What does a perfect vacation sound like?
In Emily Henry’s New York Times Bestselling novel People We Meet On Vacation, readers follow travel writer Poppy Wright as she drags her best friend Alex Neilsen along on annual trips. Though they’re falling in love with each other, they’re too afraid to ruin the friendship to do anything about it. Poppy’s narration — full of descriptions of sandy beaches, sparkling pools, and humid AirBnbs — is what pulls the reader into her world. When director Brett Haley (All The Bright Places), music supervisor Season Kent (The Fault In Our Stars, Love, Simon), and composer Keegan DeWitt (The Chair Company, Hearts Beat Loud) started the process of turning Henry’s beloved book into a film for Netflix, they knew they didn’t want to rely on outright narration to clue audiences in. Their answer: An all-encompassing vacation soundtrack, one that can make a viewer really feel like they’re on a holiday with the main characters.
“The story is number one,” Kent tells Rolling Stone. “And the music is telling the story too. A lot of my job is capturing a feeling — the emotion of a character, evolving, changing, growing. I’m a big feeler, so I really try to relate to the character and sort of put myself in their shoes and then say ‘How do I get that feeling from that piece of music?’”
The soundtrack to People We Meet On Vacation, which premiered on Netflix on Jan. 9, is a blend of upbeat synth bops and indie pop ballads, charting Poppy and Alex’s love story — with everything from “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston to “August” by Taylor Swift. These songs chart the story of travel writer Poppy (Emily Bader) and her attempt to reconnect with her best friend Alex (Tom Blyth) on one last vacation. The two had an annual vacation together for years, but after one disastrous trip, they stopped speaking. Two years later, Poppy is determined to get them back on track. Her answer: One last best friend trip to Alex’s brother’s wedding, which she hopes is a chance to remind Alex just how good they are as friends. The score also includes a simple melodic theme created by DeWitt, a softly building eight-note melody that acts as the emotional undercurrent of the connection between Poppy and Alex.
“Scientists have this theory that consciousness is not actually locked in the present time, so when you have that hunch — it might actually be your future self speaking to you. That’s what a [film] theme is,” DeWitt says. “You meet someone and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what it is. I’ve got this weird Spidey sense that this is going to be my best friend.’ The theme begins with a simple, childlike desire for adventure, and then by the time you hear it for the fifth time, you realize that the adventure has transformed them. It’s almost replicating that feeling of fate.”
Although People We Meet On Vacation was Henry’s fifth book — published in 2021—it is the first of Henry’s best-selling novels to make it to the screen. She started writing it before her breakout novel Beach Read was even released in 2020, and much of her personal feelings about her career and process ended up informing its characters. Though People We Meet On Vacation is a romance, the story also focuses on Poppy’s career, and how even while at her dream job, something feels like it’s missing.
“You spend your whole childhood dreaming of this thing, and then it happens, and you’re like, ‘Okay, now what?’” Henry tells Rolling Stone. “That was where Poppy really came from, this idea of this person who had wanted this one job forever, who had gotten it, but it didn’t fix everything else in her life.”
People We Meet on Vacation. (L-R) Tom Blyth as Alex and Emily Bader as Poppy in People We Meet on Vacation. Cr. Michele K. Short/Netflix © 2025
Michele K. Short/Netflix
With Poppy’s emotional turmoil — what Henry calls a “millenial ennui” — as the central point of the story, it was important to make sure the music matched her emotional journey and felt like it was exactly pinpointed to 2026. “The intention of this film was to harken back to the When Harry Met Sallys and the Sleepless in Seattles and the rom coms of the Nineties and the early 2000s,” Haley says. “We really went out of our way to be like, ‘What songs are going to shine? What songs are going to lead the way?’”
One might think that getting the rights to a beloved Taylor Swift song would be the hardest part of the project. But Kent says the most difficult song to clear was the 2017 track “Nanã” by the Parisian electronic duo Polo & Pan. Both she and Haley had separately written down that it would be a good fit for the film, but clearing the snippet required weeks of tracking down producers in Brazil to sign off. “We couldn’t really imagine anything else in there,” Kent says.
One of Henry’s favorite songs in the film is the track “When I Get My Hands On You,” Bob Dylan lyrics that were set to music and recorded in 2014 by a supergroup called the New Basement Tapes, that included Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jim James. (This plays while Poppy and Alex get ready for his brother’s wedding.) “I get so excited, like absolutely amped every time I’m watching it, and that song starts playing,” Henry says. “It’s so sexy and calming. It really feels like a vacation where you’re with your favorite person.” Kent says the team stumbled onto the song, replacing a Remi Wolf track they had been using in its place. It’s the song’s first usage in a film — something Kent thinks adds to it emotional resonance. “You really feel with them on their journey,” she says.
While People We Meet On Vacation’s creative team used the soundtrack to match the romantic and sweeping feel of the film, there’s one song that became a central touchpoint. In the film, Alex curmudgeonly insists that he hates the saxophone, staunchly resisting Poppy’s love of Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.” (In the book, this song is “Young Americans” by David Bowie.) But when the two are on vacation in New Orleans, the song plays again while they’re in the midst of an elaborate dance — turning Alex’s pet peeve into one of the most compelling scenes in the movie. “It was really hard for me as I was writing that scene and trying to discover what that [song] was going to be,” Haley says. “I worked with Kent and was like, ‘What’s the best song that features the saxophone, that’s funny, but also a certified banger?’ Hearing that saxophone kick in, and knowing Alex hates the saxophone, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is perfection.”
People We Meet On Vacation is a beloved book, which made even attempting to capture its magic a daunting task. Henry is known for her steadfast and inviting characters, whose personalities and eccentricities are practically taken as law by her fans. The core of her books lies in each unique pull of her romantic leads. For Poppy and Alex, “the strength of their relationship is that they’re totally delighted by each other,” she says. But Haley tells Rolling Stone while he’s nervous for fans’ response, he’s extraordinarily proud of the musical world his team built.
“This is a vacation playlist. You put it on as you’re getting packed and you’re going to the airport, and then when you get to a new place. It fills the room,” he says. “It’s a vibe but it has so much heart centered loveliness too. It’s fun, it’s upbeat, it’s sexy, it’s exciting, it’s everything the vacation should be.”
