I play several instruments, none of them impressively: guitar, drums, bass, piano, and a cello keeps threatening to join. So I have a recurring evening. The one where I sit down at any of them wanting to play something that makes me grin instead of something that makes me better, and the thing that makes me grin is always a TV theme. Friends. Malcolm in the Middle. How I Met Your Mother. Thirty seconds of pure recognition, engineered by professionals to lodge in a skull.
And every single time, the same scattered pilgrimage: a tab on one site, a metal cover on some channel, a classical version on another, a lesson buried in a playlist, and no two of them within three clicks of each other. Every time, the same thought. I just want one place to go. Log in, pick the show, play, discover, done. That place does not exist, and this article is me finally writing the thought down instead of having it again.
The covers exist. The shelf does not.
None of the raw material is missing. Kerrang! has ranked the best rock covers of TV themes and notes there are entire bands dedicated to covering them. A guitarist once played 100 TV themes in a single unedited take for Reverb, in chronological order, from Looney Tunes to Game of Thrones. The channel Beyond the Guitar does gorgeous classical versions of Friends, Seinfeld and The Office. Tab sites have whole television sections. The internet has done all the work, then filed it in a hundred unlabeled drawers.
My favorite piece of evidence is small. A radio station’s blog gushed that one of those cover artists had “even transcribed the chords into tabs,” exclamation mark included. When the mere combination of two ordinary things reads as a miracle, the product is the combination. Reprise is that combination as a website: one page per show, and on it, the original theme, every cover anyone has submitted, sorted by style, and the tab or chord sheet to learn it yourself. Listen, compare, play. A WhoSampled for the songs everyone knows and nobody archives.
The playlist solves listening. It does not solve the itch.
Is the answer just a big personal playlist? I did ask myself that. But a playlist answers one question (“play me things”) and Reprise answers three: what does this theme become in another genre, who did it best, and how do I play it tonight. The join is the product. Remove any column and you are back to the hundred drawers.
And the shelf has a second reader, the cover artists themselves, and they solve the cold start. Reprise hosts nothing, so every play is a YouTube view counted on the artist’s own channel. For them, the directory is pure distribution, attribution included. The people with the strongest reason to fill the shelves are the people who made the covers, and a librarian whose suppliers volunteer is a librarian who sleeps well.
Key Features
- The shelf. One page per show: original first, then covers grouped by style (metal, classical, lofi, jazz, chiptune, whatever arrives). Everything is a YouTube embed; Reprise hosts nothing and points at everything.
- The learning column. Each theme links its tabs, chords, or lesson videos next to the covers, so hearing a version and learning it are the same visit.
- Community submissions. Anyone can propose a cover or a tab link for a shelf; light moderation keeps it honest. The catalog of shows itself can be seeded in an afternoon from Wikipedia’s list of television theme music.
- The rabbit hole, on purpose. Filters by decade, genre of show, genre of cover, instrument. The whole point of the place is leaving with three themes you did not come for.
The part where I usually list the blockers
Unlike several of my other music ideas, this one has no rights wall. It feels like a trap, but it is not. Reprise embeds rather than hosts. The copyright weight of a cover lives where it already lives, on the cover artist’s video, where Content ID claims it and routes ad revenue to the song’s publishers, the standard regime that has kept YouTube’s cover ecosystem alive for years.
Linking to tabs is linking, ideally to licensed sites like Ultimate Guitar. The directory is a librarian, and when publishers cracked down on tab sites in 2005 and 2006, they targeted the shelves, not the card catalog. Monetization, in the proud tradition of my other civic tools like Exposed and the Obscurantism Clock: barely. A tip jar, maybe an affiliate link to lessons, and the plain admission that this exists because I want it to exist.
One cultural note, because it is why the itch deserves a monument rather than a bookmark folder. These songs are a dying form. The streaming era’s Skip Intro button is quietly training a generation to never hear a theme at all.
And yet the form, at its peak, was glorious enough that Malcolm in the Middle’s theme, “Boss of Me,” was written by They Might Be Giants and won them a Grammy, and How I Met Your Mother’s theme was performed by The Solids, the band of the show’s own two creators. Friends’ theme was a real band too, The Rembrandts, dragged onto the charts by a sitcom. Reprise is a tool for my evenings, and also a small conservatory for an endangered species.
Next Steps: How I’d Build It
A weekend, really. Static site, a data file of shows seeded from the Wikipedia list, YouTube embeds, outbound tab links, a submission form. No accounts, no uploads, no backend worth the name. Launch with the ten shelves I would build for myself anyway, and let the submissions decide what the eleventh is. The hard part is not the code but the librarian’s patience of filling shelves, which is the kind of hard part one obsessed person can carry.
Closing
Reprise is the place I keep wishing existed at 10pm with a guitar on my knee, finally specified instead of wished for. The name works in both my languages. In French, a reprise is a cover, and in music, a reprise is the moment a theme returns.
If you build this, tell me, and I will be your first contributor, with the same theme submitted four times, on four instruments. The cello version will have to wait.
