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Yellowjackets musical duo, Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, have released the full version of “Sleepwalking,” the song that features prominently in the show’s Season Three finale.
“Sleepwalking” plays during the opening sequence of the last episode, which arrived on Paramount+ last night (and will air on Showtime April 13). The track also appears on the Yellowjackets Season Three soundtrack, which is out today, April 11. Accompanying the song’s release is a music video directed by Bart Nickerson, co-creator of Yellowjackets with Ashley Lyle.
Wedren and Waronker have been composing music for Yellowjackets throughout its run (including the theme song), and ahead of the Season Three finale, they prepped three original songs to potentially feature in the episode. The pair told Rolling Stone via email that when they first heard “Sleepwalking” with the opening scene of the finale, it “made everything shiver in just the right way, very Yellowjackets, while still feeling like a fresh, new dimension to the music we’d been writing all season.”
Nickerson felt the same. “What makes a song right for a sequence of images is so ephemeral, but there is an unmistakable sensation, like a gut punch — a pleasant one — when you see them together for the first time,” he said. “When we saw ‘Sleepwalking’ over the opening sequence, it was like someone had slammed their fist into my sternum — but, again, you know, in a good way.”
When writing “Sleepwalking,” Wedren and Waronker said they were trying to create a “haunting yet beautiful” tone that reflected “the emotional landscape/hellscape of Season Three.” They also noted that the lyrics “ever-so-loosely touch upon overlapping storylines, relationships, and imagery from throughout the season without putting too fine a point on it.”
The pair also said the song was partly inspired by Marianne Faithfull, who’d just died when they were working on the vocals: “We decided to channel her rasp,” the pair said. “It also helped that we were hoarse the day we recorded vocals because the Yellowjackets wrap party had been the night before. So this one’s for Marianne! Made with love.”
As for the “Sleepwalking” music video, it doesn’t feature any footage from Yellowjackets, but certainly feels in dialog with the show. There’s an uncanny, dream-like quality to the clip, which shows Wedren and Waronker as they not only perform the song, but appear to clean up after a rather bloody (albeit unspecified) event, all while time moves backwards.
“Part of what made the video so fun was getting to reverse the process; we started with the song and waited to see what kind of story and imagery materialized in our imaginations,” Nickerson said. “Really the first thing that came up was a question: what else is going on in Wiskayok? In some ways, the video became a sort of thematic Rosetta Stone for the finale… I mean, what is more Yellowjackets than the dreamy rendering of a grizzly task undone over and over under the influence of a soul connection to a ghost.”
