THR hosts only their second Songwriters Roundtable on this week’s “Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter.” The conversation includes Academy Award frontrunner Mark Ronson for “Shallow” (“A Star is Born”), in addition to nominee Diane Warren for “I’ll Fight” (“RBG”). The other songwriters include David Crosby (“Little Pink Houses”), Kesha (“On the Basis of Sex”), Boots Riley (“Sorry to Bother You”), Tim McGraw (“Free Solo”), and Jack Antonoff (“Love, Simon”).
The conversation is somewhat atypical from the usual roundtables, as the conversation focuses less on the films, themselves, and more on songwriting, generally, and how their creative process sometimes overlaps with the films that they contributed to.
Ronson, who has known Lady Gaga for a while, was “lucky that we had worked on [Gaga’s album] Joanne and broken some ground where she was ready to go somewhere very personal when we wrote ‘Shallow.’ If it was a regular songwriting session, we had just met the day before, I don’t know if we would’ve tapped into that. She was obviously writing as [her character] Ally, but you can’t help but tap into your own emotion. Everybody’s shit and life experience and trials and tribulations is kind of being channeled in that song, but for this one person to sing in the film. We imagined it was the end credits song. We had no idea it was going to become part of the narrative.”
For both Kesha and Warren, who wrote songs about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they looked to RBG’s inspirational outlook. As Warren notes, “I wanted to write a song that could be her theme because she is a fighter. She speaks so softly but she is louder than anybody, what she has to say and what she stands for, which is us … Obviously, first and foremost it has to live for the movie and be Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s theme song, but I want it to be also outside the movie.” For Kesha, she had “never written a song for a movie before [so] because it’s a period movie, we wanted the song to feel that it could’ve been from the ‘50s, it could’ve been from the ‘70s or it could be current.”
Those political overtures carried over to many of the other songs and songwriters, with Antonoff believing, “Everything is inherently political, so sometimes being less on the nose – like, if you put out a song that, as you would say, makes you boogie, that’s political right now because that’s in the face of what’s happening.”
Riley, who not only wrote the songs for “Sorry to Bother You” with his collective The Coup but, also, served as writer/director, agrees with Antonoff, saying, “Every piece of art and everything we say is political because, to use a well-worn analogy, if you were a singer in Nazi Germany and your thing was ‘Let’s all party,’ that would be a political statement because you are ignoring everything … It’s a way for the listener and the artist to be engaged with the world, engaged with the universe, and feel this moment more.”
All the musicians interviewed touch on how important music is to not only film but also their everyday lives. As Tim McGraw says, music saved him “in a literal sense … because I was getting an eviction notice from my apartment and I got my first royalty check pretty much within the same week. But in a broader sense, everything good that has happened to me in my life has come from music.” Crosby agrees, believing music allows you to “look at parts of your life and things that you’re going through in a way that we couldn’t otherwise. I love that about it.”
Check out the entire roundtable discussion below.
