The recent Mickey Mouse shorts and The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse are a treasure trove of musical Easter Eggs for diehard Disney fans. So it came as a surprise to me that Emmy-nominated composer Christopher Willis didn’t have an extensive Disney background before he was hired for the series. It was his wife, singer Elyse Willis, who opened his eyes to a world of Disney magic that helped him add a musical flavor that’s so unique to the series. As songwriters and collaborators, their work has been heard in the recent Apple TV+ series Schmigadoon! I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Chris and Elyse about their shared love of music, how they met, and their Disney work.
(Chris and Elyse Willis, Disney)
Alex: Where did your love of music come from?
Chris: My memories of being drawn to music go back to very young, so they get very vague. I remember just tinkering around on a keyboard when I was very, very little, just being curious and confused and wanting to know more things. My grandad, who was a self-taught pianist, showed me some things when I was a little kid, teaching me some chords, and I just thought the whole thing was so interesting. He's an engineer and my dad is an engineer, and so the way it was described to me had a kind of element of craft and science to it, like if you do this, then this happens; and if you do this, then this happens. And I joined a church choir when I was a little kid, and the organist in the church choir was a musician that I got on really well with, and he also taught me some things when I was a little kid. So my earliest memories about music are like that, piecing things together on the piano and being fed two different things and putting them together and then playing for hours on end and my own tinkering with these little bits.
Elyse: It's also my grandpa, funny enough. He was a really big musical theater fan, and he was born in the '20s and was a real crooner. When you listen to recordings of him, he's very like Bing Crosby, "Come on along, come on…" or like Al Jolson or something. And his mom actually was a soprano as well, so even though I don't have strong memories of her, because I was really quite little when she passed away, I think her influence was also there somehow. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, and we just watched a lot of old classic MGM musicals. And then eventually I started banging on the piano as well, and my parents were like, "Get her lessons, we can't stand this anymore." And so just sort of built up from there. And I started doing theater when I was like seven. And then my grandpa played violin as well, so then when I was nine, I got to choose an instrument in school, so I chose violin, and it all just kind of snowballed into what it is that we do and the kind of musician that I turned into.
Alex: Is music what brought the two of you together?
Elyse: We actually met in a gym originally. I was working at the front desk; I just graduated from UCLA. And I had my foot in the door very, very slightly with music, but I was really figuring stuff out and didn't know what I was doing. And Chris came in, I gave him a tour, and we were instantly attracted to each other, and his pickup line was asking me what else I did. And I said I was a musician. And he was like, "Oh, me too." And I was like, "Okay, everyone in LA is a musician or a writer, an actor, whatever." And then he actually was really good. So we kind of flirted at the front desk for a while.
Chris: Quite a long time, yeah. I was working at a studio. I was working at Hans Zimmer's studio actually, which is… well, I was going to say it was walking distance from the studio. It was technically walking distance, but I don't remember anybody ever walking. But there were a few people at the studio whose bodies were falling apart because we were living that kind of assistant lifestyle of never seeing any sunlight and hardly even going home, people sleeping in the studio and stuff like that, working very, very long hours, so there was a desperate need to join a gym. And that was the closest gym, and so that's where I went.
Alex: I love that story. I was curious to know about your Disney fandom prior to working on projects like Winnie the Pooh, The Lion Guard, and the Mickey Mouse shorts.
Elyse: We sort of come from different ends of the spectrum almost, because I was 2 when The Little Mermaid came out, so that was a big deal. And then 4 when Beauty and the Beast came out, and that's one of my earliest memories of actually going to the theater to see a film, and it's so good. Every time I watch Beauty and the Beast, I'm like, "Chris! You have to watch this with me! It's so good! It's such a good film!" It's not a fluke that it got nominated for Best Picture. It's so good. I grew up in California too, only a few hours north of Disneyland, so I think I started going when I was a year and a half. It was definitely a major, major part of my life. Chris, on the other hand, was in the UK, and a little bit older than I am, so slightly different experience.
Chris: Yeah, my experience of Disney was sort of a typical experience of someone in the UK with Disney. It was much vaguer than what Elyse is describing. I have very fond memories of seeing Mary Poppins a lot, and I remember the first time I saw Dumbo, and things like that, but it was vague and piecemeal. For me and I think for a lot of English people, it was intermingled because there was a big Disney period of being very Anglophile, when they were doing Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh and things like that. And so the English, when I was a kid, were still enamored, and probably still are, of all of the source material as well. So the two things were sort of mixed together. So, for instance, I was a huge fan of the Winnie the Pooh books when I was a little kid, and I wanted Winnie the Pooh wallpaper. It ended up being the Disney Winnie the Pooh wallpaper, but I didn't see the Disney Winnie the Poohs until 20 years later. So it was a weird mixture. Well, when I found myself here in California and plunged into Disney things, Elyse was actually incredibly helpful in that I was able to ask her about everything, and she was the one that took me to Disneyland.
