Robert Lopez, Kristen Anderson-Lopez Bring the Family to ‘Central Park’

Husband-and-wife group Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez aren’t any strangers to writing musical earworms. They’ve received Oscars for “Let It Go” from “Frozen” and “Keep in mind Me” from “Coco” and an Emmy for “Agatha All Alongside” for “WandaVision.” Now they’re reuniting with family and friends, penning “You Are the Music” for the Apple TV Plus animated comedy “Central Park,” which returns to the streamer March 4.

Songwriters Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson (Kristen’s sister) invited the duo to put in writing a track, and it was a proposal they couldn’t flip down. “The household ties to ‘Central Park’ are big,” says Anderson-Lopez. Rory O’Malley was within the Broadway present “The E-book of Mormon” (which Lopez co-wrote and for which he received a Tony Award), and Josh Gad voiced Olaf in Disney’s “Frozen.” The scripts for the brand new season of “Central Park” got here with 4 empty track slots. “We picked the one which felt like a stand-alone track, the one which was about music and the one which had our expensive good friend Josh singing together with our different expensive good friend, Rory,” Lopez says of the beginnings of “You Are the Music.”

Anderson-Lopez got here up with the essence of the track, during which Gad’s character, Birdie, is feeling threatened by O’Malley’s Elwood, who he feels goes to take his job. That motif performs alongside the larger theme of the episode about competitiveness between Tillerman siblings Cole (voiced by Tituss Burgess) and Molly (voiced by Emmy Raver-Lampman).

As Birdie grabs Cole’s guitar, wanting to assist him study music, Anderson-Lopez says, “I used to be approaching it as a chord-teaching track, such as you put your thumb right here for a G and your thumb right here for A.” Lopez factors out the Easter egg in his spouse’s lyrics: “[The chords] and people phrases are G-AD, which spell out [Josh’s] identify.” Says Anderson-Lopez, “I understood fan-girling out to somebody in your career, and you’ll go to a hyperbolic place with compliments.” In the end, the track turns into an appreciation by Birdie and Elwood of what the opposite is doing — Birdie sees the great in Elwood and not considers him competitors, and Elwood’s admiration of Birdie is expressed within the music.

Whereas the method of writing the music and lyrics got here collectively in simply two days, the Lopezes didn’t see the completed product till a month in the past. The visuals characteristic Elwood and Birdie shifting from the park to an animated musical-note background. “The musical notes that they’re dancing alongside is correct to what you’re listening to,” says Lopez. “Hardly ever when animators put music into their drawings is it correct, however this I used to be impressed with.”

Anderson-Lopez provides that the visuals have been superb for the track’s bridge, during which Elwood and Birdie, dressed like Elton John and David Bowie, go on the magic musical journey: “The animators take us to enjoyable locations in our creativeness.”