Alan Menken Knows He Wrote the ‘Soundtrack to Your Childhood’

Alan Menken is a true romantic. Just ask him how he met his wife of 52 years, Janis.

“This dancer walks into the room, and I knew immediately who she was, because I dreamt her,” he says, beaming from across the breakfast table on a Beverly Hills rooftop.

It’s no surprise that the man behind lionized love songs like “A Whole New World” and “I See the Light” has a tender, gentle nature. In fact, it’s that undeniable sentimentality that has elevated Menken to legend status (and EGOT status) over the course of his career spanning five decades. The composer has earned eight Oscars (the most of any person alive today), all of which came from his work on films of the so-called “Disney Renaissance,” the period between 1989 and 1999 when the Mouse House produced some of its most beloved animated films. And he remains one of the industry’s most sought-after songwriters to this day, most recently penning the music for Skydance’s lively 2024 movie “Spellbound.”

But before penning classics including “Part of Your World” and “Colors of the Wind,” Menken had a different profession in mind. “Almost all the men in my family were dentists,” he says. But the young maestro had loftier goals. “I just want to sit and make up music,” he told his father, who described the prospect as “a recipe for failure and becoming a shoe salesman.”

The pressure to conform took its toll on Menken physically: “I developed a peptic ulcer at the age of 11, just because of all the stresses of feeling that disparity between what I wanted and what was expected.”

Menken set his sights on making the family proud, improving his grades and attending NYU as a pre-med student. It didn’t last long. “I think I made it to one class in biology,” he says with a laugh. He may be the king of crafting kid-friendly hits, but Menken’s no square. “It was 1967, so I spent four years writing music and getting high. No more ulcer, but very worried parents!”

To appease them, Menken joined the BMI musical theater workshop with famed composer Lehman Engel, all while writing songs for “Sesame Street” and catchy jingles to make ends meet. Menken once dreamed of becoming a rock star (“like Billy Joel or Elton John!”), but his time with Engel and his cohorts at BMI, including “Nine” composer Maury Yeston, impressed upon him a newfound theatrical sensibility.

“That’s where my pop and rock style of writing married to everything else, and became part of my signature style,” Menken says. “You have such a specificity of stories and characters and genres you could go to. It just keeps it fresh, also, with collaboration.”

That penchant for collaboration has been the secret sauce to Menken’s most beloved works – and it all began with lyricist Howard Ashman. “Initially, I was writing music and lyrics, and I was actually a very good lyricist. Still am! But with Howard, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll put that aside,’ because he had his own theater. He had the rights to a show, ‘God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.’”

The adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel was a critical hit when it opened in 1979, eventually transferring Off-Broadway. The problem, Menken says, was that it had too big of a cast to foster longevity. So when he and Ashman set their sights on a new collaboration, a musical based on the 1960 black comedy “Little Shop of Horrors,” they kept the numbers tight with a cast of just nine performers.

“With ‘Little Shop,’ everything exploded,” Menken says of the 1982 Off-Broadway smash about an ambitious young florist who discovers a carnivorous alien plant. Given his family business, it’s no surprise that Menken was the perfect fit to pen a song about a dentist (albeit a sadistic one). The musical spurred on its own film adaptation in 1986 starring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene and Steve Martin.

Menken and Ashman’s new song penned for the movie, the anthemic villain rap “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space,” earned the pair their first Oscar nominations – and the Academy’s first-ever nod for a song featuring explicit lyrics (“You can keep The Thing, keep The It, / Keep The Creature, they don’t mean shit!”). Officially solidified as a white-hot team, Disney took notice (despite the profanity).

“It was [‘Little Shop’ producer] David Geffen who really connected us to Disney. It was more through Howard, because Howard was that incredibly rare commodity of somebody who understood how to how to use the musical genre in a dramaturgical way,” Menken says with reverence. “For me, the big headline when they came to us about ‘The Little Mermaid’ was, ‘Great! Howard and I are going to work together again!’”

While the 1989 Hans Christian Andersen adaptation doesn’t outwardly resemble the morbidly humorous “Little Shop,” Menken says the musicals are actually spiritual sisters: Ariel longs for life on land the same way Audrey and Seymour dream of a world away from the mean streets of Skid Row. “We used to jokingly call ‘Part of Your World,’ ‘Somewhere That’s Dry,’” he recalls with a laugh, referencing the beloved “Little Shop” ballad “Somewhere That’s Green.”

“It was this infusion of talent directly from theater into Disney and into animation,” Menken says of the film, which was an immediate hit among critics, audiences and awards voters alike. “You could sense there was this hunger for classic Disney animation. What we brought to it had a whole new rootedness in the cutting edge of musical theater. It was a great, explosive combination.”

Of course, the Mouse House wanted more. Menken and Ashman got to work on both “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin, while Menken was simultaneously writing music for “Newsies” with lyricist Jack Feldman.

“The Little Mermaid” kicked off the Disney Renaissance, and though Menken does his best to stay humble about that period of unprecedented success, he admits to always knowing this work was something special. “In my gut, I think I knew it all along. We were obviously a really special collaboration. I had developed a lot of skills as a songwriter,” he recalls of writing alongside Ashman. “My particular brand of talent was very, very compatible with this form. I felt that I had this unique voice to bring homage to styles of music and re-ignite them.”