Elyse: I basically forced him to go Disneyland with me when we were dating. He didn't really want to go.
Chris: I needed to know these things because the Mickey Mouse shorts that I started working on, the showrunner wanted these arcane Disney references and was throwing them at me, and so I was going off trying to understand what is Adventure Thru Inner Space, and what is The Black Cauldron. And they deliberately wanted these off-the-beaten-track things.
Elyse: But just for the record, I made him go before that was even on the table. And he was like, "What is the point of that? Why are you bringing me here?" And I was like, "Someday you're going to understand." And then maybe, I don't know, a year later or something, he got this opportunity with the shorts, and I was like, "See? See? It actually is important. You're welcome." You knew what they were talking about when they referenced this thing.
Chris: The first time I went, I was acutely aware… this is, again, slightly European and very snooty, just that a lot of the things are sort of these collages of other things from the world, like, "Why would we be here? Why don't we actually go to Texas instead of Frontierland? Why don't we actually go to Amsterdam or Paris or whatever?" But I didn't really understand how artful it was. Really, if it weren't changing all the time and if it weren't so commercially successful, it would be kind of the most interesting museum in the world, Disneyland now. There's so much there. It's actually a big, interesting question, what happens to all the things when Disney decides to rebuild them? The old assets are so valuable, and there's a danger that they go away. So now I totally prize it, but it took me a little while to appreciate what it is.
Elyse: That first trip, I had a friend, a good friend from high school, who was working in Disneyland, but he was in HR or something. He had a pretty high-up job, so he of course got us in, which, always appreciated. But he also loved Disney and Disneyland and knew a lot of the history that even I didn't know. And so that helped too. He took us around and was showing him historical stuff, but also things that he thought he might find interesting about the scale of Main Street, for instance, how it looks longer one way and shorter the other way, and piping of the smells and things like that.
Alex: Chris, what kind of musical training did you have to do for the Mickey Mouse shorts? You not only had to borrow musical queues from attractions like Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland and Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, but you also had to emulate a style of music that was done by George Bruns and the composers in Walt Disney's era from the original Mickey Mouse shorts. How deep of a dive did you do into the past?
Chris: You're clearly a person who's watched them and is exactly the kind of person that we make them for, so thank you. Well, I had discovered… as you said, I had worked with Henry Jackman on the Winnie the Pooh movie, and I had been introduced to some great people at Disney. Earl Ghaffari was the music editor, and he was very steeped in Disney lore. These are not household names, but I met Booker White, who is the head of one of the copyist companies but also of the Disney Library, Music Library. So I had made some of these connections on that and realized that it really suited me to go deep, to go off and ask, there's no harm in asking, can I look at this thing from 1960, or this thing from 1970? Does it still exist? Is there a PDF?… I had come to LA straight from musicology, so it made sense to me to look at things, and as soon as I look at a new thing, still now, I'll open a document, the way I used to when I was a PhD student, and just start making notes on it. As far as the jazzier sounds in Winnie the Pooh went, I felt terribly out of my depth, but things were written down, and a lot of Winnie the Pooh is actually still quite classical, and I realized there's this great connection between what I really knew a lot about, which is classical music, and that sort of wonderful mid-century jazzy sound. And I really explored that area and started to understand, even though I don't really think of myself as knowing about these American things, these kind of jazzy things, these Broadway things, there's a connection. And I started teaching myself, basically with classical music as my foundation, kind of adding plugins or extra layers of knowledge to get me into that kind of Disney space. And so when Mickey Mouse happened, it was kind of exactly the same thing, a lot more of it, but it was kind of the same thing. I was back in touch with Booker again, and I was saying, "Hey, can I get ahold of Snow White? Do you have ‘Casey Jr.’ still? Do you have anything from Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland?" Getting all these things and looking at the music really closely, and, again, just sort of starting from what I knew, which, as I say, is classical music, and saying, "Well, okay, in classical music, you would do X. In jazzy Disney music, you would do X-dash." It's not that different. It's just a bit different. So I definitely was able to just keep pulling myself up from my bootstraps.
Elyse: Nature's Wonderland was tough. They really didn't have much.
Chris: Yes, that's right. We had to recreate the Rainbow Caverns at the end. There just isn't a score for that at all. And actually, some of our friends who are big Disney nerds thought that we had used the recording and just overlaid a bit on top of it, so we were really pleased, because it's not that at all. All the vocals are all new.
