When Consequence refers to their score for Barbie as having a surreal quality, composers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt are both pleased. “We have the keyboards from the ’80s, and the symphonic stuff that spans a good 200-year timeframe, everything from classical music to late romantic music in there. And so I think that’s a great compliment, to call it surreal,” Wyatt says.
It’s music befitting the film, as director Greta Gerwig transports the viewer first to Barbie Land, an alternate dimension in which Barbies like the one played by Margot Robbie live in innocent bliss. Until, that is, a Barbie has an existential crisis and a Ken (Ryan Gosling) learns about the patriarchy. “The world that Barbie’s occupying is kind of a surrealist world too, just from the giddy-up,” Wyatt continues. “So I think that probably informed us making music that had really bright colors in it and also stuff that was part of the inheritance of Western music.”
Ronson says that finding that sound took some experimentation, with a lot of hearkening back to the 1980s, “when people really were interweaving these crazy grand synthesizers like the DX7 and the CS-80 with the orchestra and the score. We were trying to find that zone where those things could live together. We went through a lot of iterations and trial and error. Because, you know, we hadn’t really scored a full film before.”
In fact, when Ronson and Wyatt first began working on Barbie, the plan was not for them to do the score for the film — the veteran music producers and songwriters were instead asked to tackle a more specific task. “We were brought in to do a couple of songs,” Ronson tells Consequence. “Greta and Noah [Baumbach, who co-wrote the film] originally sent us this very funny, slightly eccentric song sheet — they wanted a Barbie song for this big dance number, and then a Ken song.”
At that point, he continues, “There were no guidelines for the Ken song. It was never going to be sung in the film. Ryan was never going to sing.” However, Ronson and Wyatt were given some “weirdo, very funny” details about what Gerwig and Baumbach were looking for the Ken song (including “he likes horses, he has no genitals, he wishes that he could be hugged”) and wrote what would become “I’m Just Ken.”
Gerwig loved “I’m Just Ken,” and after she played it for Gosling, plans for the song changed. “She was like, ‘He wants to sing the song in the film,’ and we were obviously over the moon, because we’re such fans of these filmmakers,” Ronson says. “And all of a sudden they’re saying like, ‘Oh, we love your words too. We’re gonna make your words part of our script.'”
