epic song.”
Mercer: I was just thrilled. I thought it was the coolest thing. I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it felt like some tentacle from the outside world had reached in and touched us. I don’t recall there being a vivid description of [how the song would be used]. Certainly there was no mention of Natalie Portman. It was a terrific surprise when it was a hit movie and famous people were in it and it wasn’t just another indie movie that kind of disappears.
Braff: I just knew that that song in the right place could really work. People just really, really fell in love with the Shins, just like I did.
Mercer: Financially, it was a boon to us because he gave us money from the sales of the soundtrack, and it sold a lot. It certainly outsold anything we had put out ourselves.
Glen Brunman (former soundtrack executive, Epic Records): This was a time when a lot of alternative bands were getting in-store play. It would take some work to make that happen—record stores, clothing stores. We got “New Slang” onto music samplers. Let’s say you did a sampler for the Gap. Either your label did it or else you were buying your way onto a sampler that was multi-label, multi-artist. There were a lot of moving parts needed to move the thing into position so when it went into stores it would be while the movie was still in theaters.
Danielle Diego (executive vice president, Fox Music): Right now, everybody’s a tastemaker, right? That moment of somebody like Zach being the tastemaker and introducing an artist like the Shins to the world doesn’t happen anymore.
Mercer: It changed my life.
Stephen Deusner (music critic who reviewed the Garden State album for Pitchfork): So, the iPod debuts in 2001, and by 2004, it’s kind of reached saturation, where you have not only the iPod Mini, but Apple introduces software so that PCs can connect to iPods. I feel like this is maybe emblematic of that moment, where you have a soundtrack that is basically somebody’s iPod.
Diego: I guess Stranger Things would be the closest thing [today].
Sophie Barker (“In the Waiting Line” with Zero 7): It was a very halcyon time for music—and for that moment of [artistic] freedom, which seems harder and harder these days. There’s so much exposure that you’re not really given much time to just be in the moment.
Deusner: Coming from somebody like Zach Braff, who would have had some sort of celebrity status, to have that peek inside his head—I don’t think celebrity necessarily works that way anymore. I’m not sure a celebrity mixtape would be as marketable in 2024.
Brothers: A lot of this was just songs that we were listening to that were lingering in the air. And then over the course of a year or two, the movie gets made, and the songs found their way onto the soundtrack.
Braff: Cary Brothers was a musical encyclopedia. He played [“The Only Living Boy in New York”] for me, and I was just like, “What? How have I missed this amazing Simon & Garfunkel song?” I have to credit Myron Kerstein, my incredible editor, who’s the one who said, “How about here?” The second we saw [Andrew and Sam] coming out of the boat—I mean, I’m getting goose bumps 20 years later. We got Simon & Garfunkel’s managers in a CAA screening room, and we showed them that moment in the movie. I remember one of them swiped a tear from their cheek, and I was like, “We got ’em.”
Paul Simon (Simon & Garfunklel, “The Only Living Boy in New York,” speaking to Billboard in 2011): That song, at the time of the album [1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water], was almost a hit. If they would have released it, it would have been a hit. At the time, before Michael Jackson, the record company would say after three or four singles, “That’s all we can put out. We don’t want to look like we’re greedy.” So they didn’t put out a fifth single. Time goes by and then comes Garden State. It’s the first time for a [new] generation [to hear it], so I put it back in the [live] show.
Brothers: I had become obsessed with Nick Drake in the years prior to Garden State, so I was so happy that Nick Drake song [“One of These Things First”] ended up in the movie. I thought everybody knew who Nick Drake was. It only took me 20 years, almost till last year, but someone was describing to me the rise of Nick Drake, and I didn’t realize that Garden State had a lot to do with it.
Sam Beam (Iron & Wine, “Such Great Heights”): I didn’t know who Zach Braff was. Anybody who asked to use a song in a movie, I would say, “Of course.” Where I was living, there wasn’t a radio station to play those things. Those sort of avenues had been closed for a while to us, and the movies sort of opened them up.
Barker: It all really happened quite quickly for us. Zero 7 released the album [Simple Things in 2001], and it started taking off in the U.K. and America. I remember someone saying, “Oh, Zach Braff is doing this film with Natalie Portman, and they love ‘Waiting Line,’” which was really exciting. He put it in the scene where everyone’s quite high, but it’s an existential thing.
