Forget the Needle Drops — One of the Best Songs to Come Out of ‘Stranger Things’ Was Never in the Show

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Back in 2021, Hannah’s love of all things nerdy collided with her passion for writing — and she hasn’t stopped since. She covers pop culture news, writes reviews, and conducts interviews on just about every kind of media imaginable. If she’s not talking about something spooky, she’s talking about gaming, and her favorite moments in anything she’s read, watched, or played are always the scariest ones. For Hannah, nothing beats the thrill of discovering what’s lurking in the shadows or waiting around the corner for its chance to go bump in the night. Once described as “strictly for the sickos,” she considers it the highest of compliments.

Stranger Things is remembered as much for its music as its monsters. The show’s needle drops have become cultural landmarks, reshaping how entire generations hear familiar songs. But one of the best songs to come out of Stranger Things was never placed in an episode at all. “Charlie’s Garden,” written by Joe Keery under his Djo project, exists because of the show rather than for it, inspired by his friendship with Charlie Heaton during filming due to Heaton and Natalia Dyer living nearby. The song from Keery’s latest album captures something the soundtrack never could: what life on the series actually felt like when the cameras stopped rolling.

“Charlie’s Garden” Could Only Exist Because of ‘Stranger Things’

“Charlie’s Garden” is inseparable from Stranger Things not because it references the show, but because it reflects the conditions under which the show was made. Long-running productions create a specific kind of time. Days are rigidly scheduled, but life still happens in between. You wake up early, wait around, rush to set, wait some more, and repeat the cycle for months or years at a time. That structure produces a strange blend of urgency and stasis, and the song lives squarely inside that space. The lyrics are almost aggressively ordinary: coffee, dogs scratching at the door, and water taking a full day to boil. None of it gestures toward metaphor or spectacle. Instead, the song documents the routine as it unfolds. That matters because Stranger Things is a show defined by heightened stakes. “Charlie’s Garden” captures the opposite end of that spectrum. It is about what it feels like to live alongside something massive without being inside it every second. That contrast is why the song could only come from someone embedded in the production itself. It is not a response to the finished product, it is a byproduct of the process itself.

One of the defining features of Stranger Things has always been its use of needle drops. The show does not just include familiar songs, it recontextualizes them, often tying a track so closely to a scene that the two become inseparable. Those moments are designed to be immediate and memorable, and they tell the audience how to feel. To this end, “Charlie’s Garden” feels radical within the context of Stranger Things’ musical identity. Where the needle drops are curated and intentional, this song feels accidental. It does not exist to heighten a moment: it exists because a moment lingered longer than expected. In that sense, “Charlie’s Garden” functions as a quiet rebuttal to the idea that the show’s musical legacy is defined solely by what audiences heard on screen.

Sadie Sink in a poster for Stranger Things 4

The Lyrics Are Specific But Universal

The emotional center of the song is its fixation on postponement. The pre-chorus repeats the same question twice, asking how to convince yourself to stay and how to accept that work can wait. The desire is not to leave responsibility behind, but to delay it for just one more day. That feeling resonates because it mirrors the experience of working on something with a known endpoint. During later seasons of Stranger Things, the cast and crew were aware that the series was finite, and that every day spent filming was one fewer day left inside that shared world. “Charlie’s Garden” captures the emotional tension of that awareness without ever naming it. The song does not tell you how to remember Stranger Things, it simply preserves what it felt like to be there.

"Charlie's Garden" is the Show’s Quietest Legacy

In the end, “Charlie’s Garden” stands out because it captures something the show itself could never fully depict. Not the danger or the drama, but the waiting, the familiarity, and the comfort of a shared routine. Those are the things that define long creative collaborations, even if they rarely make it onto the screen. If Stranger Things is remembered for turning old songs into cultural touchstones, “Charlie’s Garden” deserves recognition for documenting something rarer. It is a song that came out of the show rather than into it: a piece of music that holds onto the feeling of one more day before everything changes. That is why it remains one of the best songs to come out of Stranger Things, even if it was never part of the show at all.