Elyse: Yeah. I did my best. I don't sound exactly like the original, but I tried.
Chris: I still don't really know what the instrumentation of the harmonies are, because it's so weird, but I just had to do something.
Alex: Well, you did an amazing job. Elyse, as a vocalist, what's the difference between singing the lead on song and being a score vocalist that has to blend in?
Elyse: There's a lot of overlap, but I think the main thing is knowing how what you're doing contributes to the final product. Just what Chris does in writing the underscore, those of us performing the underscore, we're all trying to serve the picture and serve the storytelling. And so knowing how you fit into that is important. I think sometimes singers can think, "It's all about me," and that's fine if that's the thing that's happening. But I grew up singing choirs but also playing in orchestra, and I really value ensemble work and lots of people coming together to create this goal and not always being the center of attention. I really like doing stuff with other people, so I think score singing especially really suits me because I just like the sound and the feeling of everyone coming together to create this thing that would not be possible with only one or two people. But then, conversely, if it is your moment, you do have to know when to step up and really just to go for it. So, I don't know, sometimes I have to kind of psych myself up about it, especially if I've done a lot of, whoop, background work. But basically the answer I think is just knowing what the goal of the project is. If we're referencing something specific like that or a specific style, like when we wrote that song for “Once Upon An Apple” for the new Wonderful World shorts and just knowing, "Okay, this song is kind of referencing these specific songs or these specific styles," I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to listen to the way that they sing that, the lyrics." I wrote the lyrics for that; there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. There are certain lyrics or certain styles that work in a song like that that would be out of place in a different style. So having an idea of the end goal and how you fit into it, and just trying to be as real as possible.
Chris: You kind of want to bring certain standards to everything, and sometimes you realize that your little rules that you have might be holding you back, like, "I'm trying to be too clever in this bit," or, "I'm trying to use Cole Porter wordplay when it's just going to be bad. It needs to sound like Tina Turner or whatever."
Elyse: And also, as a singer, I think any performer deals with this, but especially vocalists, you can really get in your head about stuff, because your instrument, unlike a violin or a saxophone, those are separate from your body. But as a singer, your instrument is your body, and so if you are struggling with something, you're like, "It's me." It's very difficult to divorce those two things. So sometimes, going into something, I'll be like, "Oh man, I…" like that high soprano thing that I did in Game Night, I had to really psych myself up about that. And we did it a lot of times until we got what we needed, and there was clever editing, and we did what we needed to do, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that there are some moments that I would not want people to see in public of me just being like, "What am I doing? Oh my god. I'm such a fraud." We all deal with that on some level. But, like I said, we knew what we needed to accomplish and we figured out a way to get there. And that's what we're always trying to do.
Alex: What was your songwriting experience before collaborating with Chris?
Elyse: I didn't have a ton of songwriting experience, but I did write a lot as a kid, and a lot of poetry and a lot of taking song lyrics for a preexisting song and changing them for something. So, in a way, that was all just kind of fun to me, and I had a sort of innate interest in it, but I never really thought that it would end up leading to anything. And then it just sort of organically turned into what we do.
Chris: I had written the odd song for my band when I was like 15, but they were awful. And tinkering with things, listening to a lot of songs, sort of writing comedy things, silly things. But I think in both of our cases having quite an acute sense of why the songs that we like work. And so when push came to shove and songs needed to somehow exist and songs needed to be made, we at least had standards. We sort of had a sense of what they ought to be like.
Alex: When you're writing a song for a Paul Rudish Mickey Mouse short, how much do you have to work with the writers to get that song locked into a place where it fits the story and keeps the plot moving?
Chris: There are songs earlier on in the shorts where Paul Rudish wrote the words, or Paul and Darrick and I, Darrick Bachman, the show's writer. It sort of evolved and moved around. I was bouncing ideas off Elyse and her sense of how those Great American Songbook songs would go and how the lines aren't all the same length, and how the lines can be very odd lengths, actually, because they fit the jazzy cadence of the notes.
Elyse: As a singer, we would talk about a line, and I would say, "Oh, I feel like that's kind of awkward to sing because of this," or, "Maybe we should try this word instead of that word, or this melodic structure instead of that one."
Chris: It's a testament to Paul, actually, who's very zen in his whole outlook, that he was able to just go with the flow over the years and understand that the best thing ultimately might be for us to write the songs rather than being weird about that and insisting that someone already on the team should always do it. I see him doing that all the time. He's very in the moment and able to adapt to people's strengths.
Elyse: Yeah, seeing what other people's strengths are and being like, "Yeah, you know what? That's going to be best for this."
Chris: "That's working. Let's actually let that happen."
