The 8 Keys to Writing a Great Movie Musical Song

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It’s Musicals Week at IndieWire. With “Wicked” about to sparkle over theaters, we’re celebrating the best of the movie-musical genre.

It’s a big question: how do you craft, not just a great song, but a great movie musical song? To answer, we turned to two craftsmen who unquestionably have a handle on how that particular alchemy work: EGOT-winning composer Alan Menken and Tony-nominated lyricist Glenn Slater. The pair’s latest film, the Vicky Jenson-directed original animated musical “Spellbound,” is yet another example of their unique ability to blend the playful and the personal. In short, another example of their uncanny ability to write great movie musical songs.

“A musical is a musical,” Menken said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “It is a good song if it moves the story forward, if it captures the emotional gestalt of the moment, and the intent of the story. And, hopefully, has a unique vocabulary that comments and helps enlighten the story.”

For Slater, the magic of a musical and the songs and score within it is hard to match. It’s just something bigger and better.

“There’s always something magical about that moment when characters burst into song,” Slater added. “A great song for a movie musical takes that magic and just amplifies the magic of the movie, makes the character seem bigger than life, makes the moment seem super emotional and makes you just lift up with the film to that next level where anything can happen.”

So, how do we get to that next level? We asked Menken and Slater to walk us through their process, and the duo didn’t disappoint when it came to cueing up some great tips, tricks, and ideas.

Consider the Characters and the Story First

“It’s always the characters and the story,” Slater said. “Before we write a note, we will talk endlessly about the character, the character’s arc, who they are, their background, what they want in the moment, what we want to convey to the audience, how the character relates to the other characters, how this moment relates to other moments in the film. It’s a lot of conversations that go on, so that by the time we’re actually ready to write the song, we know those characters in that moment so intimately.”

But it’s not the information the songs need to deliver that’s essential, it’s also the emotion they must elicit that’s also key. For Menken and Slater, that is the sweet spot: writing a song that balances feeling and data with ease. That requires plenty of chatter.

“Beyond the information: What emotion are we eliciting? What’s the conception of the song that will make that the most powerful possible and most interesting?,” Menken said. “We can talk for a full day before we’ll put my hands to the piano.”

Jenson’s film follows the plucky young princess of a magical land (Rachel Zegler, voicing Princess Ellian), who is hiding a very big secret: her parents, voiced by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, were turned into monsters a year ago, and she’s doing everything in her power to change them back. It’s a coming-of-age story, an adventure tale, a cute comedy, and family drama, all mixed up into one big musical package.

A Partnership Doesn’t Hurt

“Spellbound” marks Menken and Slater’s third animated feature together, following 2004’s “Home on the Range” and 2010’s “Tangled,” and clearly something is working. They don’t just have the shorthand down pat, they also easily trade answers back and forth, nodding along to the other’s answers before popping in with their own insights.

Consider this exchange, inspired by a pretty hefty question: How does this all work when they’re working on a film together:

Slater: “I do a lot of the thinking about plot and character and all the intellectual stuff, and Alan is the pure emotion.”

Menken: “Well, we create the mold, and then I pour the musical gestalt into it.”

Slater: “And then I will take his emotional lead and give that emotion a little bit more contour and shape, but following the emotional verse that he’s provided with that music.”

It’s cheeky to say, but these two are in sync, and their partnership works because they have such a keen understanding of what the other brings to it. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

“As I always say, there’s this brain and there’s this brain as well,” Menken said, pointing first to his head and then his heart. “I had a gut moment where I really felt we needed to have a song that reflected the memories started to come back [in ‘Spellbound’]. And I remember, Glenn is going, ‘Ah, you sure?’ But I felt it in my gut, right?”

Slater nodded. “When you’re working on songs, you’re trying to imagine the entire moment in your head, you’re imagining what it sounds like, what it looks like, what the action is, you’re trying to inhabit the entire moment not knowing what it’s going to be,” Slater said. “But the person you’re working with doesn’t always have the same vision in their head, and it’s not so much arguing as it is insisting, ‘No, this is how I’m seeing it, this is it,’ and trying to get the other person closer to your vision.”

Slater noted that while he and Menken’s visions tend to hew close together, there’s also richness in bringing together seemingly disparate takes on the same song or sequence.

“You want those opposites because often you don’t know what the other vision is, you’re not seeing it,” Slater said. “And once you do see it it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, yes. Alan brought up the song ‘Remembering,’ and he kept saying, ‘This is what it should be, this is what it should be.’ And I just wasn’t seeing it. I just wasn’t seeing it. And finally I just took the leap of faith and I said, ‘Alright, if Alan’s feeling it, his gut is infallible.'”

If Your Story Takes Risks, So Do You

Jenson’s film opens with the sudden, shocking reveal of a big secret: Ellian’s parents, the beloved king and queen of Lumbria, are monsters. And they have been for an entire year. While quick flashbacks explain how we got there — a very bad trip to a very evil forest, at least, that’s what Ellian thinks happened — we enter “Spellbound” with an incredibly large piece of plot already in the rearview. That’s bold, and Menken and Slater needed to reflect that in their songs.

