Linda Ronstadt has said she won’t receive any money for her sync in The Last Of Us.
Episode three of the HBO series used Ronstadt’s breakthrough hit ‘Long Long Time’ to tell the backstory of Bill and Frank.
“I still love the song and I’m very glad that Gary will get a windfall,” Ronstadt told Billboard, referring to Gary White, the songwriter who first played her the song in 1969.
In The Last Of Us, Ronstadt’s 1970 song appears three times (and is the name of the episode) in the background of a decade-spanning love story between Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett).
After the episode aired last week (January 29) Spotify reported that streams of ‘Long Long Time’ jumped 4,900 per cent between 11pm and midnight.
The episode’s director Peter Hoar revealed recently that he originally wanted to use a piece of music from The Last Of Us in It’s A Sin.
“There’s a piece of music in there by Max Richter which stayed there,” Hoar said at a screening in London recently.
“A lot of the time you put temp music in and then it’s like, ‘too expensive!’ But this is HBO. What was really great about it was I tried to put it in It’s A Sin and then they took it away from me. I’ve never felt as much listening to a piece of music as I do listening to that every time.”