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The Music of Moana
Lin-Manuel Miranda takes us inside the writing of his instant-classic Disney soundtrack.
By Danny Munso
2016 marked the year Lin-Manuel Miranda became a household name. It also happened to be the year his creative life came full circle. For all the deserved plaudits he received for writing, composing and starring in Hamilton, one of the seminal artistic achievements of the century, Miranda seems equally proud of his role as one of the songwriters on Disney’s Moana. The reason for that is simple: it was a Disney film (1989’s The Little Mermaid) thathad the biggest impact on his decision to undertake the career he did. In a large bit of serendipity, Moana is directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, the same duo who helmed Little Mermaid. This fact was not lost on Miranda when he met the pair to interview for a position on the film’s creative team and gushed about how they had impacted his life. This was in late 2014 when he was best known as the Tony-winning composer of 2008’s In the Heights whose new hip-hop musical about America’s former treasury secretary was set to open off-Broadway in two months. He had to audition for Moana the same way one of the actors from Hamilton did for him. “I told Ron and John they were the reason I was even here,” Miranda recalls. Needless to say, he got the job.
Miranda left rehearsals for Hamilton and hopped on a plane to New Zealand to join the rest of the team, including score composer Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i, a New Zealand singer-songwriter from the group Te Vaka, which specializes in music of the Pacific (the setting for the film). The very first time Miranda jammed with his collaborators, the seeds sprouted for what would be come one of the core songs on the Moana soundtrack – “We Know the Way,” which gives the title character the history of her village. “That first song sort of set the template for how Mark and Opetaia and I would work together for the rest of the film,” Miranda says. “Opetaia brought the melody and those lyrics in Samoan and it was an amazing starting point. The song was there and I began writing English lyrics to that. Mark played with the chords and I came up with a counter melody to that. It was such a joyous collaboration. That set a really nice tone of, If you have an idea, take the lead and we’ll all chime in and play with it together.” Miranda especially leaned on Foa’i early in the process to find the exact sound of Moana’s Polynesian locale. “He has been writing from the perspective of this part of the world and his ancestors for so long. He really was the key to making the music a success. So I knew any rhythm I wrote, any harmony I did, I wanted to make sure Opetaia felt like they would come from this part of the world.
The centerpiece of the soundtrack – and the film itself – is Miranda’s “How Far I’ll Go,” a showcase Disney song in the vein of “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid or Frozen‘s “Let It Go,” that has garnered him both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Song. “The song came together throughout the course of the film,” Miranda says. “It was sort of the song we kept checking back in with. As you know on an animated film, whole plot points change, so what you’re setting up also changes. I would say that song was always in flux in terms of its lyrical content for about a year.” One of the challenges in nailing down the tune was the complexity of the film’s narrative. Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) is not in search of something tangible per se. She’s really seeking her own identity, as she feels a calling to the ocean, which goes against the wishes of her parents and her village. Miranda embraced the thought of trying to capture this desire in lyrical form, but the actual idea come from the lyrics of one of his other songs in the film. In “Where You Are,” Moana’s Grandma Tala (Rachel House) sings, “Once you know what you like, there you are.” The song is a push-pull between Tala and Moana’s father (voiced by Temuera Morrison, with singing done by Hamilton‘s George Washington portrayer Christopher Jackson) about the possibilities for the young girl’s future. “We’d been dancing around that scene< but when I found that lyric, it sort of crystallized it, not just for the songwriting team but also for the filmmaking team. So that became a major plot point in the film because that lyric crystallized that thing we had all been talking around pinned into one sentence. It’s thrilling from our perspective to have that much input on the storytelling of the film.” Miranda also embraced the challenge for “How Far I’ll Go” of then writing to that emotion. “It was actually really thrilling,” he says. “Disney has an incredible legacy of songs and I think my favorite ones are the ones that are so specific they kind of become universal.”
Miranda’s first crack at what would turn into “How Far I’ll Go” was an early song called “More,” a tune catchy in its own right but one that didn’t offer the same lyrical complexity as its successor. “I think what we learned from ‘More’ gave ‘How Far I’ll Go’ its complexity by virtue of the fact that we realized she doesn’t hate her island,” Miranda explains. “She’s not bored with it.” In “More,” Moana’s tone is more dismissive of where she comes from. She’s sort of over it. I thought it was much more interesting for her to really love being the daughter of the chief and to love her family and her island, and yet there’s this voice inside her calling her away anyway. I felt that was more nuanced and more specific. Once we sort of made that leap, I felt like it really became a more unique song and more unique to Moana’s perspective.
