From the notable smatterings of retina-scalding hot pink outfits across the capital, to billboards plastered across what feels like every bus stop, it seems like the whole world (or more realistically, a good portion of London’s cinema-centric Leicester Square) is gripped by Barbie fever this week. Ahead of Greta Gerwig’s take on Mattel’s most famous doll, out on July 21, there’s been a great deal of focus on the film’s polished visuals - but the soundtrack is also shaping up to be one of the world’s most star-studded. Dua Lipa, Tame Impala, Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Billie Eilish, and Lizzo are just a few of the biggest names.
Barbie may be Gerwig’s biggest step yet into the world of blockbuster movie-making, but music has been central to her work since the early days of her breakout writing and acting role in Frances Ha. Here’s a look back at some of her most notable musical moments.
Frances Ha
“We talked about wanting the movie to feel like a pop song,” Gerwig has said of Frances Ha. “When it’s over, there’s a feeling of, “Put it on again.”
Accordingly, there’s a hell of a lot of great music crammed into this black and white indie comedy, which Gerwig co-wrote with her director partner (and real-life partner) Noah Baumbach. She also stars in it. The film follows the misadventures of dancer Frances Halladay, who is in her late twenties and lives in a New York City flat-share. When her housemate Sophie announces that she’s moving into an expensive new place in Tribeca, Frances is hurled into a full-blown life crisis, forced to move into increasingly cheaper apartments, and grappling with the idea that her dreams may be slipping away from her.
Along the way, this aesthetically-pleasing quarter-life crisis is soundtracked with Hot Chocolate’s strutting Everyone’s a Winner and underrated Paul McCartney cut Blue Sway. The best needle-drop of all, though, comes from David Bowie’s 1983 classic Modern Love - which plays as Gerwig’s character Frances Halladay dances joyfully through the streets of Manhattan, cheered on by her new flatmate Lev (played by Adam Driver). “I never wave bye bye,” Bowie sings, his lyrics taking on a strange optimism as they surge forward atop thumping power-pop. “But I try, I try.”
Mistress America
Another writing collaboration between Baumbach and Gerwig, Mistress America follows Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) as she struggles to settle into her first year at Barnard. Adrift in New York, she strikes up a friendship with Brooke Cardinas. The daughter of her mother’s fiancé, the pair are about to become step-sisters; and they immediately hit it off. Gerwig’s character Brooke is magnetic, deeply flawed, and incredibly chaotic, and the story quickly becomes a whirlwind swirling around her unstable orbit. She is a woman with plenty of great ideas, we’re told, but “no follow-through” - she has about seventeen side-hustles on the go at all times, but her carefully curated, incredibly stylish life conceals a real need to impress.
Like Frances Ha, Mistress America’s soundtrack also features a Hot Chocolate moment - this time, the bass-grooves of You Could’ve Been A Lady - along with Dream Baby Dream by the influential avant-garde duo Suicide, Paul McCartney’s 1984 track No More Lonely Nights, and the shimmering synth-pop of Souvenir by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The remainder of the film’s achingly cool, post-punk influenced score is by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. Wareham was previously a member of shoegaze group Galaxie 500, and the pair later went on to play in Luna together. Their ‘80s influenced score sets the tone perfectly.
Lady Bird
In 2017, Gerwig made her solo directorial debut on Lady Bird; a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship with another outstanding soundtrack. Saoirse Ronan plays high school senior Christine McPherson, a teenager hellbent on escaping Sacramento. Nicknaming herself Lady Bird, she constantly ignores her mother Marion’s advice, and secretly applies to a college in New York despite her family not having the means to pay her fees. Eventually, after a tearful, rage-filled farewell, the pair reconcile, Christine having now forged her own path in life.
Along with eclectic choice cuts from Alanis Morrisette, Haim, John Cale, Ani DiFranco, and Dave Matthews Band, a recurring piano motif - nicknamed “the tumbling thing” by Gerwig, according to composer Jon Brion - pins the soundtrack together. “It’s like that period of life where you’re tumbling around a bit,” he told Interview. The pair also devised a mirror image - a flourish of notes that ascend upwards - to act as a kind of musical counterpoint, and called it “the falling-up part.”
A prolific musician, and producer, Brion’s other film score credits include 1999’s Magnolia, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and 2008’s Step Brothers. Speaking to Deadline, Brion said that his aim was to draw out a ” very specific, bittersweet feeling” from Gerwig’s film; his score is supposed to be vaguely reminiscent of a high school wind band, complete with a certain sense of naivety. “I talked to her [Gerwig] about it, and I said, “Look, it’s hard to describe, but I think you’re going to like this sound,” and gave her my reasons why, and she understood.”
