Last week Laughing Place was invited to participate in a press conference in promotion of Walt Disney Studios’ new film Mufasa: The Lion King, during which its acclaimed and award-winning songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton, Moana, Encanto) discussed his process of creating catchy new tunes for the movie without leaning too heavily on its predecessors.
“That original The Lion King ‘94 soundtrack is immortal,” began Lin-Manuel Miranda. “It's [got] no skips from Elton John and Tim Rice [as songwriters], and then Hans Zimmer's incredible score. If it had just been that first movie, I think I would have been very intimidated. But there's been an entire world of Lion King music. There's the incredible musical– it's one of the longest running musicals on Broadway. There's Beyoncé's album, The Gift, which expanded the vocabulary of what a Lion King song could sound like. So it just felt like this amazing world to play in, and then my secret weapon was Lebo M., who was the first voice you hear on that original film. I knew his choral arrangements and his incredible choir were going to raise whatever I wrote to the next level. Working with him and Mark Mancina, who I worked with on Moana, I knew I had just incredible talent in my corner that would help us get to that Lion King level.”
“Lion King is practically a genre, thanks to all of the incredible music that's been made in this world,” continued Miranda. “I knew I wanted Lebo M.'s voice and talent on the tracks I was writing as well, so everything I wrote bumped up a level when he got in the studio and started playing around with the tunes and adding harmonies. That [original] music is so powerful that it would have been very easy to just do lots of quotes and samples and lean on the nostalgia. [But] I only allowed myself one Hans Zimmer quote: it's five notes, and it's when Mufasa is alone in the middle of ‘I Always Wanted a Brother.’ I just wanted to hit it once, when Mufasa is longing for his mother and his ancestors. It felt like there's a direct line between Mufasa searching for his ancestors and Simba ascending the throne, and I wanted to connect those dots.”
“90% of it was in the script,” continued Miranda when asked how he determined which characters would get their own songs. “Jeff [Nathanson] took such care [in his writing]. Sometimes you get a script and they go, ‘We want to make this a musical,’ and you read it, [and] you go, ‘Where?’ But [with this movie] there was such care taken to make space for the music to carry the ball and carry the emotional real estate. I'm amazed at some of the things music got to do in this movie and most of them were [foundational] to the point where most of the song titles actually began as lines of dialogue. The first time I read the script and I read Taka say, ‘I have a secret: I always wanted a brother,’ and he makes a sacrifice so that he can have a brother, I had that first lump in my throat. I was like, ‘That's a song title, and that's our way of learning all about them.’ And then there was one number that wasn't in the script that I pitched to [director Barry Jenkins], which was– we had this incredible villain in Kiros, voiced by Mads Mikkelsen. And I was like, ‘To have Mads as your villain and not make him sing in the musical is malpractice, so please let me write him a big ol’ tune. So that was really a lot of fun.”
Mufasa: The Lion King is now playing in theaters nationwide.