Why the Barbie Score Needed Surrealism and Slash
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The post Why the Barbie Score Needed Surrealism and Slash appeared first on Consequence.
When Consequence refers to their score for Barbie as having a surreal quality, composers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt are both pleased. “We have the keyboards from the ’80s, and the symphonic stuff that spans a good 200-year timeframe, everything from classical music to late romantic music in there. And so I think that’s a great compliment, to call it surreal,” Wyatt says.
It’s music befitting the film, as director Greta Gerwig transports the viewer first to Barbie Land, an alternate dimension in which Barbies like the one played by Margot Robbie live in innocent bliss. Until, that is, a Barbie has an existential crisis and a Ken (Ryan Gosling) learns about the patriarchy. “The world that Barbie’s occupying is kind of a surrealist world too, just from the giddy-up,” Wyatt continues. “So I think that probably informed us making music that had really bright colors in it and also stuff that was part of the inheritance of Western music.”
Ronson says that finding that sound took some experimentation, with a lot of hearkening back to the 1980s, “when people really were interweaving these crazy grand synthesizers like the DX7 and the CS-80 with the orchestra and the score. We were trying to find that zone where those things could live together. We went through a lot of iterations and trial and error. Because, you know, we hadn’t really scored a full film before.”
In fact, when Ronson and Wyatt first began working on Barbie, the plan was not for them to do the score for the film — the veteran music producers and songwriters were instead asked to tackle a more specific task. “We were brought in to do a couple of songs,” Ronson tells Consequence. “Greta and Noah [Baumbach, who co-wrote the film] originally sent us this very funny, slightly eccentric song sheet — they wanted a Barbie song for this big dance number, and then a Ken song.”
At that point, he continues, “There were no guidelines for the Ken song. It was never going to be sung in the film. Ryan was never going to sing.” However, Ronson and Wyatt were given some “weirdo, very funny” details about what Gerwig and Baumbach were looking for the Ken song (including “he likes horses, he has no genitals, he wishes that he could be hugged”) and wrote what would become “I’m Just Ken.”
Gerwig loved “I’m Just Ken,” and after she played it for Gosling, plans for the song changed. “She was like, ‘He wants to sing the song in the film,’ and we were obviously over the moon, because we’re such fans of these filmmakers,” Ronson says. “And all of a sudden they’re saying like, ‘Oh, we love your words too. We’re gonna make your words part of our script.'”
Not just the words, as it turned out, but the music. As Ronson explains, “We saw a very early rough cut of the film, and they had made ‘I’m Just Ken,’ which was a two-and-a-half minute song, into 10 minutes by continually looping sections, because now there was this whole battle. It was so horrible to watch this thing looping.”
So Ronson says he and Wyatt asked, “Can we just write seven minutes of music that could be this whole battle? And weave ‘Ken’ into it?” The filmmakers agreed, and liked the results so much that Gerwig then sent them the opening credits. “You know, Barbie’s perfect day. She’s getting dressed, making toast, making cereal, jumping off the building into the car.” Lizzo eventually wrote the song heard over the score Ronson and Wyatt created for the sequence, and Ronson and Wyatt would go on to score the rest of the film.
“It just seemed to grow quite organically,” Ronson says of the process, especially as he, Gerwig, and soundtrack producers Kevin Weaver and Brandon Davis worked on the movie’s soundtrack, showing scenes to their “dream list of artists” so that folks including Charlie XCX, Karol G, and Billie Eilish and Finneas could come back “with these really fucking killer songs.”
Along the way, the songs they started with got even more awesome. Slash of Guns N’ Roses becoming a featured artist on “I’m Just Ken” was “really 11th hour,” according to Ronson. “We wrote it as this ballad and it was pretty earnest, just piano — it was really lovely, because Ryan’s vocal over it was really vulnerable. But then we started playing it against the film and there’s this battle scene happening — Saving Private Ryan, but on, like, pedal boats. It needed to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So we just started building it up with the arrangement.”
When it came to the guitar solo, Ronson says that while he and Wyatt had played all the instruments on the demo, he remarked to George Drakoulias, the music supervisor, “Man, it’d be so cool to have somebody like Slash play on this. Like, who should we get?”
Drakoulias’s response: “Why don’t you just ask Slash? You have to ask. You never know.”
Between Drakoulias knowing Slash, and Ronson’s not-so-secret “fanaticism” for Guns N’ Roses, they were able to bring the legendary guitarist on. “He really loved it,” Ronson says. “He definitely texts like Cool Guy Slash. He doesn’t get too enthusiastic or anything. But he was like, ‘Ryan Gosling actually sounds really good. Yeah, I dig this song, what do you need?’ Same thing with Wolf Van Halen as well. They just seemed like the best people to play these parts that we had imagined.”
And all the while, they were creating this unique soundscape for Barbie — one which required a lot of experimentation. “I think that Greta was really in love with the synths and those sounds because it felt unique and very bespoke to Barbie Land,” Ronson says. “But also, you know, what the orchestra can do with the symphonic, the kind of emotions that conjures from the golden age of Hollywood, that are maybe in a track like ‘Meeting Ruth,’ were also really important to Greta. So we just kept up trial and error until we found it.”
Both Ronson and Wyatt’s past work is also reflected in the music, Ronson says, “like the symphony strings of ‘Back to Black’ [the Amy Winehouse track produced by Ronson], and the synth-y stuff that Andrew did with Miike Snow. We had to find it, but Greta indulged us in a really lovely way.”
Ronson’s biggest takeaway from working with Gerwig on the film was her belief that “there could never be any moment where you weren’t emotionally connected to these characters. There was never a moment, even in the most plastic-y, shiny parts about Barbie Land, that should have any artifice or an emotion that’s not real. She’s just such a genuine sort of feeler of a person, and I felt like the movie always had to have that, whether it was the performances or the production design or what we were doing.”
Barbie is available on VOD now.
Why the Barbie Score Needed Surrealism and Slash
Liz Shannon Miller
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