“I don’t sing after I’m instructed. I sing after I’ve acquired one thing to say,” Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Baird Grey declares in The Starvation Video games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Because the movie’s title would counsel, music performs a central position within the new Starvation Video games prequel, which is about roughly 60 years earlier than the occasions of the unique trilogy.
When she’s chosen to take part within the tenth annual Starvation Video games, Lucy Grey’s act of defiance is to sing “Nothing You Can Take From Me.” When she—spoiler alert—returns from the world, she croons a music known as “Pure because the Pushed Snow.” At one other level, Lucy Grey presents the unique model of “The Hanging Tree,” a folks music Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss would finally carry out in 2014’s Mockingjay: Half 1.
Readers of Suzanne Collins’ novels will acknowledge the lyrics to Lucy Grey’s songs, that are largely taken instantly from the e-book. However their melodies have been written by government music producer Dave Cobb. “Fortunately, they have been loopy sufficient to rent me,” says Cobb, referring to director Francis Lawrence and government producer Nina Jacobson. His songs work in tandem with a movie rating by James Newton Howard, in addition to a soundtrack that options artists together with Olivia Rodrigo and Molly Tuttle, who performs Lucy Grey’s guitar within the movie.
Although Cobb revisited the prevailing movies, none of them have a lot in-universe music. He acquired extra steerage by means of expansive conversations with the filmmakers and Collins, whom he calls “essentially the most good individual I’ve ever talked to.”
“If you speak to her, this isn’t in a e-book—this can be a universe she’s created,” he explains. “When she’s telling you about every character within the sequence, she’s acquired a backstory behind a backstory, behind a backstory.” Collins instructed Cobb that her model of dystopian Appalachia was impressed by a number of sources, together with the English Civil Warfare and turn-of-the-century mountain music. “Suzanne is a historian. I’m a historical past buff,” Cobb continues. “If you happen to speak in regards to the historical past, I’m in. I can learn for days about it. She undoubtedly schooled me and I went down a deep dive.”
That excavation course of additionally concerned a dive into his personal private historical past. “My granddaddy was a bluegrass musician. I grew up Pentecostal. My grandmother was a preacher, and he or she sang like Snow White.” It’s a humorous reference, he is aware of, as a result of Zegler herself performs the princess in Disney’s upcoming Snow White remake—“however she sang stunning 1930’s melodies. I believe a variety of these songs all harken again to hymnals,” says Cobb, noting that Collins was additionally well-versed on this style. “She was a rustic music DJ at one time, so she knew precisely what she was speaking about.”
Although he was guided by the folksy mountain music one would count on from Appalachia, Cobb wasn’t allergic to extra unconventional influences as properly. “There’s a variety of The Smiths in there,” he reveals. “I determine by the point we acquired to the long run, [the characters] in all probability heard these items. It’s undoubtedly a melting pot. We tried to stay to those very conventional roots, however there’s a variety of curveballs.”
