Alan Menken or Randy Newman for Best Song Oscar?
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**Dave Marx** · 02-27-2011, 10:31 PM

Probably won't get many replies before it happens, but maybe we'll toy around with it and untangle the mystery.

(I'm voting for Alan, some of you may know why I'm biased.

)

mandy1627 · 02-27-2011, 10:39 PM

I'm voting for Alan! Toy Story won already, and I'm thrilled, so now I want Tangled to get some recognition! But I'll be happy for both! I just want one of them!

mandy1627 · 02-27-2011, 10:47 PM

Congratulations to Randy Newman!!!!

**Dave Marx** · 02-27-2011, 10:47 PM

Congrats to Randy! Alan already had eight Oscars, and Randy's been robbed a few times in the past.

cubfancolleen · 02-27-2011, 11:44 PM

Really happy for Randy, and love that song, but still loved the song from Tangled a bit more.
Disney was pretty lucky tonight with the awards, though! They got a pretty good number of them.

mandy1627 · 02-27-2011, 11:55 PM

Disney did wonderfully tonight between the initial Alice in Wonderland wins, Toy Story's wins and noms, and having the two songs! All were well deserved!!!

Carousel96 · 02-28-2011, 10:20 AM

I actually thought the song from Tangled was a better song. Not that I didn't love TS3...

**Dave Marx** · 02-28-2011, 12:35 PM

I also preferred Alan's song, and not just because I'm biased in favor of a guy I worked with for almost 5 years.

While both songs were sentimental, Randy's song played a different role in the film - the lyric was much more expository of the film's story as a whole. To compare to another Toy Story film, it has more in common with "Strange Things are Happening" than "You've Got a Friend In Me." When a song has to carry that much lyrical baggage, the lyrics tend to dominate over melodic development (and I'm a sucker for melodic development). Alan's song illuminated (so to speak) just one emotional aspect of the story. That relatively simple task gave Alan a chance to spread out and sell the emotions, rather than just support the lyrics. When Randy has a chance to do the same, he's equally brilliant. Put "Our Town" from Cars, or "When Somebody Loved Me" from TS 2 up against the song from Tangled, and it's an entirely new contest.

Randy's one of my favorite songwriters, but this song isn't nearly as good as many of his best (20 Oscar nominations, only 2 wins, but he deserved far more wins). I think the victory, as it often does in Oscar Best Song voting, went to the film seen by the largest number of Academy members. TS3 beat Tangled and the other two films hands down at the box office. Familiarity is an important factor in the long-term success of a song. The more times we hear it, the better we tend to like it. Radio airplay, film trailers, media stories about a film... the bigger the "story" for the film (and a blockbuster like TS3 has been a big story), the more the song will be heard, and the song's success on Oscar night is almost automatically assured.

Carousel96 · 02-28-2011, 01:25 PM

I also think that the academy voters tend to recalibrate the Oscar universe periodically -- this may not be his best, or the best of the year, but he's darn good and has been overlooked so often.... So the votes come in.

Also, the TS song accompanied a more memorable piece of film than the song from Tangled. So when you're looking at the ballot, which song do you remember? Does that make you think it's the "better" one?

mandy1627 · 03-03-2011, 10:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dave Marx

I also preferred Alan's song, and not just because I'm biased in favor of a guy I worked with for almost 5 years.

Dave, that is amazing that you worked with Alan Menken! I admire him. Afterall, most of my favorite movies' music is his work! Perhaps it's that I'm fairly new around here that I do not know, but would you mind sharing your experience with him? Or have you somewhere? I'd love to know!

**Dave Marx** · 03-04-2011, 04:46 AM

I don't think I've told the long version of the story, and I won't here, either.

Maybe.

In the late 70s through mid 80s I worked in the jingle business in New York, on the recording and production side of things. The company I worked for was hot - we were responsible for Reach Out and Touch Someone, GE We Bring Good Things to Life, Kentucky Fried Chicken We Do Chicken Right, Catch That Pepsi Spirit, Give Me a Dew, and a lot more. Alan's career was also getting hot around the same time. Little Shop of Horrors was doing great Off Broadway, and the film version was going into production in London. Basically, Alan came by our place when he had a gap in the schedule and he'd take a crack at one of the demo projects that was in the hopper.

I was usually Alan's engineer. I wore a lot of hats there - production director, studio manager, recording engineer, and music editor. Music editor was my favorite. It's one of those jobs that shows up in movie credits, but nobody knows what it is. Basically, I worked with the composers and arrangers on preparing and recording the musical score. I'll leave it at that for now.

Back to the jingle demos, which is what Alan was usually doing... The ad agencies would send out lyrics for various ad campaign concepts to a number of jingle companies, a bunch of songwriters would take a crack at 'em, we'd record simple piano/vocal demos of the promising tunes, send them back to the ad agency, and see if any of them would stick. Odds were, they didn't. Either the song didn't click, or the concept for the commercial didn't click, or both.

