Song Exploder - Justin Hurwitz - La La Land

Episode Date: December 21, 2016

The film LA LA LAND tells the story of Mia, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, and Sebastian, a jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling, both of them struggling artists in Los Angeles. The musical was written and directed by Damien Chazelle in collaboration with composer Justin Hurwitz. It’s the third film they’ve made together, the follow-up to the Oscar-winning film Whiplash. In this episode, Justin Hurwitz breaks down a song from the film sung by Emma Stone; it’s called Audition (The Fools Who Dream). Plus, some thoughts from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who wrote the lyrics. songexploder.net/la-la-land

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hurway. The film La La Land tells the story of Mia, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, and the story of Sebastian, a jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling, both struggling artists in Los Angeles. The musical was written and directed by Damien Chazel, in collaboration with composer Justin Hurwitz. It's the third film they've made together, the follow-up to the Oscar-winning film, Whiplash. In this episode, Justin Hurwitz breaks down a song from the film sung by Emma Stone called Audition, The Fools Who Dream. Plus, we'll hear some thoughts from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who wrote the lyrics.

This episode is part of a series I'm doing in partnership with New York Magazine site, Vulture, highlighting awards-worthy film music. For more, go to vulture.com slash awards. My name is Justin Hurwitz. I'm the composer of Lolloland. The film is written and directed by Damien Chiselle. Damien first talked to me about working on this project in 2010. We had made another musical, the first feature film either of us made, respectively, in college.

That movie, Guy and Madeline on a park bench, got into some festivals, a few people saw it, and a couple of people suggested that we should make another musical, make something a little bigger. So we started developing it in 2011. And then we couldn't get the movie made, so we put it down, and we worked on Whiplash together. and then we picked a lot of land back up in the spring of 2014. I did a little over 1900 piano demos on this movie. These are just piano demos. This is just to find the melodies and the themes.

This was the last song I composed. Damien wanted me to tackle this last. We wanted to kind of understand what the rest of the music was in the movie before we tackled. It's a really emotional scene, and it's a really pivotal scene narratively. based on the script and just conversations I'd been having with Damien, I think I knew emotionally what this scene had to be

because it's in some ways an optimistic song. It's about never giving up, and it's about having these dreams that you believe in and that you chase forever, but that's also that idea just has some sadness in it as well because it's about never giving up, which means you're not there yet, which means life might be difficult at the moment.

So it had to be somewhat optimistic, but it also had to be kind of melancholy. And I knew that it had to ultimately have this sort of bittersweet tone to it. Emma Stone's character, Mia, is an actress. She's an aspiring actress, and she's kind of been through The Ringer in Los Angeles. She's been through one heartbreaking audition after another. She's given up on acting at this moment in the movie,

and she's convinced to come back for one last audition. And in this audition, she starts talking about an aunt of, hers who inspired her to be an actress and who has always been an inspiration in the way that she never gave up on her art and she always dreamed big. So this song, it's about this amp but it also has this larger theme about dreamers. I went through so many versions of melodies for other songs and pieces of material, but this one came out very easily. And I think that's in part because I really connected to the idea of the idea of the other songs.

of being a frustrated artist, but having these dreams. My aunt used to live in Paris. The scene starts with Mia talking to the films director and the casting director. She told us that she jumped into the river once. The song proper starts when she says barefoot, she smiled. Barefoot, she smiled. When I first composed that, those were notes,

those had pitches. But as we started thinking about actually making the scene as we were rehearsing it with Emma, and Damien was thinking about how the scene was really going to be shaped, it became clear that those needed to actually kind of be pitchless and needed to kind of slip into song. So there's this sort of gradation from spoken to song. Barefoot. She smiled. Left without looking and tumbled into the sand. It was freezing.

She spent a month sneezing but said she would do it again. The fact that we have a song in there that talks about someone sneezing, to me, I'm like, oh, that's cool that we got to use the word sneezing. This is Justin Paul, and I'm one of the lyricists on the whole end.

We feel very lucky that Damien let us write songs that were specific lyrics and really told stories with details. And there was never a push to write sort of more accessible, popified lyrics that were kind of general and didn't tell stories much. I'm Benj PASIC, a lyricist with Justin Paul. This is something that our professor at the University of Michigan when we were studying musical theater there taught us in differentiating songs between pop songs and theater songs. He would say a pop song is like an adjective. all about how it makes you feel. And a theater song, you have to approach like it's a verb and it's what the action is. So we like thinking about songs that move story forward. And in particular,

this song, it was our goal to try to make it as much of a verb as possible. Because once Mia sings it, things change forever for her. And Damien and Justin sort of both giving us permission to let this be a verb and not just an adjective, not just be about a feeling, but really about story is something that we really were excited to try to write. She lived in her liquor and died with a flicker. I'll always remember the flame. This is not a studio vocal. She was not lip-syncing.

She was singing it live on set. I was playing piano. I was accompanying her, and I was letting her lead the song and take the space she needed to act it. Because I was letting Emma lead the song, I was reacting to her. So a lot of times the piano was a little bit behind the vocal.

