So it started with two songs and then became more? She then asked us to score the opening title credits and we wrote this music that became the Lizzo song ‘Pink’. And I think at that point, then we started to write more and more music for the film. And then at the same time with the soundtrack, for all the other songs Charli XCX and Nicki Minaj and Billy [Eilish], I just really became like, Robin to Greta’s Batman. She’d be on the Zoom explaining her vision for this film while showing scenes to Billy Eilish and Phineas and, you know, I might help translate a couple of musical terms or whatever.
There aren’t many soundtracks with such a collection of the hottest stars, was it down to you to rally everyone to do this? Yeah, so sometimes I would be producing or writing on the songs, like the Sam Smith song, or Andrew and I did the string arrangement or the orchestral arrangement on the Billy song. But really, we were just there sometimes to just like, harass people about deadlines [laughs], It was just this thing of being the executive producer of the soundcheck. I don’t have any ego about that stuff. It’s not like, ‘I’m an artist, too’. So sometimes it was just herding cats.
Can we go back to the beginning, can you share where you were born and raised and about your folks? I was born in England and then my mom and dad split and we moved to New York with my mom. She married this great man, Love Is’ for my mom. So talk about setting the bar high! [laughs]. I grew up in New York, in this house where music was very alive. my mother was quite strict. She was from Liverpool. It was always like, ‘Get your studies done’ first. But then I was able to tinker around in my stepdad’s recording studio. And that was a great opportunity.
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Firstly, Let’s talk about ‘Barbie’, how did that come about? I got text from my friend George Drakoulis, he’s a music supervisor, and said, ‘Hey, you want to speak to Greta Gerwig about this new film that she’s doing?’ And I was such a huge fan of hers and ‘Ladybird’, that’s one of my favourite movies of the past 10 years. And so I said, ‘Yeah’. She said, ‘We’re making ‘Barbie’’. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s unusual, but I’m sure it’s going to be cool if you’re doing it.’ She said, ‘There’s two songs that we need. We’ve got this big dance number ‘Barbie’s Best Day Ever’ and it’s going to be this big choreographed number. And then I think then we should probably have a Ken song as well, whatever that means. I had read the script, I was so in love with it, I wanted to make sure the first thing that I sent was something that they would love. So I came up with a track for the song that became ‘Dance the Night’ after trying two or three other things. And I sent it to Greta they were in England and I had got all these lovely messages from her. Then they did the choreography to the instrumental while I asked Dua Lipa if she would be interested in writing the song and being on it.
Who you had worked with before? Yeah. And then with Ken, I was so excited to do the dance number but there’s just always something when you’re writing for the underdog character - it just gets its hooks in you as well. I knew Ryan Gosling was playing the part, I think even while reading the script, I was picturing him saying some of these lines. I was just kind of falling more and more in love with him. And I just had the idea for the line for the song, ‘I’m just Ken, anywhere else I’d be a 10’. And I wasn’t really thinking like, ‘That’s funny’, I was thinking, ‘That’s so sad’. I wanted you to feel his sort of pain. So I sent a demo like that. And wrote the rest of the song with my partner Andrew Wyatt. Ryan heard the song and I don’t know if Greta was always hoping he might sing, because he’s such a great singer and a performer, but she said she played it for him and she said that he said that the song really resonated with him. So she started to send me these storyboards of how they were reworking the last scene to fit this song and he was going to perform it. And it was so exciting to be a part of something like that.
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As a kid what kind of music were you into, what were you gravi- tating towards? My first favourite band was Duran Duran because it was just the 80s and I loved that. And then I got really into hip-hop because I was in New York and this was in the early 90s. So there were things like EPMD, Tribe Called Quest and Wu Tang and that got me really into this music. That’s when I became a DJ.
So even before the DJing began other things had happened - At the age of 12 how did you end up as the yougest ever intern at Rolling Stones Magazine, and what did that entail? They let me work the switchboard sometimes and I remember my voice hadn’t broken yet so I remember I would answer the phone like [high voice] I was just such a voracious fan of music and I would read liner notes and magazines and trade publications - sort of weird stuff for a 12-year-old. And my mother was friends with Jann Wenner, who had started Rolling Stone and, you know, the nepo baby or stepo baby that I was, I got a job there and I worked there for three summers.
At 16 you were part of a band signed to Polygram, was the dream to be a rock star yourself? I loved Guns N’ Roses and I played guitar. I was in a band with a guitar player who was much better than me, so that was sort of sobering. But when you’re 15, you just want to be on stage. I figured out slowly that maybe there was another path for me closer to something like producing and being behind the voice.
Not long after that you started DJing in clubs, how did you get to do that at Club USA? I just knew I loved music so much and I was trying to find my way in it. And so I loved playing other people’s music as much as I like writing my own. And DJ-ing was so exciting. It was the summer of 93 I was 17. And there was Robin S. ‘Show Me Love’ and like all this amazing club music and then all this amazing hip hop. And I was DJ-ing in Club USA, which was this crazy, like, adult playground that I definitely shouldn’t have been in at that age. But I loved playing music for people and watching
INTERVI EW MARK RONSON
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