‘Central Park’ Songwriters Kate Anderson & Elyssa Samsel On Choosing “Backing Up” For Emmy Consideration: “All The Dads Would Cry”
Three seasons into Central Park, songwriters Kate Anderson and Elyssa Samsel are thrilled with how much room they’ve been given to explore new genres. Told through the eyes of a busker narrator named Birdie (Josh Gad), the musical series follows Owen Tillerman (Leslie Odom Jr.), the manager of the park, who lives in the park with his journalist wife Paige (Kathryn Hahn) and two children Cole (Tituss Burgess) and Molly (Emmy Raver-Lampman). As they deal with issues across the park, elderly heiress Bitsy (Stanley Tucci) is plotting to turn the park into condominiums. Anderson and Samsel chose the song “Backing Up” for Emmy consideration, performed by Owen (Odom Jr.) as he deals with the possible loss of his family’s memories from a hard drive. As the pair played the song for the show runners, they found it “hit a nerve in a good way.”
DEADLINE: What has it been like to work on the series for three seasons? Have there been any big changes, musically, as the show has gone on?
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ELYSSA SAMSEL: Yeah, I think musically we got to branch out and be very explorative in our genres. When we approached season one, we were hoping to create a new type of musical series where the whole season is an entire musical on its own. So, we were trying to stay in line with musical theater, which is where we come from. That’s our world. But we also got to branch out as we became more and more fluent in the language of the characters and have more fun with them, like doing really bubblegum pop stuff for Molly who’s at that teen age where it’s appropriate and then leaning into really interesting other genres for characters like Elwood or Helen, who is voiced by Daveed Diggs. So, I would say we just got to be more outgoing as the seasons went on.
KATE ANDERSON: Once we hit our flow by season three, the songs were coming a lot faster. We even got to the point where we were writing songs while they were still in the outline phase, because I think at that point we all just recognized that the songs were just so concrete in the character’s voices by then.
DEADLINE: What is your process for writing the songs? Do you get the script first and then write them or do you work with the writers of the episodes?
ANDERSON: Generally, we would get a rough paragraph outlining what the song should accomplish and sometimes they would pitch a song title. Obviously, it would include what characters should be singing. And then we got to a point where there was a trust and they would just sort of let us do our thing. We’d turn it in and there would be like a little bit of back and forth. The writers were so brilliant. They always had really, really great pitches for us for how to punch it up.
DEADLINE: And was there any input from the voice actors?
SAMSEL: Well, a lot of Season 2 and 3 was done during the Pandemic, so usually we would record with them and they would’ve heard the song before. They were all incredible musicians, so their instincts were just spot on, even after hearing the song only a couple times and they would nail it. When you are working with actors like Josh Gad who could improvise his way around any situation, I think there was a lot of elevation in terms of what they brought to the songs and their natural energy. They would come up with stuff in the recordings, which was always hilarious whether we used it or not.
DEADLINE: What was it about the song “Backing Up” that made you want to choose that to submit for Emmy consideration?
ANDERSON: Personally? It’s because whenever we played it for the writers and the showrunners, all of the dads would cry. To me, that just says that we hit a nerve in a good way and we sort of accomplished what we set out to do, which was to have this really powerful song and performance from Leslie [Odom Jr.] that resonated with people. I think it’s a universal thing in today’s day and age. We have all of this technology to preserve our memories as they happen, but our best hard drive is our own brain in actually being present for those things. It’s so hard to be present nowadays with our iPhones and social media and everything that’s constantly coming at us, but it’s one of those things of like, if you don’t put it down once in a while, you’ll actually miss it as it’s happening.
SAMSEL: Yeah, and we chose the electro pop ballad style for that song because it worked so well for Owen’s character, when he would’ve been growing up listening to ’80s ballads. But more than that, we were really interested in pouring ourselves into this song that we were writing in the pandemic, and it was a time where we were all looking back at our past and things that we took for granted. And we were all coming up with this brand-new evaluation system on what matters and how we spend our time and with whom. So, Owen singing about his family and cherishing their memories and no longer living in the past, but being present as Kate just said so beautifully, that felt very pertinent to our situation as a cultural entity. So, we wanted to express that in a fun pop ’80s style electro ballad.
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