Theme Songs for Primetime Weeknight NFL Games Are More Than Just Music ESPN, NBC, Amazon Prime have their own takes - musically and culturally By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Thursday, October 19, 2023 - 12:54 pm
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The phenomenon that is the Taylor Swift Effect demonstrates how the singer's concert tours have lifted retail, hospitality, and even tax revenues in cities that host them. And the singer's love life - the topic of much of her oeuvre - has even given a boost to the NFL: her appearance at a trio of Kansas City Chiefs games, the team for whom her current swain, tight end Travis Kelce, plays, has actually moved ratings. Her attendance at the Oct. 1 Kansas City Chiefs-New York Jets game helped NBC's Sunday Night Football score an average of 27 million viewers across all platforms, making it the most-watched NFL Sunday since Super Bowl LVII in February.
Music and the NFL have been a duo for far longer, though. The theme songs for two of three primetime NFL broadcasts have themselves become cultural icons. The most notable - and contentious - was country star Hank Williams Jr.'s adaptation of his 1981 hit All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight as All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night, the opening theme for ESPN's Monday Night Football in 2011.
It didn't last long. After Williams made snide comments on Fox News about President Barack Obama, the network dropped the song and the singer, going to a cold open for the rest of the season. But All My Rowdy Friends made a comeback in 2018, with Williams duetting with country duo Florida-Georgia Line and R&B singer Jason Derulo.
All My New Friends Are Coming Over This year, ESPN debuted the new official opening song, a rework of 1981 Phil Collins classic In the Air Tonight, featuring Americana country-rocker Chris Stapleton, drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, and ubiquitous rapper Snoop Dogg. Co-produced by ESPN's Creative Content Unit and Grammy-winner David Cobb, it airs before all MNF games on ABC and ESPN.
ESPN's Joanne Strange says that, choosing an artist for the new Monday Night Football theme, we wanted someone who would have a big reach to our audience, who was cross-generational.
The artistic ingredients seem to check a lot of inclusionary boxes, including gender and ethnicity, but ESPN Music Operations Supervisor Joanne Strange says the choices were collateral rather than calculated.
We wanted someone who would have a big reach to our audience, who was cross-generational, somebody that everybody knew of, says Strange, noting that Stapleton had caught the ear of the production team with his soulful rendition of the National Anthem before this year's Super Bowl on Fox. We needed somebody that can belt out a song like In the Air Tonight,' and Chris Stapleton was at the top of our list.
Producer Dave Cobb, who won a Best Country Song Award in 2022 with Stapleton and had previously worked with ESPN on NFL-show opening themes, came aboard as the track's producer. Stapleton, in turn, voiced his desire to work with Snoop Dogg, with whom Strange says ESPN has collaborated on other projects and whose rapping offered an opportunity for lyrical customization. All that was needed was someone to play the iconic 1980s-era gated-reverb tom-tom fills made famous on Phil Collins's original version of the song. Cindy Blackman Santana - whose husband, famed guitarist Carlos Santana, proposed to her right after she had finished a drum solo - had the perfect credentials, completing an artistic triumvirate that crosses genre and generational lines.
I think the percussion in that song is maybe the most famous piece of percussion in 50 years of pop music, says Julie McGlone, VP, creative content production, ESPN. The fact that we're crossing genres with country and hip-hop and then jazz and rock with Cindy brings the diversity of musical genres and musical fans together. And that's what the NFL audience is, right? It's this cross-section of America in what we all listen to together.
SNF: Changing It Up Every Season For NBC's Sunday Night Football, eight-time Grammy Award-winner Carrie Underwood reprised the regularly updated rendition of the show's Waiting All Day for Sunday Night theme song for the 11th consecutive season. The new show open features a concert performance, from the Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, home of her ongoing residency, interspersed with augmented-reality highlights displayed across a halo scoreboard.
The song, a rewrite of Joan Jett's 1988 hit I Hate Myself for Loving You, has been part of SNF for all of its 18 seasons on NBC, with renditions by Pink and Faith Hill before Underwood took over the franchise. The most recent iteration was recorded at Nashville's Starstruck Studios, produced by Underwood's record producer, Chris DeStefano. Like previous versions, it was recorded the spring before the NFL season kicked off, with each section of the track analyzed for potential new wrinkles.
NBC Sports' Tripp Dixon: There's a visual challenge and a sonic challenge every year. It needs to be recognizable, but I think it also needs to evolve from season to season.
Every season, we're striving to do something different within the theme, says Tripp Dixon, VP/creative director, NBC Sports Group. The music is essentially the same, but we challenge ourselves to do something different from an arrangement standpoint. We discuss the pacing, the tempo, the grit of the lead guitar, the vocals, what we are going to do differently structurally.
Dixon's description of the process is not unlike laying out a football play: It's a 10-second intro, you've got two verses, and you've got a refrain and a big chorus and a short solo where it starts to
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Theme Songs for Primetime Weeknight NFL Games Are More Than Just Music ESPN, NBC, Amazon Prime have their own takes - musically and culturally By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
