How Mark Ronson became Hollywood’s soundtrack king: “‘Barbie’ felt special”

He’s won seven Grammys, two Brits and an Oscar. He’s one of the most successful record producers of all time – counting hits with Lady Gaga, Adele and Paul McCartney in his discography. He’s played the Super Bowl. Amy Winehouse was his muse. Meryl Streep is his mother-in-law. But at 4am, unable to sleep, Mark Ronson was nervously checking his phone to see if he’d written a good enough demo to make it onto the Barbie soundtrack.

“I wanted to get the job, but I also didn’t want to just give them some generic dance shit. I wanted to do something I’ve never done before.” Talking via Zoom from his New York apartment, fresh from Cannes, Ronson still seems in awe of Barbie director Greta Gerwig – and from getting the opportunity to work on the biggest movie of the year.

“The minute I knew Greta Gerwig was directing… I signed up”

“The minute I knew Greta was directing the film, that she was writing it with her partner Noah [Baumbach], and that it was Barbie… I signed up. I mean, I did read the script. And the script was incredible. But honestly, if it had been bad I still would have said yes.”

Asked to write something quick for Barbie’s first big musical number (a sparkly dance party in the disco-fied Dreamhouse), Ronson only had a week before choreography began to come up with something to fit the scene. “It felt like if I did a good job on that track there might be a chance to do more,” he remembers. “But it was getting close to the deadline and I didn’t have anything. Finally, at the last minute, I had this track that I liked. I named it ‘Tastes Like Barbie’ and sent it in overnight. I knew it was already mid-morning in England, where they were filming. I always turn my phone off before I go to bed but I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t resist checking my email. Greta loved it. She said she’d already listened to it 100 times on the way to set. It felt like I could breathe again.”

Later, he asked Dua Lipa to work on the vocals (“I always felt like it had a Future Nostalgia feel to it”), and the track developed into ‘Dance The Night’. Ronson’s single contribution to Barbie had grown into one of the most ambitious projects he’d ever worked on. Lizzo followed. As did Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Charli XCX, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish, Haim, PinkPantheress, Karol G and FIFTY FIFTY. Assembling 17 original tracks with every one of the biggest names in pop, Ronson turned a movie soundtrack into the hottest album of 2023.

“You know, I’ve been asked to do songs for movies before,” he says, talking slowly in a transatlantic slur, hanging every sentence off a long pause and the word “like”. “And they just say, like, ‘hey, we’re doing a Ghostbusters reboot! Just make a song!’ Like, sure, you can go make a song but your brain goes 1000 different ways. No offence to the Ghostbusters reboot, but they ended up with, like, 11 interpolations of the original Ghostbusters song on that movie…”

Ah yes, the Ghostbusters reboot (not that one, the other one, with Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, in 2016…). Ronson’s ‘Get Ghost’, with Passion Pit and A$AP Ferg, marked a turning point in his work on film. By then, he’d already contributed tracks to a dozen movies – but they’d mostly been songs he’d already released elsewhere.

“My first single, [2003 funk hip-hop mash-up] ‘Ooh Wee’, did pretty well in England when it came out, but the main reason people know it in America is because it was in the [2003 Jessica Alba romcom] Honey, right in the opening scene,” he says, still slightly bemused by the fact that his biggest hits have had such a shelf-life on adverts, end-credits and cartoon chipmunk dances. “Even though a lot of my solo records haven’t done so great, for some reason filmmakers seem to like them. And they still use ‘Ooh Wee’ as the bumper for insurance ads. I’m like, ‘why the fuck didn’t you guys play it when it was actually out?!”

Digging further into his early inspirations, Ronson names Footloose and Top Gun as the soundtracks that first made an impression when his mum moved him from London to New York as an eight-year-old. “In the ‘80s, they were the records you just saw everywhere. Every kid had ‘Thriller’, and every kid had those two movie soundtracks.”

Waxing about his love for Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Danger Zone’ and Steve Steven’s guitar riff (and the time he slipped the Top Gun theme into a DJ set at Tom Cruise’s wedding, getting him to shoot finger guns on the dance floor), Ronson talks about soundtracks the way he talks about all music. As obsessed with Carter Burwell’s Fargo score as he is with Eric B. & Rakim’s ‘Know The Ledge’ on Tupac’s classic Juice hip hop compilation, his own first movie credit is harder to place.

“Sometimes with movie music, you just need to get the fuck out of the way”

“I think I did a song for Zoolander?”, he asks, after a pause. “They were just having people cover songs, and I did ‘Call Me’ by Blondie with Nikka Costa. But the first time I was asked to actually write music for a film was Mortdecai, with Johnny Depp.” The 2015 flop isn’t remembered that fondly, if at all, and Ronson has his own issues with his retro jazz score. “I hate to say it now, but… I didn’t know as much then. And I didn’t think about things like serving the picture. When I watch that film, the music is far too funky, all of the time. I think that’s something I was definitely struggling with around that time too, after [his second album] ‘Version’. Like, ‘oh is that what people want from me?’

“The thing I learned very, very quickly doing the score for Barbie is that you’re always serving the picture. You’re always serving the emotion. You have to turn off all the things you know about making pop and rock and soul music for the last 30 years. Yes, it needs to be beautiful, but sometimes you just need to get the fuck out the way.”