What Menken didn’t know was that his cherished time of collaboration with Ashman would soon come to an end.

“Howard was not letting anyone know that he was HIV positive,” Menken says, his jovial demeanor turning suddenly somber. “It was like a death sentence. … It was a nightmare time. You’d watch these young, healthy men literally be shrinking into nothing and dying.”

The pair was able to finish their work on “Beauty and the Beast,” but Ashman passed away in 1991 before the film’s release. “The day that Howard died, I dreamed I was visiting Howard in the hospital,” Menken recalls. “He said, ‘Hey, help me up.’ I put my hands under his back and lifted. There was no weight. He fell on the floor like a Raggedy Ann doll. I picked him up, and he was no longer in the hospital gown. He was in a black robe. I woke up and remember looking at the time.”

The next morning, Menken learned the news from dozens of messages on his answering machine. “He had passed. It was at the exact hour that I had that dream.”

Menken remains silent for a few moments before adding, “It’s fueled everything that’s come since. I took on protecting both of us.”

Menken was joined by “Jesus Christ Superstar” lyricist Tim Rice to complete work on “Aladdin,” and admits to feeling concerned that the level of success he achieved with Ashman was behind him. Thankfully, those fears were assuaged when he and Rice took home the Oscar for “A Whole New World,” the first “Aladdin” song they wrote without Ashman.

The maestro flashes a smile. “It was Howard who really talked me into – almost browbeated me into – scoring these movies, which was such a blessing. The fact that I write the songs and I score them creates a genre of work that’s pretty unique. God, I feel so blessed that I do that.”

His fruitful creative partnership with Disney continued for many years to come, composing music for “Pocahontas,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Hercules” “Enchanted” and “Tangled,” among others.

As beloved as Menken’s work is, the Disney Princess franchise has faced considerable criticism for its portrayal of young women, arguing that its heroines’ only goals are to find love.

Menken flat-out rejects those claims. “Look at Ariel. Look at Belle. Look at Jasmine. I’m trying to think of if any of our characters have been anything but empowered,” he says. “These female protagonists are very contemporary, very powerful. Ariel is fully three-dimensional and relatable. Belle is bright and curious and passionate and strong-willed. Jasmine breaks free and is her own person. Pocahontas is Pocahontas. My perspective is that our job is to create a story that has the right dimension and the right structure in it. Within that, you want characters that are relatable, that grow. There are times where you might have a character that doesn’t meet all your standards of what they should be, but that’s part of telling the story.”

And Menken’s work has stood the test of time, with Disney opting to craft live-action adaptations of several films from its Renaissance era. He’s enjoyed revisiting his work for the new medium and finding new ways to bring depth to these larger-than-life characters. He cites Jasmine’s powerful ballad “Speechless” from Guy Ritchie’s 2019 movie as a particularly proud moment of empowerment.

But there’s one change to a live-action film he wasn’t the biggest fan of. In the 2023 “Little Mermaid” iteration with Halle Bailey, her crustacean pal Sebastian sings some updated lines by Lin-Manuel Miranda during “Kiss the Girl” to ensure audiences don’t feel Prince Eric is forcing himself on Ariel. “There is one way to ask her / It don’t take a word / Not a single word / Go on and kiss the girl,” are the original 1989 lyrics. Daveed Diggs’ new Sebastian, on the other hand, croons, “Use your words boy and ask her / If the time is right / And the time is tonight / Go on and kiss the girl.”

“Let’s not sanitize ourselves out of any kind of passion. That’s not the way we’re built as people,” he says, rolling his eyes. “We recognize what’s right and wrong. But at the same time, passions are not constructed out of correctness.”

He’s not losing sleep over it, though. “Everybody compromises on their stances. We have to be one society somehow,” he says. “The basic underlying emotions and intentions and desires are exactly the same.”

Menken intends to bring that same signature emotion to the litany of projects he’s currently got in the works, from “Hercules” on the West End to new musicals based on the Nancy Drew series and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

“I don’t have to do it for financial reasons anymore. I do it for emotional reasons,” Menken says of remaining booked and busy at 75. “Why am I successful? Because I’m probably boring enough to want to do the same thing every day. That’s what I want to do. It’s what I love doing. You can’t manufacture that.”

It doesn’t hurt that he’s reminded so often of how much his music has meant to millions — he can’t go a day without being told, “You wrote the soundtrack to my childhood.” He’s not sure why that exact phrase is what’s stuck, but he’s grateful to have guided so many through their most formative moments. He is a romantic, after all.

“During the AIDS crisis, my daughter was born. It was a terrifying time. People were dying right and left. It was very frightening. I couldn’t watch the news. It was all too painful. Too raw,” he says. But he found an escape. “I’d put in ‘Winnie the Pooh’ or ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Peter Pan.’ I remembered being a child. And I remembered feeling safe. I’m proud to be a part of that.”

Of course, the children that were raised on his songs have since grown up, but Menken still sees them the same way he did all those years ago.

“We’re all children,” he muses with a smile. “There’s a child in all of us. That child is the part of us that remembers when the emotions were the most intense, when the freshness of life was the most intense, when the sense of discovery was most exciting. That’s the part of us that reacts to music.”