Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Next time you watch Dark Winds, or rewatch episodes of seasons 3 and 4 of the riveting hit AMC show, turn on the captions to catch the names of the songs and the lyrics in the powerful, expansive soundtrack.
Whether the music is blasting out of an NDN car radio or a jukebox, or the backing track to a pivotal scene, music supervisor Rick Clark has been digging into the past and the present to curate a distinctive sound for the show.
Clark has tapped Native music from Kiowa guitar master Jesse Ed Davis, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, John Trudell, and Radmilla Cody. In season 3, he had award-winning musician Keith Secola re-record his Indian Country anthem, “NDN Kars,” in a more stripped-down version that netted a nomination from the Guild of Music Supervisors for best song written for a TV show, as well as a nomination for Clark as Best Music Supervisor for the overall show.
This is a big deal, as they were in a select group of only six TV shows out of hundreds.
“In my mind, if it’s the right music, it’s the right music,” Clark told ICT from his home studio in Tennessee. “I don’t care how obscure it is. I just want emotional, creative truth. The show’s setting is on the reservation, largely in 1973. I needed to select music that was unequivocally from that period, and music on a production level that had an impact or roughness, rawness that connected to the landscape.”
Clark is not Native, but he has been a musician, songwriter and producer for decades. He asked for a revision to “NDN Kars” to fit the mood of the show.
“I couldn’t use ‘NDN Kars’ the way it was released,” Clark said, “because the production value is outside what the show’s sonic palette is. I wanted it to sound more organic and shine some love light on his sweet, stoner spirit. It was an act of intention, I could hear it in his voice, his humanity. His kind spirit is enveloping.”
Native musician Keith Secola, shown here with hoop dancer Eric Hernandez, performed a revised version of his hit song, “NDN Kars,” at the Guild of Music Supervisors Awards show on Feb. 28, 2026. The song is among those by Native performers that has been picked for use in the AMC hit “Dark Winds,” by the show’s music supervisor Rick Clark.
Credit: Sandra Hale Schulman/Special to ICT
At the Guild of Music Supervisors Awards show on Feb. 28, presenters included Emmy/Grammy/Oscar/Tony winner John Legend and Oscar-nominated actress Kate Hudson. Secola was asked to perform his song “NDN Kars” live for the elite industry crowd.
Secola assembled an all-star band he called The 49ers composed of Rick Clark on bass, David Huckfelt on guitar, Genevieve Gros-Louis on violin, John Densmore of The Doors on percussion, Beth Goodfellow on percussion, and Eric Hernandez doing a hoop dance. Secola played flute and guitar.
While the “Dark Winds” nominees didn’t win, the Sterlin Harjo’s show “The Lowdown” did win for Best Music Supervisor, with supervisor Tiffany Anders at the helm. She said she got the gig when she and Harjo bonded over Jesse Ed Davis.
Music as creative truth
“Dark Winds’ Episode 4, “Ni Aniidi – The New World,” of season 4, which aired March 8, opened with a song by The Doors and has tunes from The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, as well as Jesse Ed Davis. Given the strict limitations on artist licensing, the fact that Clark was able to use his industry savvy and experience to acquire those tracks for the show is pretty astounding.
“I came on board at the beginning of season two,” Clark said. “John Wirth, the showrunner, and I have worked together before. Our language we have between each other is pretty refined by this point; he trusts me to do what I do. AMC TV show budgets are not large, so I had to figure out a way to make sure that the music was as good as it could be. I wanted to make sure that I not only included Indigenous talent, but that they got paid more than they were expecting.”
With Clark’s experienced dealing, he managed to get music from the top mainstream artists at a reduced rate, explaining to them that he needed his budget to ensure that Native artists were paid fairly.
Musician Keith Secola has been nominated for a 2026 Guild of Music Supervisors award for Best Song Written and/or Recorded for Television, for “NDN Kars” from the Season 3 finale of “Dark Winds.” Credit: courtesy photo
“I had to get real creative and say, ‘Look guys, we need to elevate the Indigenous artists in a way that doesn’t feel token, it doesn’t feel like we’re appropriating them and not honoring the culture,” he said. “I’m grateful to Neil Young, to Bob Dylan’s people, to Jackson Browne, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, and all these artists that got the vision and have been extremely generous.”
“There’’s a lot of that in the fourth episode because they go into LA and they’re in a bar and there’s jukebox music, there’s car radio music,” he said. “That’s 1973 LA, you have to have that, the real deal stuff.”
Clark says he has a lot of time to fill so he began to look at more contemporary Native artists with the requirement that the music has to plausibly feel like it existed or spiritually came from that time, so it wouldn’t take viewers outside of the show,
A Chief Seattle vision
Clark found musician David Huckfelt in Minneapolis, who is not Native but has been working for over a decade with some of the top contemporary Native artists, including John Trudell and Quiltman Sahme. Clark asked for one of his songs.
“David Huckfelt is a formidable truthteller whose songs are like dreamscape movies, illuminating a real place that was never taught in American history books. ‘Chief Seattle’s Dream’ embodies the best of these qualities,” Clark said.
It’s a song he added to the line-up, and it appeared in the season 4 premiere.
Huckfelt told ICT he wrote the song after a long drive across Four Corners.
“‘Chief Seattle’s Dream” came to me in a 15-minute vision one night,” Huckfelt said, “writing alone in the woods of Wisconsin, as fast as I could take it down. But the song was conceived on a long drive west to east across the Navajo and Hopi Nations at dusk, where the time zone changes six times and man-made borders blur. I’ve done that drive a hundred times, and without fail there’s always a man or a woman, walking alone, towards or away from the sunset, across the Earth as if time didn’t exist — which it doesn’t.”
He can’t escape the message.
“I read Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech at least once a year;” he said. “Like my friend Keith Secola says, you can’t wake up someone who’s pretending to sleep. The spirit world raiding your bedroom on a Tuesday night. To me, Chief Seattle reminds us that manifest destiny has a very unfortunate flip side, and our prayers will be unanswered in the order they were not received.”
Huckfelt introduced Clark to the music of Secola, Buddy Red Bow, Dirt Rhodes, Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey, and Jackie Bird.
“I worked with [Clark] on season three,” Huckfelt said, “sending him artists and songs that I thought might potentially fit in the show, and then he used a couple of my songs and Keith’s. It’s been eye-opening to me, I’ve learned so much working with Rick and how it all happens, the things that he gets to choose himself, and the things that producers tell him to go after. It’s quite a job.”
So how does Clark pull the music together for individual scenes?
He said he works ahead, asking for as many as six songs per scene as options so if a scene changes he can adjust. Then he needs to do that for almost every scene for all eight episodes of the hour-long show.
“This is a year-round job for me because I take it so personally,” Clark said. “I’m gathering music like crazy all year long. I’ve already read four scripts for the next season 5. I have a clear sense of the arc and the texture of that season’s drama. I choose accordingly. Am I reading the script and mentally placing the music in there? Yes and no, because then the editor’s job is to take the script as it was written and shot, and create the best representation of the story, and I work with that.”
He continued, “Sometimes it says ‘Leaphorn riding with Chee across the reservation in the patrol car, mountains looming, above a storm in the distance.’ Automatically I see a montage. This is going to need a piece of music that is going to happen during that flow of images, it might be 10 seconds or it might be two minutes.
“I choose music that fits the scene and the characters.”
“Dark Winds” airs Sundays on AMC through April 5, 2026.
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