Little Women
According to the Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat, Greta Gerwig had a highly specific brief when it came to scoring Little Women: “a mix of Mozart meeting Bowie”. Speaking to Billboard about collaborating with the director, Desplat observed that “there’s something pop about the art direction of this film.” Though it’s a period drama with historical costuming and plenty of frills and ruffles for lead cast Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen, “they don’t dance like they would be in a period movie with every moment tailored like it’s 1867,” he says. Throughout, the women constantly embrace or lie together in a tangle, inspiring him to approach the project like a shapeshifting “ballet” piece.
While Gerwig’s previous work mostly made expert use of iconic musical moments, Little Women was her first film with an entirely original soundtrack - and Desplat’s music set the tone for the director’s strikingly modern take on Louisa May Alcott’s novel, which was set during and after the American Civil War.
For Gerwig, this blending of classic and contemporary was crucial. “I’m very influenced [by] period pieces. I never wanted it to feel heavy or nailed to the ground,” the director told Rolling Stone. “For me, some of the best examples of period pieces that feel injected with the kind of excitement of youth are [François] Truffaut movies. I was looking at movies like Jules and Jim, which is a period piece, but you’d never know that. I loved those movies and I love the music in them. And they have this deceptive lightness. I really loved that. Alexandre’s music is beautiful like that, but not saccharine. It’s exacting. It already senses a certain loss, which is what I was looking for.”
White Noise
Directed by Noah Baumbach, this Don DeLillo adaptation sees Greta Gerwig back in the lead actors’ chair. A notoriously complicated novel, White Noise follows Hitler studies professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his frazzled, death-fearing fourth wife Babette (played here by Gerwig) as they’re flung into a state of existential panic by a huge chemical spill known as The Airborne Toxic Event; it grapples with ferocious consumer culture, American symbolism, mortality, and our morbid obsession with watching tragedy or disaster unfold from a safe distance along the way. Just a few hefty themes, then.
The majority of White Noise’s score is by Danny Elfman, who first broke through in Eighties new wave band Oingo Boingo before turning to film composition. Most closely associated with director Tim Burton, he’s the artist behind the scores for Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and 1989’s Batman. His menacing arrangements for White Noise, rich with theatrically spiralling strings and bursts of echoing choirs, only adds to the film’s unsettling feel. Previous collaborators Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips also make their return for the ominous The Cloud is Coming.
Best of all, though, is the new LCD Soundsystem track New Body Rhumba, squirrelled away right at the end, as a reward for those who stick about for dance-led, seven minute long sequence that ends the film. “Pana-Sonic! Pana-Sonic!” yelps James Murphy; a stomping nod to the title DeLillo wanted to give White Noise in the first place.
Barbie
Gerwig’s eclectic approach to music has now taken a blockbuster turn; it’d probably be quicker to list the leading stars who aren’t donning fuchsia pink and getting involved in Barbie’s rammed musical line-up. In demand producer and musician Mark Ronson (who previously co-wrote A Star is Born’s smash hit Shallow with Lady Gaga, Andrew Wyatt, and Dirty Pretty Things founder Anthony Rossomando) has been tasked with masterminding the upcoming film’s entire soundtrack, enlisting everyone from Dua Lipa, Charli XCX and Billie Eilish, to Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, and Lizzo.
Based on what we’ve heard so far, Ronson and his squad took the bubblegum brief and ran with it. Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj have given Aqua’s Barbie Girl a refresh (“I’m a ten, so I pull in a Ken,” they quip), Charli XCX’s Speed Drive interpolates aspects of Toni Basil’s Mickey into a frantic hyperpop car chase, and Dua Lipa’s Dance the Night is a natural continuation of her smash second record Future Nostalgia. PinkPantheress’ autotuned love song, laced with B*witched-styled pop strings, is another highlight. “Get ready to sob!” Eilish teased, ahead of her own track What I Was Made For - a more slow-burning cut at odds with the high-paced pop veneer on display elsewhere.
All of this sets the stage for a film which is shaping up into one of the most polished of the year, exploring the iconic and problematic character of Barbie with a liberal sprinkling of satire, and featuring a huge, star-studded cast that includes Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Kate McKinnon, Will Ferrell, Nicola Coughlan, Helen Mirren, Ncuti Gatwa, Michael Cera, and America Ferrera.
