Mark Ronson has opened up about the making of the Barbie soundtrack, along with Ryan Gosling‘s reaction to ‘I’m Just Ken’.
The acclaimed producer gave a new interview to The Guardian about the Barbie soundtrack. Spawning hits such as Dua Lipa‘s ‘Dance The Night Away’ and Billie Eilish‘s ‘What Was I Made For’, Ronson also opened up about the backstory of ‘I’m Just Ken’, which landed at Number 50 of NME’s 50 best songs of 2023 and has been nominated for a Grammy.
Ronson, who wrote the soundtrack with Miike Snow‘s frontman Andrew Wyatt, said that he had originated the chorus’ main lyric: “I’m just Ken, anywhere else I’d be a 10”. Wyatt, meanwhile, sketched out the verses “from the perspective of a lovelorn, overlooked himbo.”
When Ronson showed the track to director Greta Gerwig, she reportedly “flipped out over it.” But according to him, it wasn’t just Gerwig who was a fan of the track. “I remember she wrote back, saying: ‘Ryan says this song speaks to him very deeply’,” Ronson told The Guardian. “I was like: ‘Was he being sarcastic?’ Because that’s a very emotional, heartfelt sentiment. She said: ‘I don’t think so.’”
He also revealed Gosling was not planning on singing in the film; however, he was apparently so moved by the track that he was willing to sing on ‘I’m Just Ken’.
“The next thing we knew, Greta said Ryan’s down to sing it, and we are going to rewrite this battle scene to incorporate it,” Ronson said. “These brilliant comedy writers think our song is good enough to actually put into this script … We kept building it out from there,” he added.
According to Ronson, this newfound confidence extended ‘I’m Just Ken’ and its original runtime of two-and-a-half minutes to the seven-minute power ballad we know today. He also recruited guitarist Wolfgang Van Halen, Foo Fighters’ drummer Josh Freese and Slash of Guns N’ Roses to play on the track, who apparently thought the song was “cool”.
Previously, Gerwig has said she fought to keep the ‘I’m Just Ken’ sequence in the Barbie film. The script described the sequence as “a dream ballet” where the Kens “work it out through dance.”
“There was a big meeting that was like, ‘Do you need this?’,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Everything in me needs this.’
“They were like, ‘What do you even mean? What is a dream ballet?’ And I was like, ‘A dream ballet? Where do I begin!’”
Meanwhile, the NME review of the Barbie soundtrack called ‘I’m Just Ken’ a “surprise”: “Ryan Gosling is perhaps the biggest wild card. If you can sincerely belt the words “blonde fragility” in a glam power ballad and hit every single note – my God, you Ken do anything in life.”