Imogen Heap (Frou Frou, “Let Go”): “Let Go” was originally written for a film called Phone Booth. It had a much bigger energy, much bigger drums, very intense. I always loved the song, but it didn’t get into the movie. Then one night in our studio in West London, I brought out my cello. We stripped away all the intensity, and we were just left with the strings and the voice and that amazing bass line. We loved it so much, but through that whole Frou Frou album [Details], nobody really got to know about it until after Garden State.
Braff: There was a Radiohead song at the end, [“Sulk”]. Of course it would have been a huge Hail Mary try, but as I recall, what happened was we found a song that just works better. We didn’t need to make the insane ask of Radiohead.
Heap: Thank you, Thom [Yorke].
Bonnie Somerville (“Winding Road”): I dated Zach Braff during the making and shooting of it. That song was written eight or nine years beforehand when I had a development deal; it’s basically about my life—living in L.A., being broke, and being homesick. He loved the song. I remember I was at Home Depot getting stuff for my house, and he called me. He was like, “I might be able to get that song on the soundtrack. You and Chad Fischer are gonna recut it.” It was the last thing to come together, I think. I called my old writing partner, David Weisberg. There was no money left for us, but I was like, “I’ll do it for a penny.” Once they were releasing [the album], you have a new set of negotiations. It was amazing. To this day, I see residuals from that.
Fischer: I got a call from Zach one day, and he goes, “I was just going to do songs, but now I’m realizing I need a score.” My score for Garden State was essentially writing original acoustic music that works with the aesthetic Zach was going for, which was Harold and Maude and The Graduate. There’s a theme where Zach and Natalie are driving around on a motorcycle. I think they may have had a Cat Stevens track playing that they didn’t want or couldn’t afford.
Braff: Fiona Apple’s “Paper Bag” was in the movie. I don’t know if it even ever got to her, but we just couldn’t win her manager over. I eventually put it on the Last Kiss soundtrack because we had more money or something. Another little trivia is that “Orange Sky” by Alexi Murdoch is not on the soundtrack because it had been featured on The O.C. We didn’t know that when we placed it. The O.C. was very popular at the time and was playing lots of cool music. Josh Schwartz and I must have similar music tastes.
Josh Schwartz (creator of The O.C.): Both were definitely not market-tested soundtracks designed to cash in on what was popular at the moment. They were actually not reflective of the mainstream popular music of the time but definitely fulfilled a hunger people had to discover something new.
Deusner: The thing that I connect the soundtrack to as a whole is “montage rock,” this rise of songs that are made to elicit an emotional reaction in these very obvious ways. Scrubs was huge for that, and I think [Braff] would have picked that up.
Mercer: There’s always that super-mega-hipster collector who will eschew anyone who’s had success of that sort. They don’t consider that an organic, grassroots come-up. Like, everyone can make money and become millionaires, but not artists. If you’re an artist and you make money, you’re scum. That, to me, was East Coast college kid talk.
Deusner: There was already the backlash kind of built into it.
Mercer: When the opportunity came up to do commercials and movies, the backlash started. I was shocked at how extreme it was with certain people. Mike McGonigal, who was a terrific journalist and had a magazine called Yeti and was just hip as hell, I would have expected he would have not supported me in doing anything to exploit my art. But he encouraged me to do it! He was like, “James, if you could look back in 10 years and you said no to this or that, and then you’re just working at UPS or something, you’re going to be so pissed, dude. These kids are gonna get mad, but whatever.”
Mike McGonigal (music journalist): James and I are close to the same age and both came up in the same indie scene where selling out was taken very seriously, usually by middle-class kids still living at home, but whatever—no one wants to piss off their fans and friends.
Deusner: I think a lot of people found the whole thing with “The Shins will change your life” really cheesy. This was at a moment when there were a lot of movies about rebellion, but they were all cute movies.
Braff: Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I guess in some circles, the film has become polarizing. I’ve heard it all, and I appreciate it. I can take criticism. It’s the first thing I’d ever written. I think everything deserves fair criticism, and I’m sure there’s plenty more criticism to be had.
Part 3: “You Don’t Dream That Big”
Today, Garden State is the epitome of love-it-or-hate-it, twee indie—so much so that Vulture once published an essay titled “In Defense of Zach Braff’s Garden State.” If nothing else, the film is a relic from a time when intimate Sundance movies more commonly crossed into the mainstream. Subsequent dramedies featuring alt-pop soundtracks, such as Elizabethtown and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, seemed indebted to Garden State’s influence. Jane Schoenbrun, the director of this year’s I Saw the TV Glow, another buzzy indie with a hip soundtrack, recently said on Twitter that they wanted the movie’s trailer to evoke “the one Zach Braff made for Garden State.”
