Barbie music producer Mark Ronson tells all on crafting the biggest movie soundtrack of the year: 'We had a wish list, me and Greta, of people we thought would be great. It made sense that it was female-heavy.'
, which took place last month, also at Ronson’s New York studio, amid stacks of amplifiers and dozens of gorgeous vintage guitars and keyboards. An edited version of the long conversation appears below.It started off with me only doing two songs, but they came out well, and I got on really well with Greta. I think she felt like I’d be a good kind of sparring partner to help realize her vision for the music, and working on the soundtrack sort of blossomed into scoring the film as well.
I brought in [songwriter-producer] Andrew Wyatt, who’s one of my favorite collaborators, to help finish it. And 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?” If we’d just looped sections of the song it would have been really boring and uninspiring.
I don’t know, you’d have to ask Greta. But everything about this film is trying to be a reinvention or an evolution of what we think Barbie is, so maybe Nicki and Ice Spice flipping the “Barbie Girl” was a way of doing that. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t in the back of my head, “How do we possibly have a Barbie soundtrack without Nicki Minaj on it?” Because that is the person who’s been keeping the term Barbie relevant for the last 15 years [with her “Barbz” fans].
No, and I think you’ll see why if you see the film. It starts kitsch, because it’s obviously setting up this world, and it’s very like “Barbie’s perfect day,” but so much of the movie is beautiful and deep and offers so many existential questions about life. And that’s where I saw some parallels to like things like “The Truman Show.” It’s poignant but it’s still light.
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