The Time Warner Cable-supplied blurb described the program as:

Conventional music used in a [sic] unconventional manner.

I wondered, what might that unconventional manner be, so I clicked on channel 83, the Ovation network.

It was Carter Burwell, describing the process of composing for Fargo, how he took a Norwegian folk song called The Lost Sheep, played around with it on his piano, then reshaped it with fiddle, pizzicato cello, double bass, harp and celeste using his computer and a few synthesizers. (It was rerecorded, of course, for the film).

Fargo, North Dakota.

I've always been drawn to the melancholy theme that seems to sum up the snowy expanse of the rural Dakotas. It was performed on a Hardanger fiddle by Paul Peabody.

I've been thinking about a passage in this book.

The narrator recalls that, as a young girl, she was obsessed with a particular song. When no one was around, she played it over and over on her boombox. She sang along with her eyes closed, cradling a pillow. She kept the cassette cued to that song, eventually wore out the tape.

Baby, baby, never let me go...

Years later, she realized she had deliberately ignored some of the lyrics. It was about lovers, not infants. She had skipped over those phrases to recast the song and maneuver her meaning onto it.

She had imagined infants, not lovers.

Today my iTunes shuffled from Madonna's "True Blue" to a snippet of a free jazz free-for-all live recording from the early 1970s.

And it worked.