With ‘Moana 2,’ Songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear Explored New Waters
On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
In “Moana 2,” Disney’s latest smash-hit animated musical, the title character (Auli?i Cravalho) receives advice from a mischievous bat spirit Matangi (Awhimai Fraser) about taking new, uncertain directions during her quest to find the island of Motunui rather than staying on the path she already knows, via the rollicking diva number “Get Lost.” It’s a moral that felt very apt for the experience songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear had while writing it, as they were forced to do something they’ve always avoided: work together over Zoom.
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As Barlow described it to IndieWire, the song was written across the several months Bear was on the road with Beyoncé playing piano on the Renaissance tour. Separated by hundreds of miles, the longtime collaborators had no choice but to work on it remotely, a method they’ve always hated and have never used while working together. Instead, they found that the song flowed easily out of them, as Bear took inspiration from Beyoncé herself to craft the diva number.
“We just sort of gave ourselves over to that, and it was a magical thing to learn we can write over Zoom,” Barlow told IndieWire during an interview at Vibrato Grill Jazz in Los Angeles. “We really found her voice even from that far away.”
“Taking it somewhere unexpected, too, made it really fun,” Bear told IndieWire. “Because the song is all about forgetting what you know.”
Writing over Zoom isn’t the only new ground Barlow and Bear broke while working on “Moana 2.” A sequel to the incredibly popular 2016 Disney film about a Polynesian chief’s daughter and her quest to explore to vast uncharted waters beyond her home island, the film is by far the biggest platform that the young (Barlow is 26, Bear is 23) songwriters have had during their career.
Before the film’s release this November, the duo was best known for their Grammy-winning “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” album, a soundtrack for a hypothetical musical adaptation of the popular Netflix romance series that grew out of viral posts of songs they wrote over TikTok in 2021 during the early days of the pandemic. While Bear has worked on film scores before, this is the first film credit ever for Barlow. When the two were hired for the movie, they became the youngest songwriting duo to have their work featured on a Disney film, and the first female duo at that.
And now a lot of people are hearing Barlow and Bear’s work. The movie smashed several records at the box office to make $221 million in its opening weekend, the biggest first week for an animated movie in history. It’s a level of exposure that the two of them can barely comprehend — and makes the two the perfect choice to receive the Breakthrough Award at IndieWire Honors later this week.
“I’ve definitely felt the entire range of human emotions,” Bear said. “It’s hard to comprehend those kinds of numbers. And I feel like most creatives will agree that you never really believe that anyone will watch anything you have your hand in. So then, all of a sudden, you’re reading Deadline and Variety, and your name’s in there.”
Despite their age, both Barlow and Bear had worked in the industry for years before becoming a duo; Barlow was a professional pop songwriter, while Bear worked as a pianist and composer since the age of five. The two first met in 2019 when a mutual friend invited them to dinner to discuss a potential stage show. The two clicked, and Barlow invited Bear over to her apartment, where they watched “The Bachelorette” and made macaroons. Soon, they got in a room together to collaborate, the first time either took a stab at making something for musical theater.
“I never thought I was capable of more than just writing a pop song until I met Emily, and we started falling in love with writing music for storytelling purposes, and I think that just opened my eyes to a whole new path I never thought was possible,” Barlow said. “And from the very first session, we had it, it was set in stone.”
Describing their collaborative process, the two say they have their own strengths — Barlow leans more toward writing lyrics, Bear toward music and melody — but in practice, they do almost everything as a unit.
“It’s sort of a running conversation. It’s also more like a pop session than like musical theater,” Barlow told IndieWire. “Classically, lyric goes off, music goes off, and they come back together. We kind of just collaborate in the room for all of it. So one of us will bring the concept or a lyric, or Emily will start producing something out, and then we’ll start building upon it. Our one shared brain cell will ping back and forth and create a structure of a puzzle, and then start putting all the pieces together.”
After two years of collaboration, their partnership saw the pair blow up when the “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” went viral and earned them the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. Suddenly, the two had multiple projects in the works and were taking many calls — including from Disney Music President Tom MacDougall, who met them in 2020 for a general pitch meeting that eventually evolved into them getting hired for “Moana 2” in 2021.
The original “Moana” featured some of the most acclaimed songs in recent Disney history, courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda. In writing their songs for the sequel, the duo aimed for something that was spiritually true to the sound of the original but introduced new elements while allowing the characters’ voices to evolve.
“You want to pay homage to the world, but also allow the sonic world to expand and grow, and the characters’ voices to evolve,” Bear said. “We start the movie out with that opening number, which is the most of the world that we know, and then as she sets sail on this new journey and goes to unexpected waters the soundtrack changes, like with Matangi. It’s all about balance, and it’s a conversation that we have with the creative team.”
At the beginning of the process, Bear and Barlow had some guidelines for what the producers and directors wanted and where the songs would go in the script, but — as with all animated projects — the story heavily changed throughout and what was needed evolved. They had a genuine kill-your-darlings moment when they had to alter the first song they wrote for the project, which was eventually cut entirely and replaced with the new “I Want” song “Beyond,” because Moana’s goals changed in the script — the original song focuses on her doubts about if she should stay or go, while the new song became about her knowing she must go, but fearing what it will cost her.
The hardest song for them to write during the process, and the one that went through the most revisions, is the song of Moana’s main ally Maui (Dwayne Johnson), “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” A pivotal song in the film’s arc, where Maui comforts Moana during a time of need, the piece was a balancing act. Barlow and Bear needed to retain the character’s boisterous spirit and cater to Johnson’s specific screen presence, while also reflecting Maui’s growth; as Bear put it, they wanted to avoid a “cheesy, YouTube motivational speech” vibe.
To find the perfect tone, the two came to think of the song like a battle-cry, and worked from there to give the otherwise comedic song solid emotional grounding, while still tailoring it exactly for Johnson’s vocal range and acting style.
“We knew the line we wanted to straddle with his character tone-wise,” Barlow said. “But then you have to truly step into their shoes. I think it’s a superpower to be empathetic like that, and l be able to hear their voice and know their voice. And I saw it multiple times before we stepped into this process. I knew his mannerisms and his dry humor. I think we tried to weave that in and out of the song.”
Barlow and Bear have been basking in the movie’s success, particularly with their friends and their friends’ kids. The day of our interview, Barlow was FaceTimed by her nephews after going to see it in theaters to tell her they loved it. Bear recounts how she went to the theater to see the movie and watched the children watching it. “I love that,” Bear said. “I love that they’re so locked in.”
“Moana 2” ends on a sequel hook of sorts, with the implication that new threats will come to face the young heroine. Asked whether or not they would be interested in returning for a sequel, Bear was blunt that the answer is “far above our pay grade,” but as Barlow puts it, “We love the Mouse. They know where to find us.”
“Working [at Disney], it’s just wonderful,” Bear said. “And they value music. So many people view music as an afterthought, they try to hide that it’s a musical, and they see power in music and what it can do to tell stories.”
Regardless of their future with Disney, the two have several other projects that they’ve put in the works, including a few Broadway-bound works. One of those projects? The musical that brought them together for the first time five years ago.
“That’s exciting, that we’re finally talking about seeing that through,” Barlow said.
“Moana 2,” a Walt Disney release, is currently playing in theaters.
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