Elyse: The whole team was just always so nice about everything. Obviously, they had notes, and that was fine and great, and we want it to be the best that it could be. But a lot of times they would just be like, "Yeah, this is working. Great," and just really encouraging and not giving notes just to hear themselves give notes.
Chris: In a less flexible group of people, figuring out how the workflow of getting these things done for some of these very complicated cartoons might never have happened or it would've taken years to get one cartoon done, because before they'd even drawn anything, the song needed to be written. “Homespun Melody” is sort of the classic. The first thing I should say is that if someone on-screen is going to sing, then the music for that has to be done really early, whereas normally the music is done right at the end. So already you've got a lot of complexity there. But with “Homespun Melody,” Paul figured out that, really, I should get involved before they'd even drawn anything. So as soon as they had a kind of outline, they brought me in so that I could figure out the structure of most of the episode and go to them with this idea.
Elyse: He started writing these really Gilbert and Sullivany lyrics for this bluegrass song, and I was like, "Man, I grew up in Central California. Let me help you out." So that was kind how I wedged my way into this. They were very good lyrics. They just weren't quite right for bluegrass.
Chris: But there've been so many different approaches that we've had to have, and a lot of people have had to work very quickly or be very patient or release control of something that they otherwise would've had control of. And I can imagine, in another context, another group of people, none of that would've been impossible. So, yeah, we've been very, very fortunate to be able to work with this very, very creative, very kind of flexible group of people.
Alex: I know our time is almost up, but congratulations, Chris, on your Emmy nomination for Schmigadoon! Elyse, did Chris need a similar level of musical theater training like you offered for Disney? And what was both of your experience like on that project?
Elyse: Yeah, I did. It was very fun. He was sort of familiar with some of it. He wasn't a complete newb to musical theater.
Chris: I caught musicals on TV at Christmas, and I was aware of them, and I always admired the songs, and I had the fake books and stuff. So it was around in my life, it was just jostling with a lot of other things. Classical music was always sort of the center for me, and then these other things were just things I admired. So I wasn't one of those people who really knows about it, whereas Elyse really was.
Elyse: The interesting thing about this project is that we both worked on it coming from completely different angles. We both got hired without them knowing that we were married or that we even knew each other. I got hired to do vocal demos. There were four of us that demoed basically the whole thing so they had something to work with and figure out if songs were working and work on timing and stuff. And I didn't think that any of those vocals would make the final. And then they liked what I did on “Cross That Bridge” so they kept that in, which is fun, and always a weird experience to see your voice coming out of someone else's mouth. But that was great. But when I first got the songs to listen to, I was just like, "Oh my gosh! This is referencing this, and this is referencing this." And I was like a kid in a candy shop. I was so excited. And then I realized that a lot of the things I was talking about or the references that I was hearing Chris wasn't hearing yet, because he didn't know it quite as well as I did. But it didn't matter at that point because he was not involved. This was at least probably two or three months before he even got contacted for an interview. So then, when he did get contacted, he had to confess that he'd already heard a lot of these songs, which Cinco [Paul, series creator and songwriter] was like, "What?" He was like, "Oh no, because my wife is the soprano." And so then when he actually got the job, I was like, "Oh goody! We get to watch all these musicals." And he'd never actually seen The Music Man.
Chris: Yeah. That's the big one. That's amazing to me, because it shot up to being one of my favorite films. I just think it's amazing. I love it. And it was so sort of interconnected with all of the Disney things I've been doing for the last 10, 12 years. There's such an overlap there. So it was mind-blowing seeing that all in one go, all that sort of stuff, all that artistry that's packed into The Music Man.
Alex: That’s very poignant, because The Music Man is a significant part of the area music for Main Street, U.S.A. at Disneyland.
Elyse: Right? We kind of had talked about that before, because every time we went to Disney, I'd be singing Music Man songs. Also, I sang “Till There Was You” at his brother's wedding, which he accompanied with me because Chris is an amazing pianist. And we had the music. I didn't need the music because I know the song, but he needed the music because he didn't know The Music Man, which I didn't realize when I chose that song however many years ago that was. Anyway, it was a very hot day in the UK and my iPad overheated, and he just started making up chords, and I was like, "What is he doing?" He's like free jazzing back there… I was like "I'm just going to keep singing and ignore what's happening behind me." So anyway, that wouldn't happen now.
Alex: You’ll get it right when you play their vow renewal. Well, thank you both so much. This was really fun for me and I look forward to seeing what you both do next.
You can hear the work of Chris and Elyse Willis in Winnie the Pooh (2010), Mickey Mouse, and The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, all streaming on Disney+. Select songs are also available on major streaming platforms.