By 2016, Ronson was starting to realise exactly what that meant. First there was the track on the Ghostbusters reboot, then work on Scarlett Johannsson’s singing snake solo in The Jungle Book and a song with Queens rapper Action Bronson for Suicide Squad. “This was right when ‘Uptown Funk’ was still kind of crazy,” he says. “Even though it’d been out for over a year, we were rehearsing for the Super Bowl, and we had all this stuff going on, I started getting drawn to these different projects. Swingers is one of my favourite movies of all time, so when I ran into [director] Jon Favreau and he asked me about The Jungle Book I said I’d love to do it. I was there in the studio with Homer [Steinweiss] and Tommy [Elmhirst] and all these amazing musicians that I’ve worked with since [Amy Winehouse’s classic 2006 album] Back To Black, and we had two hours with Scarlett, who had this great, crazy, super-throaty New York rasp. She was great.”

Finding his way towards more mature film writing, the next biggest milestone came in 2018 with A Star Is Born – and with that, an Oscar.

“We were working on Gaga’s album ‘Joanne’ and Bradley Cooper stopped by the studio one afternoon. I like his films. He showed up looking like a movie star. So we hung out,” Ronson smiles. “He was really sweet, talking about this new script that they were both doing. I played him the song called ‘Joanne’ and he’s like, ‘that’s great, can I have it?’. I know he’s a big star and everything, but I really liked that song. And I kind of needed it for Gaga’s record.”

Agreeing to take some time out of the schedule to work on something new for the film with Gaga, Ronson remembers the exact moment ‘Shallow’ clicked – after days spent trying to nail the chorus. “We were working in this incredible studio in Malibu, [Los Angeles] – Rick Rubin’s studio, Shangri La – and it had this really long echoey hallway. I have this very distinct memory of Gaga’s voice coming from 30 feet away, sounding so excited about something as she came in. She sat down at the piano and started singing ‘I’m off the deep end…’”

“Where else am I going to find someone to sing ‘I’m Just Ken’?”

Noticing that something had changed after A Star Is Born – and now adding an Academy Award to his mantlepiece – more movie projects started turning up, but none of them felt like Ronson was throwing everything he had at the screen. “I think it was fun to just make some feel-good shit around then,” he says, looking back on the tracks he made with Anderson. Paak and DJ Shadow for cartoon pigeon comedy Spies In Disguise. “That was coming off the back of ‘Late Night Feelings’, which was just an immensely personal record and a little bit more melancholic, so it was nice to have some licence to make something totally different.”

All of which led to Barbie. As much fun as Ronson had with the film (“I can be as serious as I need to be sitting in a studio with Miley Cyrus working on a track… but [Barbie is the only place] I’m going to find someone to sing ‘I’m Just Ken’), the soundtrack was also a chance to hone the film skills he’d been working on throughout his whole career. This was going to be a compilation record – his biggest yet – but one that was always only there to serve the story.

“There were some great songs that just didn’t feel tonally right at the end of the day, so they didn’t end up in the film,” he says, not naming any names. “Everything had to serve the movie. It had to push the picture. There was never any idea of just putting in a ‘hot track’, as they call it, or a ‘needle drop’.”

Feeling like a snapshot of pop’s global reach in 2023, as well as of how varied its sub-genres really are, the album found its sound by accident. Ronson and Gerwig decided to approach their favourite artists and see who was keen to get involved. To their surprise, everyone was.

“Everybody is the best in their lane. And we went after them all,” he says. “I would have been over the moon to have gotten a quarter of these artists, but they all just kept coming back saying yes. We showed [Colombian superstar] KAROL G the scene on Venice Beach Boardwalk, and Charli XCX got the chase sequence. Everyone was just like, ‘I got it. Let me send you something in a week.’”

Dua Lipa turned in a summer anthem. Lizzo wrote the opening number like she was on Broadway (“Greta loved it so much that she ran out of the room and played it for Margot over the phone”). Billie Eilish got a “secret” track. Haim nailed the big retro tearjerker. Ryan Gosling smashed a Meat Loaf-inspired ballad that’s the highlight of the whole film.

“I was never a big musical theatre buff growing up, and that’s not ever something I felt like I’d go into,” says Ronson. “But as I’ve gotten older, I love [musical theatre legend] Stephen Sondheim and I appreciate all of it. Barbie’s really given me licence to make stuff I’ll never get to make. I mean, someone like Johnny Marr is my musical hero, but to work with people who come from this other art form feels more magical to me. Films have more fairy dust. I don’t know, it was just very… gratifying to be a part of this.”

Clearly still slightly star-struck, Ronson seems more at home talking about Barbie than he does anything else he’s ever worked on. He’s proud. And he’s obviously also where he wants to be – finding a way to mesh his skills making super-singles with his passion for movies in a way that finally makes sense. A way that turns pop soundtracks into something genuinely new and exciting.

“Listen, my instincts aren’t always right. They’ve definitely been wrong before. I don’t want to use any, like, trite adjectives, but this one really did feel… special.”

‘Barbie The Album’, executive produced by Mark Ronson, is out now on Atlantic Records

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