If you love playing Name That Tune while watching Bridgerton, then, dear gentle reader, you’re in for a treat: Here are all the instrumental pop covers featured in Season 4. You’ll notice a fan-requested favorite and a few surprises.
As devoted members of the ton know, the soundtrack for each season of the period drama is sprinkled with recognizable songs. Season 4’s soundtrack includes music originally by Coldplay, Taylor Swift, Paramore, and Olivia Rodrigo, whose inclusion music supervisor Justin Kamps manifested back in Season 2.
“I just think her songwriting is great, and it makes for some beautiful string quartet versions,” Kamps shared with Tudum. Now, in Season 4, fans will get to hear a cover of her song “bad idea right?” off her GUTS album. “It’s just got a great energy to it,” says Kamps. “People will be rocking out to that one.”
The soundtrack permeates the Season 4 love story of the Bridgertons’ most bohemian family member, second son Benedict (Luke Thompson). He’s loath to settle down but is surprised at his mother Violet’s (Ruth Gemmell) opening masquerade ball of the season. There, he’s enchanted by the mysterious Lady in Silver — who, unbeknownst to him, is actually resourceful housemaid Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) underneath her mask.
Kamps teases that “Enchanted” by Taylor Swift — or Joseph William Morgan’s orchestral version — is the one track fans have been requesting for Benedict and Sophie (“Benophie”) since Season 3 came out. “Anytime I was posting about Season 3’s music, or if I was just looking online to see what people were saying, there were all these people just retweeting the YouTube video of this song or being like, ‘You have one job. This is the ultimate Benophie song. You have to use it,’ ” he says. So he did.
Below, Kamps walks us through all the instrumental pop covers you’ll hear in Bridgerton Season 4 — from “bad idea right?” and “Enchanted” to “360,” “Birds of a Feather,” and “Never Be the Same.”
“This is someone who’s only ever dreamt of being in a moment like this, stepping out of a carriage into the beautiful entryway to a ball,” says Kamps of Sophie’s arrival at Violet’s masquerade ball. “I really love that Coldplay album, and one of my favorite artists, Jon Hopkins, co-wrote that particular track. It’s a really magical sound that matched the wonderment she’s experiencing. She gives such a great performance there, seeing her face with a joy that Benedict eventually sees later.”
“The song starts right as a dance is starting, so I had to look for something that not only made sense for the moment and scene but also made sense rhythmically with what was happening onscreen,” says Kamps. “And I couldn’t resist sending another Pitbull song after last season.”
“It was fun to have this cheeky moment for the queen when she says no,” says Kamps of Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) forbidding Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) from leaving Mayfair. The Bridgerton team watched the scene paired with the music in a spotting session, where showrunner Jess Brownell, executive producers, Kamps’s music crew, and composer Kris Bowers review episodes to decide if they like the songs they’ve chosen or they should pick alternate options. “And everyone was just laughing, going, imagine the queen looked over and was like, ‘Play this song in this moment just to show that I mean business. You can’t leave. You cannot leave!’ ” Kamps says.
“This is a big one,” Kamps prefaces. He initially heard this song while working on Season 3, and found it “beautiful.” But, Bridgerton traditionally sticks to a string quartet — and this is a full orchestral cover. Then the fans found this moving track. “I brought it up to our showrunner, and she was aware that this was going on too, because she had also heard it from fans. I think most fans wanted it to be used during the masquerade ball in Episode 1,” Kamps says. “We still wanted to use the song, but in a different way than expected. I love this scene [when Benedict comes to Penwood House and Sophie sees him through the door]. It always gets me a little misty-eyed watching. The cover has so much yearning in it, as it has that fuller string orchestra and can move into a little bit more of a score sound than we typically hear in our string covers. We have it in such a beautiful spot, and I’m hoping that the fans will think the same.”
“Vitamin String Quartet put out a whole album of Paramore covers fairly recently, and I had suggested a different track,” says Kamps. Originally there was a score playing at the moment where “All I Wanted” comes in. In the scene, Violet and Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis) kiss for the first time, and Benedict and Sophie leave My Cottage suppressing their feelings for each other.
“And during our spotting session, which are always big discussions, the writer of the episode, Cathy Lew, said, ‘Oh, Justin had suggested this Paramore song, but I was thinking, what about “All I Wanted”? We should try it here.’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it and see how it works.’ Then we all fell in love with it, and obviously they approved the use. So now we get this awesome moment at the end of 403.”
Benedict asking Sophie to be his mistress “is obviously a big moment in the book,” says Kamps. “So we really needed something to play that insane passion that they’re suddenly having. They meet, there are no words spoken, and they just go at it. I pitched a bunch of options, because it was a big moment towards the end of the first half. But I loved this one the best because it has this manic, crazy fiddle that's going on that really builds. I love the way it’s perfectly edited in there to go with his hand movements. The whole thing is that what they’re doing in that moment is probably a ‘bad idea.’ They could get caught in the staircase.” Then there’s the matter of Benedict’s “offer” to Sophie. He asks her to be his mistress, and she flees the staircase in shock.
“I love this cover and hope fans enjoy it,” Kamps says. “It’s just got a great energy to it. People will be rocking out to that one.”
