In the opening scene of Gilmore Girls, the viewer is lowered onto an idyllic New England street. “There She Goes,” fills the soft gray air. She is Lorelai, one of the eponymous girls, and she is rapidly making her way to a corner diner to submit an entreaty for a cup of coffee. It is clear that the subsequent caffeine-fueled banter between Lorelai and Luke, the diner owner, are routine in this town. Lorelai’s quick quips and coffee consumption are rivaled only by her teen daughter Rory who soon joins her at a table where they share lipgloss (vanilla, chocolate strawberry, and toasted marshmallow-flavored) and discuss the disappearance of a Macy Gray CD and Rory’s (apparently genetic) longing for caffeine to help mourn the aforementioned missing music. From the jump, Gilmore Girls establishes two of the series’ most important themes: music and food, and more specifically coffee.
From that opening song by the La’s to the now-nostalgic “lalala” interludes that tie together each scene, the show is held together by its carefully constructed soundtrack and its rampant pop-culture references. Since Gilmore Girls began streaming on Netflix in 2014, it has come to represent a particularly simple and comforting portrait of autumn in the aughts. For those who crave fall in Stars Hollow, we put together a Gilmore Girls playlist that feels like a cup of coffee on a cold October afternoon in Connecticut. You can’t drive your Jeep Wrangler to a cozy y2k coffeehouse, but you can save these songs in and inspired by the Gilmore Girls.