Meet the Guys Who Make "The Hills" Rock

Though The Hills is synonymous with Lauren and Heidi, it's Joe Cuello and Jon Ernst who really make the show worth watching. Cuello, MTV's Vice President of Music Integration, and Ernst, the series' Music Supervisor, spend each week expertly pairing songs with footage in order to convey love, loss and cheerful vacancy. Here, they talk to Rolling Stone about the show's patron saint Natasha Bedingfield, breaking new bands on the program and whether we can expect a Heidi Montag tune to pop up in an episode anytime soon.

Tell us about your strategy when making your music selections for the show.
Jon Ernst: Since we're not dealing with scripts here, we're dealing with what people are actually saying, sometimes the emotion doesn't get put forth perfectly enough so the viewer understands, so whatever else needs to be said, we'll say that with a song.
Joe Cuello: The Hills is really a marquee opportunity to showcase music. The format lends itself to great music moments. You have the opportunity for the songs to play a little longer, for the words to register and connect with the image in a unique way. Historically MTV was shorthand for super-cutty [camera shots], but if you were to say "that's very MTV" now, I would venture to say that's The Hills and Laguna Beach, which is a much more deliberate, spacious editing style. It's perfect. It's a music supervisor's dream to have that kind of room to breathe.

It seems like all the music gets pretty good pickup from the promotion that you do, but the breakout hit has to be the theme song, Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten." How did that choice come about?
JC: We all had a relationship with the characters because this was a spin-off from Laguna Beach. We all had a perception of who these characters were and what we hoped the show would become: this aspirational journey of a person moving and starting life on their own.
JE: Like a Mary Tyler Moore. When this song came out it barely hit the radio when we heard it and we were like, "Wow, this is the theme song."
JC: The song really reflected the feel of the show and we wanted to help push the career of artists like Natasha to make sure that everyone was really aware when they were watching the show who it was sung by. We tried to dovetail it all together so we featured her music video over the end credits. For us, that's a really incredible promotional tool. We see a huge response from that in terms of online and in sales. It's really gratifying years later to see that it's so inextricably tied to our show.