Miranda had Skype conferences with the directors and story team every Tuesday and Thursday at 5 pm from his Hamilton dressing room, which also doubled as the place he demoed many of the songs, often enlisting members of the musical’s cast to sing certain parts. He also took part in every story session with Disney’s famed brain trust, a collection of filmmakers and luminaries from both Disney Animation and Pixar headed up by creative chief John Lasseter that view an in-progress version of the film and then give intensive notes on what can be improved. “John Lasseter said something really amazing to me at the beginning, which was, ‘Feel free to raise your hand and chime in. Your perspective is needed. We don’t do what you do, so raise your hand when you think music can take the lead in a sequence.” That’s what occurred when Clements and Musker were struggling with the climactic moment of the film, where Moana faces off with the villain of the story, the volcanic demon Te Ka, which is causing the destruction of Moana’s village. “I sort of put my hand up a lot when it came to the climax of this thing. Still not knowing how to do it, just saying that we can do it and they could count on us.” The songs sung by Moana during this scene – “I Am Moana” and “Know Who You Are” – replaced traditional dialogue scenes and Moana tells two key parts of the plot in song form. “I Am Moana” is her declaration that she, not the presumed hero Maui (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), would be the one to save her village. And “Know Who You Are” is akin to a lullaby she sings to Te Ka telling the demon she knows she’s in pain and who she really is.
The “Know Who You Are” melody is a callback to an earlier, wordless scene in the film where toddler Moana meets the ocean. It’s a moving sequence set to music written by Foa’i and Miranda wanted to bring back that melody. “It was the only scene we hadn’t revisited in the whole movie,” he says. “In the middle of one of our conference calls, I said this is the one scene we haven’t touched and it’s the first time Moana meets the ocean. It has to be that. So I pitched it and wrote a counter melody to what Opetaia wrote, and Mark made a beautiful arrangement. It’s the right reprise at the right moment.” The use of a reprise is trademark Miranda and one of the major reasons for many of the emotional high points in Hamilton. “This is what I will say about myself as a songwriter with no false modesty,” he notes of what some would say has become his calling card. “I’ll never be the best melodist. I’ll never be the best lyricist. But I can figure out the right reprise at the right moment that will fuck you up emotionally. Hamilton is sort of an exercise in the right reprise happening at the right time. And for Moana, it was the right reprise at the right time.”
When Clements and Musker were working out the character of Maui, the trickster god that accompanies Moana on much of her journey, in various stages of production they kept struggling with making the character likable. While he is one of the heroes of the movie, he has major flaws and is dismissive of Moana after they meet. The directors freely admit that most of their problems with Maui were solved by casting Johnson. When penning the lyrics to Maui’s song – the boastful “You’re Welcome,” where he tallies up his list of accomplishments – Miranda leaned heavily on Johnson’s personality. “I don’t know who said 90 percent of directing is casting, but they were really smart,” he says. “Even before Dwayne was an actor, he made a career as a wrestler and would do incredibly unlikable things and yet, you would cheer. His charm is such that you can have him sing a song like ‘You’re Welcome’ and you don’t think he’s a bad guy. You can’t stay mad at him. So writing the lyrics was fun. It was more about how much could I get away with because he’s so lovable. It’s in his spirit. It’s who he is.” Given that Johnson is not known for his vocal abilities, Miranda found a YouTube compilation of the actor as The Rock before he wrote the song. “There was a brief phase where he would pull out a guitar and sing about how much he hated whatever town he was in. I found a supercut of him singing and got a sense of his vocal range. So I wrote within that and then went a little bit outside it. He nailed it every time. He trained for this song the way he trains for his action films.”
One song in the film doesn’t have the feel of the Pacific Islands: “Shiny,” a showstopper from the villainous Tamatoa (Jemaine Clement), a bejeweled crab that hampers Moana and Maui on their adventure. Not only does it not sound like any other song, Miranda purposely made it sound like one of his favorite artists. “It was a David Bowie song the moment they told me Jemaine Clement was going to play Tamatoa,” he says. “I’m a huge Flight of the Conchords fan and, to me, they did one of the best Bowie tributes ever. So I knew he had a great Bowie in his arsenal.” Miranda wrote the song in the months following the iconic singer’s untimely 2016 passing from cancer. “I along with the rest of the world had been mourning him and I had been listening to him a lot. I also think I subconsciously did it because one of the big children’s movie villains for me growing up as a child of the 80’s was David Bowie in Labyrinth. So the idea of a Bowie voice as the fun villain was not a leap for me at all.” The song is anything but a Bowie knockoff, particularly musically, but Miranda was definitely going for that vibe in the vocal performances (including his own, as you can hear on the original demo). “The song doesn’t really share any DNA with any of his songs. It’s all in the attitude and the weaponization of the vowel sounds in the vocals.”
Miranda concluded his onstage run for Hamilton in July, though he is a long way from putting that project in his rearview, judging by his spearheading of the December release of The Hamilton Mixtape, where other artists interpret the songs from his show. And he is not done with Disney by a long shot. He is currently rehearsing for the studio’s Mary Poppins Returns, where he plays a lamplighter named Jack opposite Emily Blunt as the title character. He is also in the early stages of composing new songs with composer Alan Menken for the company’s upcoming live-action take on The Little Mermaid. “Right now my role is to basically be the number one fan. I don’t know whether that takes the form of vetting the music or writing new music if that’s called for. I’m just a pair of eyes right now – but it’s very exciting.”
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