A  more than 50-year-old song from a Canadian music icon helped give Little Bird its voice.

Oscar-winning Cree artist Buffy Sainte-Marie recorded a 1.5 minute reimagining of her 1967 song “Hey, Little Bird” for the limited series’ title sequence, which series co-creator and executive producer Jennifer Podemski tells Playback was initially never supposed to exist.

“I was building a Little Bird inspiration playlist [while in pre-production]… and I came across this song by Buffy,” says Podemski. “It was such a weird-sounding song and I thought that it really fit the tone of [the series], the very offbeat kind of uncomfortable vibe that [the main character] Esther has.”

Podemski says she determined that the series needed an emotional anchor to ground its story, about an adopted Indigenous woman searching for her biological family, and it fit the bill. So she reached out to Sainte-Marie and sent her some scripts.

“She read everything,” says Podemski. “She got back to me, she’s like, ‘I love this. I want to be a part of it — but I don’t like the song.'”

It turned out that while Sainte-Marie wrote the words to the original, she wasn’t a fan of the arrangement. The two decided to reimagine the song for Little Bird, holding brainstorming sessions over Zoom before Sainte-Marie recorded it from Hawaii.

“She sent me the first version and I listened to it a hundred times and bawled my eyes out every time,” says Podemski, explaining that the song is meant to represent Esther’s emotional journey. “There’s so many layers and so many elements that resonate.”

Podemski pitched the concept to the producing teams of Rezolution Pictures and OP Little Bird, as well as network executives at Crave and APTN lumi, who she says were on board and helped “squeeze money from every crevice” in the budget to bring it to life.

As for whether a full-length version will be released? Don’t hold your breath. Podemski says the reimagined number only exists in its 1.5 minute form. However, she adds that producers are currently in talks to release a Little Bird soundtrack, which would feature the opening song.

Little Bird is produced by Rezolution Pictures and OP Little Bird with Canadian broadcasters Crave and APTN lumi, in partnership with global distributor Fremantle. The series premiered in Canada on May 26 and will make its U.S. debut on PBS platforms on Oct. 12.

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Fall 2023 issue

Image courtesy of Bell Media