“Getting that right was a year’s worth of work, trying to figure out what’s the right moment to come in, how much information does the audience need, how quickly can we launch our story and then fill in things behind,” Slater said. “One of the great things about working with John Lasseter and Vicky Jenson is that they’ve both done so many of these movies, and so they’re not intimidated by the creative process. We were able to work all the way through to the end to figure out, ‘Oh, where is that, what’s the emotion? What’s the big climax that we’re building to?’ And then go back and say, ‘Now how can we start back from the beginning with our songs and earn that moment?’”

Finding that balance in the storytelling — and Menken and Slater’s songs — took a lot of time, but the duo are confident the choice pays off for “Spellbound.”

“A lot of other studios and a lot of other filmmakers would say, ‘No, no, no, leave it the way it is. We’re happy with the way it is,’ and they were both such perfectionists and kept saying to us, ‘We need to get it right, we need to get it right.’ If it takes more time, that’s fine. If we need to throw out things that we love, we’ll come up with things that we love more,'” Slater said. “And so we were really able to build to that big burst at the end and then make sure that the journey to that big moment was the right journey.”

Consider the Cinder Block

Even when there are questions about starting and stopping points, refined plot movements, big twists and bigger turns, there are always going to be essential storytelling waypoints along the way. Menken and Slater rely on those to ease their process.

“In the creative process, I refer to each of the songs as cinder blocks, where you’re just going to plunk down the basic moments and then build around that,” Menken said. “‘Does that work or does it not work?’ The other thing I always refer to is the eye test version of the creative process. ‘Is this better? Is this better? Is this better?’ And we did a lot of that.”

Those blocks also help when it’s time to mix things up. In “Spellbound,” for instance, Ellian’s big “I want” song, “The Way It Was Before,” is retrofitted into a reprise with a very different message later in the film. Knowing the emotion of the song, having it locked in from the start, allowed Menken and Slater to rework it later.

“Al mentioned cinder blocks, about chunks of ideas and chunks of emotions, and once we get those right, those do become the building blocks for the whole score,” Slater said. “So that if we do need to come back to an emotion at the end, we have that block and we know the shape of it and how it fits in. If we need to nail an idea down, we know, alright, this piece of music expresses that idea, so we can bring it back here, we can bring it back there.”

When the reprise of “The Way It Was Before” strikes up in the film’s third act, it has a special resonance, because of where it came from and where we see it going.

“Once we’ve figured out, along with the writers and the filmmakers, the structure of the whole story, then we can say this would be a good place for a reprise, this would be a good place to revisit this idea, this is a good place to have that melody that reminds you of Ellian as a child come back. We do see where we’re going and create the pieces that we know will get us to where we’re going,” Slater said.

The Basic Beats Only Get You So Far

Menken and Slater have both worked on productions that are wholly original (“Home on the Range,” “La La Land,” “Sausage Party”) and adapted from beloved classics (“The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Tangled”). Jenson’s film is entirely new, a fairy tale of its own creation. What’s the difference?

“It’s slightly terrifying in a way because the guardrails are not really there. You can’t say, ‘Well, we must do this,” Menken said. “We knew the basic premise and the basic emotional architecture of what it’s about. But besides that, everything was up for grabs.”

As scary as that might be, Slater emphasized the rewards of finding something new, independent of any basic and prescribed beats.

“It was not a linear process where we knew from the beginning, this is the story we’re telling, now let’s tell it. It was more of a chunk of an idea that we all had to wile away at until we saw the shape of it emerge,” Slater said. “And it took time. But once we all got closer to it, suddenly it was like, ‘Ah, now we see what it is.’ Having it be original was a gift because it felt like ours, it didn’t feel like we were just adapting something that already existed. It was something that felt fresh and new and it’s always exciting when you can smell something that feels like it’s never been done before.”

Menken added with a laugh, “The worst assignment you can give a songwriter is to say, ‘You know what? I’m going to make it easy. Write any song you want about anything!’ No! You want the specifics, you want all those. It was a hard job, and it was worth it.”

There’s Always a Place for Humor

Scary stuff aside, Menken and Slater always find the space to have fun with their songs, both when it comes to zippy melodies and quippy worldplay. Despite the heavier themes of the film, they brought that same energy to “Spellbound.”

“This is such a unique film because it’s about a pretty heavy emotional state and a pretty serious family dynamic,” Slater said. “Whenever you have something that’s that emotionally leading, you run the risk of getting caught up in it and leaving the audience behind. What everybody knew from the beginning was that they wanted this to be not just about that serious dynamic, but also a fun adventure. … We’re the decoration that makes it pop and sing and provides a lot of the fun.”

The key question: where could they find those moments of levity and fun, even in darker sequences? The trials and tribulations of Ellian’s rodent best pal, Flink, provided an excellent outlet. In the film’s first act, Flink and the John Lithgow-voiced Minister Bolinar switch bodies, just as Ellian and Flink are heading out on their wild adventure. Result: Bolinar’s body is suddenly inhabited by a ditzy, non-speaking gerbil-like animal, while the fuzzy purple Flink is possessed by a very put out, exceedingly annoyed Bolinar.

