la la land soundtrack another day of sun

You don’t want it to just turn into a wall where there’s too much coming at you. So there’s a lot going on there and just finding pockets to feature different things, I think that’s the biggest challenge with a number like that. And then our full-size, 95-piece orchestra on top of it. There are lots of layers and counterpoint, a lot of different, independent voices. And then I spent a lot of time arranging all the very, very dense background vocals. It’s a very fast song and as a whole it’s in a major key, but it dips into minor quite a bit and it’s more bittersweet than it may seem on its face.

So I was trying to get that across in the music. is amazing, but you hear about all of these struggles and you realize what a dark and difficult place Los Angeles can be. It’s a complicated song because ostensibly, it’s so happy, it’s another day of sun, L.A. I composed music that was trying to say something and have a certain feeling to it, but a lot of the heavy lifting came from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the lyricists, being able to sort of catalogue the characters’ stories and bring it in quickly and get us oriented. So the real challenge was getting this piece to work narratively. At the same time, our opening song is a song, which is a very different animal than what that cue is or what other models may have been. That’s always been one of the favorite scores for me and Damien in the way that Legrand was able to marry a jazz rhythm section, and in some cases a jazz big band, with a full blown romantic orchestra and do it in such a danceable way. There’s no singing but it’s this big world-establishing number with great dancing and big orchestration. It’s going to be a lot of fun.’ One of our favorite movies is ‘The Young Girls of Rochefort.’ After ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,’ it was the next Jacques Demy/Michel Legrand musical, and that movie opens with - in that case it’s just dance. Hurwitz: “We just wanted to have a big production number that really pulled you into the world and announced from the beginning, ‘This movie is a musical. Captured in a single 6-minute take, the scene is boisterous and exciting, and ostensibly optimistic, but it betrays the struggle that is living in this sprawling metropolis, something the film dives into further as it goes. The film puts the audience on notice with a big, roaring ensemble number belted by motorists on the clogged 110 freeway in Los Angeles. (Note: All songs feature music by Hurwitz and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, save for “Start a Fire,” which was written by Hurwitz, John Legend, Angélique Cinélu and Marius de Vries.)

La la land soundtrack another day of sun