I think that it felt Future Nostalgia–adjacent because her music does the shit that I really love, as far as dance music goes: It has an energy, but it’s kind of tough and weird. So I’m sure there’s somewhere where Dua and I have similar influences. I’ve worked with Dua, but I’m also a fan of Dua’s records I’m a DJ, so I play Dua records. I want to correct this, because we didn’t write it for Dua - we wrote the music and then she wrote the song with Caroline Ailin. How much were you two talking about that? It feels like a continuation of the dance direction she took on Future Nostalgia. “Dance the Night” was written for Dua Lipa, whom you’ve worked with before. And that lyric just came to me, “I’m just Ken. We all have these masks that we put on to impress people, and all we really want to be is ourselves. The Barbie song is about her perfect night, and the Ken song - I got the feeling as soon as I read the script - is about this guy that just can’t get out of his own way. It was kind of tongue-in-cheekly named by Noah and Greta “Barbie and Ken Hit Songs”: a mini-directive of what they imagined those songs being. In the original brief, it only said two songs. And, listen, it’s not my first time ever at the rodeo, but to walk in and see a piece of music I made on a film set of that level of people rehearsing, and Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and shit doing choreo, it was kind of rad. So they started to do all these dance rehearsals to it. My driver says it’s a hit.” This is just the most basic instrumental ever. And she wrote back, “Oh my God, I’ve listened to this 100 times already on the way to the set. I didn’t think the whole project hung in the balance - if she didn’t like that track, I was out - but I just wanted her to like it so badly. I think I named it “Tastes Like Barbie,” because I just thought it sounded cool. I tried about three or four things and then I finally had this one that I liked and I sent it to her. When you listen to “Staying Alive,” there’s this big-ass kick drum just going. The thing about the Bee Gees that’s really sneaky: A lot of great pop music, when you listen to it, it’s not as syrupy and slick as you think. I wanted to give them something that’s got disco, but has an unexpected slightly harder edge to it. It was like, I’m really inspired by this film. I wasn’t thinking, This has got to be the summer smash. Pictures, like, This is our big-tent movie for summer 2023, what are your hits? It just felt like, let’s have fun as long as what we make is incredible.Ĭoming up with the instrumental that became “Dance the Night,” I felt pretty free to create. I’m sure I would’ve been stressing it from the beginning if it had come to me through Atlantic Records or Warner Bros. However it got to me, I’m extremely grateful. They could have literally been spitballing names and I was the first one to come up. When they first reached out, what was your understanding of why they wanted Mark Ronson to work on this? You said you took on the project because you were really excited about working with Greta and Noah Baumbach. (Ronson, who is a SAG member, spoke to us before the SAG-AFTRA strike began.) “We were fucking spoiled for the amount of people that actually even came to the table.” Ronson spoke to Vulture about pulling the soundtrack together, what to expect from his next solo project, and his thoughts on the upcoming Amy Winehouse biopic. “It was just crazy who kept being like, ‘Yeah, I’m down,’” says Ronson. Among the tracks: a dance-floor hit from Dua Lipa, a drill-pop linkup from Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj, a summery reggaeton jam from Karol G, a glossy K-pop anthem from Fifty Fifty and Kaliii, and a devastating ballad from Billie Eilish. Working with director Greta Gerwig, they wanted the soundtrack to cover as much of the pop-music landscape as possible. Ronson’s role quickly ballooned from initially producing two songs for the film to executive-producing the whole thing and scoring the movie, alongside his collaborator Andrew Wyatt. It’s the same approach he took on the Barbie soundtrack. (They’re the glue that held together his breakout production, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.) Every few years, he rounds up some of his favorite musicians to make his own solo album - everyone from soul revivalists like Bruno Mars to pop stars like Miley Cyrus to psych-rockers like Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. When he became enamored with the retro-soul outfit the Dap-Kings, he turned their rhythm section into his go-to studio band. Since Mark Ronson began spinning hip-hop records on the New York City DJ circuit in the early ’90s, the driving force of his music career has simply been chasing what he loves.
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