It’s rare, during filming, that the Bridgerton cast gets to dance along to the same music viewers will hear when they watch the finished episodes on Netflix. But Peter Gregson recorded his original cover of Charli XCX’s “360” in advance for the series, allowing choreographer Jack Murphy to plot out the dance moves Hyacinth (Florence Hunt) and her guests would move to during her practice ball.
“This is another one where I felt like we needed to get a Charli song in here somewhere because she was still blowing up everywhere,” says Kamps, reminiscing about the phenomenon that was “brat summer.” The cover is one of Kamps’s favorites of the season, because it’s deployed during such a charming moment. “The whole time, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God. Look at how grown up they are!’ And they’re messing up the dance and tripping on people,” he says.
Kamps first heard “Birds of a Feather” when Billie Eilish’s management invited him to an early listening session for her HIT ME HARD AND SOFT album at a recording studio. “The second I heard that song, that was the one that stood out for me and that I kept remembering,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is the perfect Bridgerton song.’” Kamps knows the series has used a number of Eilish’s songs, but adds, “She’s super huge. You can’t ignore these songs!”
The track plays just as Francesca (Hannah Dodd) and Michaela’s (Masali Baduza) friendship sparks, Kamps explains, before cutting to a sweet dance between Benedict and Hyacinth at her party. As Benedict dances with his sister, he and Sophie can’t keep their eyes off each other from across the ballroom. They share a particularly longing look at the point in the song when you’d ordinarily hear the lyric, “I’ll love you ’til the day that I die.” Not that you, dearest gentle reader, needed another reason to yearn!
Benedict and Sophie finally “lose control” after he declares his love for her. “We’ve waited long enough, they’re going to lose control,” says Kamps. “This is a track that I was like, ‘We’ve got to use this for a sex scene at some moment,’ and this seemed like the perfect one. It’s a very spicy moment, and the song really adds to that. It’s great to see them finally getting to express their love in that way.”
The song also serves as a parallel to Rodrigo’s “bad idea right?” — with the couple now in Benedict’s private quarters instead of a hallway. “They’re in a room, no one’s going to catch them. Probably,” jokes Kamps.
For both covers in Episode 6, Kamps shares that Brownell and the producers wanted to look back and find some older songs. Kamps jokes that The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” really was “just what I needed,” he laughs. The song matches the fun energy of the ton arriving at Cressida Cowper’s ball — “and taking in all the pink!”
Sting’s “Fields of Gold” plays as Francesca and her husband, Earl of Kilmartin John Stirling (Victor Alli), step outside the ball to take in the quiet glow of the moonlight. The two relish their shared silences, but John is moved to speak, basking in the love he and Francesca share. “It’s a beautiful, nostalgic song about thinking back on times gone by and love, and I think that it plays really well in that moment for them as they stare off and hope for the best of their future,” says Kamps. “But we know what’s coming. …”
As fans learn at the end of the episode, this scene is John and Francesca’s final time at a ball together. He dies suddenly at the end of the episode, devastating Francesca, Michaela, and the Bridgerton family. The cover offers a poignant moment to reflect on their bond before everything is upended by grief. “For people that know what’s coming, this cover is going to be heartbreaking,” says Kamps. “I feel like people are going to get wrapped up in that moment, and then want to hear that cover again … It’s a tough one.”
Out of respect for John — and the grief the Bridgerton family is experiencing — Episode 7 features no music covers. “We didn’t want to have some cover take away from that emotion,” says Kamps. “It didn’t seem like the right episode.”
Benedict and Sophie take a steamy bath together after he assures her that she can fully trust his love. Kamps knew the bathtub scene was a fan-favorite moment that book readers had been eagerly anticipating, so he was intentional about selecting a song that hit the emotions just right for this “final passionate moment with the couple this season,” he says. The scene’s playful splashing was also carefully timed to the Strings From Paris cover, a string group the music team frequently returns to. “They’re one of our current favorites out there,” says Kamps.
Like Swift’s “Enchanted,” Kamps reveals that Lord Huron’s “The Night We Met” was another oft-requested song from fans for Season 4. The song plays when Benedict asks Sophie for her official first dance at the queen’s ball for Lady Danbury. The dance is a full-circle moment to the night the couple met and danced together at his mother’s masquerade ball.
“If you look at the lyrics, it’s more of a bittersweet, sad, looking-back-at-the-night we-met kind of vibe,” says Kamps. “But this cover by Joni Fuller is so beautiful, and, obviously, they did go through a lot of heartbreak. The cover offers a chance to think back on maybe if things had gone differently, they could have been in this moment sooner.” Ultimately, the scene underscores that Benedict and Sophie are able to publicly acknowledge and celebrate their relationship.
The song also plays over the queen and Lady Danbury laughing together, sharing an emotional moment as they realize Lady Danbury is really going to travel. “They’re also reflecting on when they met,” says Kamps. “It brings me to tears a little bit when the queen says, ‘We have fun.’” Their friendship represents a lasting love in each of their lives, paralleling Benedict and Sophie’s romantic relationship.
Listen to all these covers in Bridgerton Season 4, only on Netflix. And tune in to Bridgerton: The Official Podcast as soon as you’re done.