Halsted: Zach did not like what Fox did with the trailer, even though Searchlight is so good at what they do. Zach and his editor made their own trailer that we brought to the first marketing meeting. We knew he wanted to show them his trailer, but he had to present it as, “You know, me and my editor kind of whipped something up. I think it’s in my car, hold on.” Meanwhile, he had worked for weeks on the trailer. And the trailer Searchlight released is pretty much what Zach came up with.
Heap: Six months or a year after [Braff asked to use “Let Go”], I was getting calls going, “Hey, we just heard your song on TV. It’s in a movie trailer.” So many people found out about us from that.
Mercer: Here in Portland, we went and paid for tickets and saw the movie. It was cool. People at Sub Pop were shocked. They were like, “Oh my god, this is going to sell a bunch of records for us.” It just massively improved the visibility of the Shins. If you’re sitting in your bedroom in Albuquerque recording songs, you don’t dream that big.
Diego: At that time with soundtracks, it would always be like, “Let’s make a video and release singles.” This was just like, “Put the movie out and experience it.”
Brunman: A lot of soundtracks are marketed with an emphasis on the first 10 days of the movie’s release because that’s when the most people are seeing it, so there’s a lot of front-loading going on. One of the things that distinguished us from other labels doing soundtracks is if we believed that the movie would have legs, we made sure that our marketing campaign wasn’t front-loaded.
Somerville: It was pretty incredible to see it all come together like that. I have a gold record in my house. That’s a very good conversation piece. I actually sent a photo of it to Zach a few weeks ago.
Braff: The soundtrack went platinum. It also won the Grammy [for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media], and I didn’t ever think a Grammy was something I should even dream about.
Brunman: The fact that it was almost a year later when the Grammys ceremony took place gave it time to enter the zeitgeist.
Brothers: Zach and I went to the Grammys. We were sure we were not gonna win. We won, and suddenly we’re backstage taking photos. They open these doors and just throw you out on a red carpet to do winner interviews, and the first microphone in my face was Joan Rivers.
Braff: I was up against Quentin Tarantino [for Kill Bill: Volume 2]. I certainly didn’t think there would ever be a chance where I would beat Quentin Tarantino at anything. My father wanted to come, and I was like, “Dad, there’s no way I’m gonna win a Grammy. Tarantino is winning the Grammy, and you’re wasting your trip from Jersey out here.” And then we fucking won! I couldn’t believe it. Tarantino jokingly said, “You stole my fucking Grammy, man,” and then gave me a big smile and a hug. He was super sweet and supportive. I was the kind of film-school kid that would have put a Reservoir Dogs poster on my wall.
Brothers: I don’t care if I had the biggest hit single in the world—nothing would be like the Garden State soundtrack because nothing can beat the energy of music discovery, people finding it and making it part of their lives.
Beam: It was night and day. You’d be playing to 200 people, and then all of a sudden you’re playing to 2,000. Or probably more like 500—2,000 was after the Twilight soundtrack. That was another one that had a huge influence. It took everyone by surprise.
Braff: There’s a story I’ve heard where there was a Virgin Megastore at Union Square [in New York City] back in the day. People would go to the movie theater on 13th Street, and they would just walk around the corner to 14th Street, and the Virgin Megastore got so tired of it, they put a cardboard sign in the soundtrack section saying, “We do not have the Garden State soundtrack. Please don’t ask.”
Brunman: We got another jump during the early DVD life. We went back and treated it almost as a new release. You were fighting with all the other labels and all the other records for display space. CDs don’t end up in the front of the store by accident. Labels are buying in to get placement that will make that final connection with the customers.
Halsted: It’s an ongoing joke in my family that pretty much every elevator I get into you hear some song from the Garden State soundtrack—or the Muzak, which is even worse.
Braff: I have a letter from Spielberg. It’s framed on my wall. It was a dream letter to get from one of my heroes saying that he loved the film. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like, “On behalf of so many others, I’d like to welcome you to Hollywood,” or something like that.
Brunman: Zach was one of those guys who knew what he liked and had his finger on the pulse. He deserves all the credit.
Braff: I never in a thousand years would have thought this would be what happened to this movie, but whether it’s the soundtrack or the film itself, it’s rare that a day goes by that someone doesn’t ask me about it. It was a seminal movie for a lot of people at a time in their life when they really needed to see it.
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on Twitter @majacobs.