There’s nothing quite like a Cultural Moment to ease some existential dread and make summer feel a bit more special. Thanks for that, Barbenheimer!
The coincidental pairing of new flicks from two of our best directors has prompted a delightful wave of moviegoing and conversation. Both movies met the moment, IMO, but this is a music newsletter. You can still grab some popcorn — but grab some headphones too, and let’s dive deep into Barbie’s pop-pink soundtrack and Oppenheimer’s swelling score.
Barbie The Album
Worthy of prompting Hear Hear’s first-ever 🚨 SPOILER WARNING! 🚨
Because Barbie’s soundtrack is more than just background music. In a great IndieWire piece, Sarah Shachat covered how the filmmakers paired the songs with the story…
The process: “Greta Gerwig, editor Nick Houy, and music editor Suzana Peric worked with composers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt to reverse-engineer the film’s actual score from the pop songs being created for the film.”
Lizzo set the tone: “Pink” serves as a true Movie Musical opening, soundtracking our orientation to Barbie Land’s old-school sets and literally in conversation with the narrator. The song “suddenly changed the way people saw the beginning of the movie,” Houy told IndieWire. “It solved all of the problems we were having, which weren’t crazy, but I remember everyone suddenly got the tone of the movie immediately in a way they hadn’t before.” Dua Lipa’s “Dance The Night” quickly follows — it sounded soulless the first time I heard it as a single, but in context it really won me over with a memorably choreographed setpiece.
Ryan Gosling sings again: “I’m Just Ken” is a truly joyous sequence, and I can’t stop singing the chorus. Unsurprisingly, I’m a notorious La La Land sympathizer.
Mark Ronson accidentally became the composer: In an insightful interview with Variety, super-producer Ronson explains how his initial demo of “I’m Just Ken” evolved into fully scoring the movie. “When they started to edit the film, they were like, ‘This two-minute song actually needs to be drawn out for a seven-minute sequence, so can you essentially score it, and make sections and breakdowns?’ And then they gave us the opening credits, and we slowly ended up writing more and more music until a couple of months ago they were just like, ‘You’re scoring the film.’”
Billie Eilish stuck the landing: Eilish nails the movie’s big final montage, and “Ronson and Wyatt crafted variations and different musical expressions of ‘What Was I Made For?’ that Gerwig and Houy wove into key moments of the film,” which plays really nicely on rewatch.
Top-tier artists joined the party: So many personal faves supply sounds — Dominic Fike, Haim, Khalid, PinkPantheress, Charli XCX, Tame Impala, and more. A few standout tracks are in the Hear Hear playlist. (Plus a few from Fike’s new album, which has been on repeat.)
There’s some healthy skepticism: Cat Zhang’s Pitchfork review takes a critical angle (“…all of these songs would sound better under the magical thinking of Barbie Land. But this is the real world, and in the real world, these throwaway products should largely be left on the shelf.”) and podcast Switched On Pop took an equally thoughtful look at the “plasticity of pop.”
Matchbox Twenty and the Indigo Girls have a moment: Critic Tim Grierson went deep into Gerwig’s decisions to prominently feature Dave Matthews Band in Lady Bird and Matchbox Twenty here. Rob Thomas, to his credit, is owning it: “I did this thinking I’d be the butt of the joke, and I was fine with that. I’m pretty thick-skinned.” Meanwhile, the NYT’s Trish Bendix wrote about the Indigo Girls and their recurring cue.
Oppenheimer’s score
Ludwig Göransson continues his remarkable career
You already know Ludwig from producing Childish Gambino tracks like “This Is America” and “Redbone,” along with scoring Creed, The Mandalorian, and Black Panther. (There’s an excellent Song Exploder episode about how he developed Killmonger’s theme.)
He first worked with Christopher Nolan on the booming sound of Tenet, and his stellar follow-up score for Oppenheimer is integral to the movie’s success — the music plays relentlessly through all 180 minutes.
Goransson shared the inspirations for many of his biggest projects with the Washington Post, and chatted with NPR’s 1A podcast about his process.
From the Post interview: “One of the first and only directions Nolan gave me was to use the violin. The violin is a fretless instrument, so based on the performance you can go from one note and having it be a beautiful romantic tone, but within a split second you can change the vibrato of the pitch and it can turn into a horrific, neurotic, mean, manic sound.”
2 albums to hear
Cut Worms’ “pop essentialism” // Brooklyn-based Max Clarke continues to perfect his retro revival of ‘50s doo-wop and country. The first four tracks of his new self-titled album as Cut Worms are wonderfully sequenced to capture that sunny, comforting, windows-down sound — but after you overplay those, check out his mini-concert for WXPN’s World Cafe, playing them in sequence.
Travis Scott’s “star-studded opus” // Pitchfork’s Dylan Green has an excellent breakdown recapping what to know about Scott’s new album UTOPIA — his first since tragedy struck 2021’s Astroworld festival. The big takeaway: It is loaded with features, including Beyoncé, SZA, Drake, James Blake, Sampha, and more. The 73-minute album pulls from the “maximalism of Kanye West” and follows his playbook of featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon across a couple of standout tracks: “MY EYES” and “DELRESTO.”
2 summer playlists to stream
Unravel Me Like Twine from blogger Miss Moss // The launch of Threads inspired blogging legend Miss Moss to create one of her signature “music mixes.” Highlights: First Aid Kit’s “Fallen Snow” (shades of Lucius and Sylvan Esso) and beach-lounge vibes from Babe Rainbow and Tennis.
summer ‘23 🥵 from music supervisor Jules Zucker // Great new mix featuring a bunch of emerging artists and indie favorites like Middle Priest, The Japanese House, Jordana, Generationals, TV Girl, and more.
Wow you know I wanted the movie and hear the music and had some comments on lizzos lyrics thinking that at a part if she had said ken it would of been a 10 out of ten but you really love music to have dug this deep. I appreciate the insight!
Breeze