Though Eilish and O’Connell generally work on their own, Ronson and Wyatt devised a winsome orchestral arrangement for “What Was I Made For?,” which makes Ronson laugh as he thinks about it at the beginning of awards season. “I remember we gave it to them and then we were kind of like, ‘Did we just f— ourselves?’ ” he says over coffee during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “But listen, it’s all Team Barbie.”
Ronson — who lives in New York with his wife, actress Grace Gummer, and their baby daughter — is quick to note that, for all its humor, “I’m Just Ken” is not a parody song. “It had to be earnest, and it had to vulnerable,” he says, as in a lyric where Ken wonders what it would take for Barbie to “see the man behind the tan.” It’s that sincerity, Wyatt adds via Zoom, that enabled the two to go “almost operatic” with the song’s production, which piles on squealing guitar by Guns N’ Roses’ Slash and pounding drums by Josh Freese of Foo Fighters; there’s even a knotty instrumental section that accompanies a surreal fight-slash-dance sequence in the movie.
Asked whose music he had in mind when they were putting the song together, Wyatt mentions Freddie Mercury — “the ultimate showstopper,” he calls the late Queen frontman — and Jim Steinman, who wrote Meat Loaf’s happily over-the-top “Bat Out of Hell” LP. “He was great at writing a song that had different chapters in it,” he says of the latter. Adds Ronson, who was raised between London and New York in part by his stepfather, Mick Jones of the veteran rock band Foreigner: “How far could I get from some of these things? It’s like it’s in my DNA.” (Regarding “Barbie’s” score, Ronson identifies a perhaps surprising inspiration in Dave Grusin, whose music for “Goonies” he describes as “one of the best marriages of ’80s synthesizers and orchestra, which is something we were chasing.”)
Might “I’m Just Ken” become a pop hit outside the “Barbie” movie the way “Shallow” did outside “A Star Is Born”? It’s certainly a more specific piece of material than “Shallow” — not to mention more so than Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” which has been hanging around the upper reaches of Billboard’s Hot 100 for months. Yet Wyatt points out that the power ballad, which has more than 100 million streams on Spotify and YouTube, has become a favored text among TikTok’s dramatic interpreters.
“I heard they were doing it in summer stock,” he says with a laugh.