It sounded like a recital or something where, you know, the singer is leading it and the piano is there to accompany. And that's what happens when two people make music together. You know, things are not perfectly in sync. And that's why it feels musical and why it feels real and honest. But I was so nervous playing the piano because this was such a big moment for Emma, and I knew we were only going to get so many takes.

I knew that Emma's voice was only going to last for so long, probably, when you're singing something this passionately. And I knew that just on an acting level, I don't understand fully what actors do, but I don't know how many times they can go back and be that emotional. And so I knew every take was valuable. And I was so afraid of missing a note in derailing the song. Oh, my God, that would have been a disaster. If I had screwed up the piano and the song had come to a screeching halt. Randy Kerber is playing the piano and the actual recording. He's an amazing session musician who played all of the jazz piano,

but the piano was one thing that we felt we had to record separately from the orchestra. The piano interacts with the vocal in such an intimate way, and we had to let Randy kind of come to terms with the vocal performance and really feel it with the vocal and the way that I was feeling it on set with Emma. So the melody unfolds, piano accompanies, and then we get to the chorus. And I start introducing more dissonance into the piano accompaniment. But it resolves then in the major key. And I use a major seventh.

It cuts the majorness of it. It helps it from feeling too straightforward in its emotion. I think it helps it feel emotionally complex and unsettled. I go for so much movement. in general, because that's the case for people's emotions. People's emotions are constantly changing. You can feel 100 things in under a second. And I like the music to have all these different feelings in it.

And I think if I just grabbed a triad and stuck with it for the whole measure, I think we would be a few seconds of feeling the same thing, which I don't think is how people feel. She captured a feeling. So in this next verse, the strings enter. enter. It's first violins, violas, and cellos. I was saving the second violins because I wanted them to come in later with this high shimmering part. In this second chorus of the song, the winds and the brass enter. It's just a solo bassoon line that comes in and that hands off

to a solo horn line. So it's this dialogue between bassoon and horn in this chorus. The bridge of the song, the lyric is A bit of madness is key. A bit of madness is key. That's where the bridge starts. And the piano is now playing these fast arpeggios, and is pretty much doing that for the rest of the song. We wanted it to start feeling magical. The orchestration now really takes over and does the heavy lifting, and the winds now start trilling.

This is the first time that Emma is really belting in the song. So bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles, the painters and poets and plays. We worked with Emma a lot in pre-production in the studio. I mean, she worked a lot on her own. She had a great vocal coach, Eric Vitro. And all of those rehearsals were to help learn the song on a technical level, to learn the notes, to learn the shape of it.

And the idea was that she would learn the song, she'd get it in her bones so that when she got to set, she could act it and she could get emotional, and she's on the verge of tears at the end of the song. And she's able to do all of that because she knew the song so well and had it down technically so well. It's one shot. There are no picture edits in the scene,

so we couldn't cut between the best of this take and the best of that take. It had to be nailed all in one shot. And here's to the fools who dream, crazy as they may seem. Right after the lyric, crazy as they may seem, the strings have this upward gesture.

It's the most optimistic the song gets. Mia is really singing the theme of the song. She's turned the song from being about her aunt specifically to about dreamers everywhere. Here's to the hearts that break. Here's to the mess we make. So she's singing about how important it is to pursue your art.

It's a very dramatic lyric and it's a very dramatic emotion she's feeling in the orchestra is equally dramatic. And then we come to the outro of the song, and we're returning to reality. We're returning to Mia being in the audition room. The flute trills, they're there just to keep a little bit of magic. So the second to last chord is in nerdy music theory terms, it's the minor four chord. And we want to resolve in the key that we're in, which is A major, at the end of the song. It just wants to go home in this very kind of bittersweet way.

but the A is implied but it's never given to you. The very last word of the song, when Emma says again, it's a cappella. The piano has now dropped out for the last note of the song. This song is optimistic, but it's also, there's pain in it, and Mia's life isn't resolved at the end of this, and there's something nice about not tying it up with a bow and just making it too tidy at the end. This song is really special for me, and I'm just so proud of it.

I think it's exactly what we envisioned this scene and this song would be. You know, when Damie and I first started developing this, we had this musical we wanted to make. Nobody was letting us make it. We were so passionate about it, and there didn't seem to be a path at the time to actually realize that dream of making Lala Land. And so we were feeling a lot of the same things that the character was. in this movie you're feeling, you know, having these dreams,

but not having permission to make your art yet. I still feel like a dreamer. I don't feel accomplished yet, really. I don't feel like I've arrived. And I'd like to think that will always be the case, because if I stopped feeling like a dreamer, then I don't think my music is going to be very good. And now here's Audition, The Fools Who Dream,

from La La Land in its entirety. My aunt used to live in Paris. I remember she used to come home and she would tell us, stories about being abroad and I remember she told us that she jumped into the river once barefoot. She smiled, left without looking, and tumbled into the sand, freezing, sneezing, but said she would do it, no ceiling. The sun set inside She lived in and died with a flicker I'll always remember

Here's two dreams Here's two colors to Visit songexploder.net to watch the trailer for La La Land And for links to learn more about composer Justin Hurwitz And the film I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co.

Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge shows, made possible by the Knight Foundation, by MailChimp and listeners like you. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. This episode was produced by Christian Coons and me.

My name is Rishi K. Sherway. Thanks for listening. Radioopia.