A carefree disco-influenced song like Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” from Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster summer film “Barbie,” might seem effortless. But it was anything but, as you can see from Variety’s latest “Behind the Song” words-and-music video, where she and producer/co-writer Mark Ronson talk about the song’s creation and play individual vocal and instrumental tracks from it.
In fact, “ ‘Barbie’ completely took over our lives — we were completely Barb-ified,” Dua says here. “We were putting post-it notes everywhere, trying to brainstorm what ‘Dance the Night’ was going to be.”
Created during a break from Dua Lipa’s year-long “Future Nostalgia” tour, the pair spent days not only writing the “Dance the Night,” but watching the dance-party scene from the film where it appears and working laboriously to find ways that would synch with the action.
“We rewrote ‘Dance the Night’ so many times to match the picture,” Ronson told Variety recently. “Like, Dua was literally coming up with lyrics — “When Margo does that come-hither thing with her fingers [in the scene], that’s when I want to sing ‘Come along for the ride,’ We actually engineered that song almost like a score.”
But to suit the scene, the song actually requires a slightly disturbing undercurrent, as it’s the first inkling that Barbie and her world might not be so perfect after all.
“The chords are a little sinister, dark and moody,” he says of the electric piano notes that underpin the song’s structure, along with a “murky,” warped-sounding string section that is lurking beneath the happy disco strings on top.
Perhaps most surprising of all, there’s even an acoustic guitar part deep in the mix, helping to drive the song’s rhythm.
Watch it here, and watch Finneas describe how “What Was I Made For,” his song with Billie Eilish also from “Barbie,” was made.