Co-producer Erin Mitchell works with creator and executive producer Meredith Stiehm and music supervisor Wende Crowley of Los Angeles’ Whirly Girl Music to select just the song to set a scene’s mood. “What’s great about our show is that so many artists’ songs are being used to tell stories of different times,” Mitchell says. “The music really becomes part of the story.”

In each episode of Cold Case, Detective Lilly Rush (Kathryn Morris) reopens long-dead murder cases and solves them. The story of the killing — and the show has set them as far back as the 1920s and as recently as present day — is told in a series of flashbacks, up until the final montage when Lilly solves the crime and the viewers see what Lilly and the team finally have realized. All those flashbacks are artfully tailored to the time period and scored with relevant music.

Since the show premiered in 2003, Cold Case has designed entire episodes around the music of such American legends as Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. The show’s writers listen to an artist’s catalog and then try to write stories with scenes that match up well to the various songs.

“The writer that did the Johnny Cash episode listened to a variety of his songs,” Mitchell says. “She really concentrated on the stories, which are very specific. She finally incorporated the tone of a lot of the lyrics into the story. Originally, when we came up with the idea, all the flashbacks were going to be narrated by the music. There wasn’t going to be a lot of dialogue in it. But the network wanted it to be a little more Cold Case, so we added more talking.”

Now the show’s writers and producers are looking to do an episode based around the music from a Broadway musical, and they are working on clearing the rights.

Getting permission to use the songs can be tricky, and Cold Case’s producers try to start the process early. Not every artist is eager to have his or her song showcased in an episode of television.

“Sometimes there’s just no rhyme or reason,” says Whirly Girl’s Crowley. “For example, we wanted to use ‘Cannonball’ by The Breeders for our 1994 episode, and Kim Deal finally just said, ‘I don’t want to license my song. I just don’t want to.’ And you get to the point where you are like, ‘OK, you just don’t have to.’ But for the most part, people are more into licensing their music than they are not and young bands are really into it.”

And as Cold Case has incorporated more and more music into the show, artists have really warmed up to the notion. “Once artists started recognizing how important music was to our show, they wanted to become part of it,” says Mitchell.

“We’ve definitely been approached by artists who wanted us to use one of their singles or even do an all-inclusive episode. That certainly makes things easier on us.”