“Until fairly late in the game, we didn’t have the song ‘I Can Get Used to This’ in the film,” Slater said. “It took a while for us, we kept saying, ‘It’s very serious through this second act of the film, we need something to give us just a little burst of color and fun and to bring in some new characters.’ And it was one of those great situations where we figured out, here’s the kind of song we need. Vicky and John were like, ‘Great, now let’s figure out how we get there,’ and we went back and we rethought Flink, and we rethought the journey of that character, and came up with something that elevated the film as a whole and provided humor throughout the piece.”

In the film’s second act, Ellian, her parents, and Flink run into a pack of wild flinks (it seems “Flink” is both his name and his species), who show the Bolian-stuffed Flink the kind of fun they enjoy on the regular. Mostly, that involves eating juicy larvae. Flink, hilariously, loves it, and Lithgow breaks out into a song about how, heck, he could indeed get used to this life.

“A lot of the essence of comedy songs tends to be when, for a moment, you almost feel a little bit smarter than the character in a way, with Gaston or with the dentist song from ‘Little Shop of Horrors,'” Menken said. “Here, you have Bolinar, who basically is a very stuffy, snobbish character who’s now eating a larva and going, ‘Whoa.’ And he just celebrates it.”

The wordplay Slater infuses into songs like that remind Menken of the work of his late, great partner Howard Ashman. He laughed while sharing some of his favorite bits.

“Like Howard, Glenn lyrically goes over the top so incredibly well,” Menken said. “I’m trying to think of the line! Well, the larva line alone, ‘marvelous and larvalous.’ ‘I can get used to this, shake my big fat caboose to this.’ That’s one!”

Don’t Talk Down to Your Audience

“For me, I write for the child in all of us, honestly,” Menken said. “However, there will be obviously a filter of things you will not want to say simply because it’s not appropriate. But don’t underestimate the sophistication of kids’ minds.”

“Spellbound” might be a kids’ movie, but it’s filled with heavy subject matter, hard-won lessons, and a fair bit of drama. How do you write songs for that?

“I think we never write down to kids, I think we always write up, because we know from experience that kids will rise to that,” Slater said. “I do think for this particular film, one of our concerns, because the dynamic that it describes, we wanted to make sure that we were being accurate to kids’ experiences of it, and not to give them an unreachable solution.”

Kids’ movies are rife with key messages, and “Spellbound” no different. That had to be reflected in the songs that Menken and Slater wrote for it. It may feel fantastic and fizzy and fun, but that’s no excuse for telling younger audiences things that are not true.

“In this particular dynamic, Ellian can’t solve the problem herself, and we didn’t want to rose-color glasses it and make kids think, ‘Oh, well, if only you tried hard enough or wanted it enough or do this or do that, that will solve the problem,'” Slater said. “Because that’s not how it is in real life. And we did feel a responsibility to get the psychology of it right and to get the dynamic of it correct for kids.”

It’s a Musical! Don’t Hide It!

There’s no question Menken and Slater are ardent believers in the power of the musical, and Menken has long been outspoken about Hollywood’s odd way of marketing musicals (read: too often, not marketing them as musicals), as was the case with their “Tangled.” Do they see that continuing?

“It’s not going to be continuing that way. I’ve said a few words and it’s been listened to,” Menken said. “But it is a balancing act for them.”

Slater expanded on that thought. “I think people love musicals when they are served musicals. But they don’t always know that they love musicals because they have this idea that a musical is a perfectly good movie with random songs stuck in,” Slater said. “When a musical is written well, and when it’s put together the right way, you almost don’t realize it’s a musical. Because characters are talking, the emotions rise, and then suddenly, you’re in a song almost imperceptibly without realizing it.”

Hiding that something is a musical isn’t the answer, the pair argue, but there is something awkward around musical messaging that needs to be shifted.

“When audiences get that, they just go with it,” Slater said. “And they don’t think of it as a musical, they think of it as a love story where the love felt huge and romantic. Or a comedy where the comedy was extra funny because the music made it funnier and they come out really happy. But when they hear beforehand it’s a musical, they get that bad idea in their head of, ‘Oh, they’re going to be dropping songs in randomly and it’s going to be uncomfortable and awkward.’ [Studios are] worried about the cringe. But when it’s done right, you don’t get the cringe, you get that other thing where you’re just elevated and you don’t even realize it’s happening.”

The best way to escape that cringe? Easier said than done: make a good musical. These two know something about that.

“You don’t want to have singing for the sake of singing,” Menken said. “But you do want to have the songs and the score elevate the situation, so you’re in a world that you go, ‘Oh, I want to be in this world, let me get swept away.’ So it’s all about context. And knowing that it’s not about us as songwriters or writers, it’s about the characters and the story, and we serve that and then get out of the way.”

Slater added, “When we’ve done our job correctly, you’re not thinking about Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, you’re thinking about Ellian or Flynn Rider. You’re thinking about the character and we disappear.”

Menken smiled. “That’s our job.”

“Spellbound” is now streaming on Netflix.

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