A founding member of The Fray says that when the band’s song, “How to Save a Life,” appeared on a 2006 episode of Grey’s Anatomy, it changed their trajectory — and the first person to call him when the show aired was his grandmother.
Speaking on the Wednesday, May 13 episode of the Teen Beat podcast with Danielle Fishel, vocalist and guitarist Joe King — who formed the band with fellow musician Isaac Slade in the early 2000s — was asked if he remembered the moment the band learned their song would be used in the show. “I do,” King, 45, said. “Well, first it was like as simple as an email, like, you know, a request for the license to use the song.”
At the time, “How to Save a Life” was not a single and the band was instead focused on another song — “Over My Head.”
But when the Grey’s Anatomy team used “How to Save a Life” in season 2, episode 21 (titled “Superstition”) of the show, the band gained a whole new audience. “So after ‘How to Save a Life’ aired [on Grey’s], my grandmother called me, and she was like, ‘Joey, I heard your song on Grey’s Anatomy.‘ And she was so excited and so proud,” King recalled. “That was the first call. And she was like thrilled because she loved the show.” He continued: “And so I was like, ‘Oh, it’s on your radar?’ “
“And I think because the band was already — we had a fan base and we were already touring, you know, from ‘Over My Head’ and what was happening, the timing couldn’t have been better,” he added. “Because I do think looking back, if ‘How to Save a Life’ was the first thing that happened for us through Grey’s, we may have been just super pigeonholed into, you know, that only.”
The show’s music supervisor used the song in the episode airing on March 19, 2006, and the song made it to the Hot 100 the following month. (Billboard notes that the song was also used as the official promotional song for the series’ third season.)
King said he was initially worried about being viewed as a “sellout,” telling Fishel: “You gotta get your music heard somehow. And at that time too, I remember wrestling with the idea of licensing the song, or any song, to TV or commercials because it was a time where artists were like, it was a sellout thing.”
“There was a big fear around this,” he added.