‘Sons of Anarchy’ season 6: Wait for ‘Wolfsangel’ by listening to ‘Sitting on Top of the World’

“Sons of Anarchy” is a show known for quite a few things: Intense action sequences, strong performances, and writing that really makes you feel the weight of what these characters are going through, but we would be insane to not mention the music. Creator Kurt Sutter and music composer Bob Thiele put a great deal of emphasis on finding and covering tunes that are appropriate thematically with the show, and also have something extra to say and offer.

With that, we now have a cover of the 1930s track “Sitting on Top of the World” whose name alone is something that has some of irony to it, given that we would not imagine that any character on this series right now is in such a place. According to Rolling Stone, Sutter himself hand-picked the song, and then Thiele put together a group of music superstars to help bring it to life as a rock / blues track. Scott Shriner of Weezer put together the bass work, while the Forest Rangers tackled the guitar riffs and Chris Goss (Masters of Reality) took on the vocals for the track.

The end result? A pretty mesmerizing listen, and also more evidence that show creators are putting more and more emphasis on the music that they allow to cross paths with their viewers. After all, “Breaking Bad” made waves earlier this week with the choice of “Baby Blue” by Badfinger as the last song to ever play on the show, and it has gone on to see its sales spike exponentially.

Tonight, you can catch the next episode of “Sons of Anarchy” in “Wolfsangel,” which you can preview further over at the link here. If there is one recommendation we would make for this episode in particular, it would be to make sure you don’t arrive late. Given the cliffhanger that we were left with Tig, it would be a shock to not pick up with the remainder of that scene with August.

Photo: FX