This was very Mad Men kind of stuff, and we were working with the Don Draper/Peggy Olson/Paul Kinsey/Freddy Rumsen crowd, only by the 80s Don had morphed into Bert Cooper, Peggy was out running her own boutique agency, Paul had been hired away by another agency and eventually become a VP/Creative Director, and Freddy was at an agency in Omaha, telling stories about the glory years.

Actually, we were working with the real-life big boys - Y&R, O&M, BBD&O, J. Walter Thompson, Benton & Bowles, Needham, Harper & Steers, etc. (all agencies that have been merged into huge agency conglomerates over the years). Lots of ideas would be tried out for a given product, and a bunch of lyrics would be written for each idea (assuming they wanted a jingle, of course). The lyrics were nearly always written by the ad agency, and, well, not every agency copy writer was good at writing song lyrics (even though they thought they were). I'm sure Don and Peggy would have written brilliant lyrics, but we never worked with them.

Truth be told, Alan was not all that successful as a jingle writer, and probably a good thing, too, or who knows how he might have been sidetracked from his true calling. My basic theory is, Alan's the kind of song writer who needs a great lyric or great story (in the case of his orchestral scores) to do his best work. Jingle lyrics, by their nature, are hardly inspiring.

I remember one project in particular where he did come up with the winner. It was for a bank. They had this very dramatic concept, with the commercial starting with a huge thunderstorm (life is tough and scary). Then the bank comes along with the solution to everyone's problems (that's when the music kicks in), the storm clears, and all's well.

Since it was a film scoring project (music written to fit the completed film), that meant I was on the job from beginning to end as the music editor. One of the challenges that came up in production was that the music started partway through the commercial, when the storm starts to break up. Normally, the music runs wall-to-wall, so the film editor and film mix engineer (who get the recorded music after we're finished) know exactly where the music belongs. But when the music starts part-way through, there's the chance they won't start the music where it was intended to start, and all the flute trills and drum hits and swelling strings may end up in the wrong place. One way to help insure that the music is in the right place is to send the music editor over to the film editor's place to make sure it's done right, but that's never a cool thing politically, since the film editor way outranks the music editor. So, I suggested, "Why not make the thunder part of the musical score? That way, the music track starts right at the beginning, where it belongs. And, we can write the thunder part to exactly fit the action on film." "How will we do that?" "Oh, we can do thunder with a synthesizer." "Really? Are you sure?" "Sure! Ask Bobby (Bobby Alessi, our main synthesizer guy - you can Wikipedia him

)." Bobby said, "Sure, no problem!" and everything went like a charm.

And if I remember correctly, the arranger on that job was Ken Ascher, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1979 for Rainbow Connection, which he co-wrote with Paul Williams (yeah, there's something about me and Best Song Oscar nominees. I'm sure I'm no more than one or two degrees of Kevin Bacon away from Randy Newman, too.

Kevin Bacon? I saw him once walking along Broadway, near Lincoln Center... )

Well anyway, I guess this is the medium-long version of the story. Hope it was at least a bit interesting.

cubfancolleen · 03-04-2011, 10:48 AM

It was indeed! VERY

, Dave!
It's funny to think about some of the old jingles, and the folks responsible - and where they ended up. Barry Manilow comes to mind (be a Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper!)...

**Dave Marx** · 03-04-2011, 04:24 PM

Barry's an interesting case, because he was a jingle writer and a jingle singer. Sometimes he gets credit for writing things he only sang, like, "You Deserve a Break Today" for McDonald's, which was written by Sid Woloshin and Kevin Gavin.

I can't say I know where all the jingle business bodies are buried, but I know a few.

(Jimmy Hoffa was not in the jingle business, so I'm no help there, even if I did live a good part of my life on the edge of the Jersey Meadowlands.

)

mandy1627 · 03-05-2011, 12:56 AM

Thank you so much for sharing Dave!!!

I hope it wasn't too much of a bother to write all that! I appreciate you taking the time to do so! I did find it very very interesting, and I'm facsinated by that type of work, even if it's "only" jingles.

I can sing and play music, etc., but composing and using all that technology is not in the mix for me! Now I can say I know a thing or two about how commercial music is made.

I also admire and love to follow actors, musicians, etc, such as Alan Menken, so hearing stories like that are wonderful! Thanks again!

Kevin_Wadsworth · 03-07-2011, 08:24 PM

I'm disappointed for Menkin, but glad the Oscar stayed in the Disney family. Dave - nice story. I don't know if you have a fanmail address for Menkin, but if you do let him know that my wife bought me the soundtrack to Tangled because I really liked the music, and now my 2-yr-old daughter asks if we can "watch" (i.e listen to) Rapunzel at least twice a day. So he gets the vote in our house. Interestingly, I just looked through my Disney soundtrack collection from the past 20 years and compared it to Menkin's IMDB page. It looks like the Lion King and Tarzan are the only two non-Menkin tracks that I own, and I have all of his except Home on the Range. His music must hit the right note for me.