Alien: Earth features eclectic needle drops and end credits songs from artists like Nina Simone, TV on the Radio, Metallica, and Black Sabbath. The series opens each episode with a brief, haunting invocation of Cream's "Strange Brew" reimagined as the main title theme. Composer Jeff Russo and creator Noah Hawley co-created an original cover of the song, with Hawley performing vocals and emphasizing the lyric "kill what's inside of you" to match the show's tone. Russo relied on his musical rapport with Hawley and worked with music supervisor Maggie Phillips to secure the necessary clearances, including direct outreach to Eric Clapton.
The Cream cover, it turns out, is an original piece created by series composer Jeff Russo and show creator Noah Hawley, the latter performing the vocals. As Russo tells Consequence, Hawley had mentioned that the "Strange Brew" lyric "kill what's inside of you" was "very apropos of what we were doing, feeling-wise" while they were discussing how they'd open each episode. So then Hawley's request became finding a way to mash the original Cream song up with the tone Russo was otherwise establishing with the show's original music.
Hawley was in a band called Base Nation early in his career, and Russo says that "one of the reasons why we have such a great musical vernacular between us is because he has that vocabulary, so we can talk about music in ways that I can't talk about with other filmmakers - unless they happen to be musicians." Russo immediately consulted with music supervisor Maggie Phillips to figure out how to get approval from Cream to cover the song, a kind of request she's used to receiving from the two men. "Jeff and Noah, whenever they get into the studio and do this, it's always the chicken before the egg, because I'm like, 'Well, I don't know how I'm going to do it, clearance-wise,'" Phillips says. "But it all came together like magic for this one."
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