Song of Songs

For Coco Songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Oscar Season Is a Family Affair

The married masterminds behind the Oscar-winning Frozen anthem “Let It Go” return to the awards fray with Coco’s “Remember Me.”
Songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen AndersonLopez
Coco Songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-LopezBy John Francis Peters/The New York Times/Redux.

For Oscar-winning songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, inspiration strikes in strange places.

“We recorded a demo track at a restaurant in La Jolla,” Robert told Vanity Fair.

“We wrote lyrics for the opening of Neil Patrick Harris’s Oscars while in a limo on the way to the Grammys for Frozen,” says Kristen. “We’ve written in hallways at Disney studios at 11 P.M.”

Several years ago, Kristen wrote the lyrics for “Remember Me”—the anthem song in Pixar’s Coco—while on the F train, commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Her husband had cracked the melody earlier that morning while in his boxer shorts.

“A lot of lyrics are written on the subway,” said Kristen. “More than you think. It’s commute time where, back in the day at least, you didn’t have Internet service so there was nothing to distract you.”

The songwriters, who met at a B.M.I. Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in 1999—and earned a 2014 Oscar for masterminding the most ubiquitous movie anthem of the last decade, Frozen’s “Let It Go”—had been mulling over song ideas since a meeting with Coco director and co-screenwriter Lee Unkrich in 2011.

“He had worked on Finding Nemo very peripherally, when we turned it into a musical down at [Disney World’s] Animal Kingdom,” explained Kristen. “He was taken with the power of a song—and the fact that music can be so much more emotional and powerful than speaking. He wanted to explore that.”

Unkrich told the Lopezes that he wanted a song that could be adapted to mean different things in the film—and could help the film’s protagonist, Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), unlock the story’s greater meaning.

“It started with the idea that a song can be played twice in the movie and the audience hears something different each time,” said Robert. “The first time you hear it, it is a very flashy song, and the second time you hear it, it is the way it was meant to be played, and you realize it means something else, and it is a plot revelation. That’s something we’d never seen before in a movie.”

The song needed to parallel the film’s theme of holding family members close—whether separated by distance or death. The Lopezes found that they related deeply to the character of Héctor Rivera (Gael García Bernal), who writes “Remember Me” in the movie as a lullaby to keep his memory alive with his daughter.

“Here was a songwriter who wrote a love song that was really inspired by his own love for his daughter, and the guilt about having to go away for his [music] career,” said Kristen. “That was something we knew a lot about, because one of the hardest parts about our career is toggling back and forth between L.A. and New York, and handling those trips away from our children. We have very strong rules about never spending more than three nights away in L.A. without them. It’s the agony of our life, and we deal with it by writing songs that they could sing with their babysitters when we’re gone. We have all these lullabies that we've written just for them.”

“We knew a lot about the power of the lullaby to stay connected when you’re far away,” added Kristen. “That version of the lyric came out very easily. The trick was just to keep in mind that you would have the other version, where it’s interpreted as, ‘Goodbye my love, always remember what we had together.’”

In addition to serving as inspiration, the couple’s daughters, ages 12 and 8, are also a litmus test.

“They’re our first audience often for the songs,” said Robert. “If they react well, if they want to hear it again, then we always know we have something. If they kind of wander off in the middle, then we worry.”

Just as “Remember Me” takes on multiple contexts for the Coco characters, the song also took on new meaning this past summer when Robert’s mother died.

“We sang this song at her funeral,” said Kristen. “Even though we wrote this song thinking about our children, it has become this way to stay connected to her. She was such a huge champion of artists, and especially Bobby. If we are lucky enough to get the chance to stand up and say something [at next month’s Oscars], we know how important it is to say something really meaningful. To be able to also say something for her would be pretty amazing.”

The Lopezes have a say in how the song is performed at the ceremony, and tease that they are still weighing the options.

“The lullaby is really the main version of the song, because it’s the one we first wrote. We couldn’t not have that,” revealed Robert. “I think we’re veering towards the pop [music version] as well. We might have a mix of those two.”

The second time through, the awards circuit “is a lot more fun because there’s so much less terror,” said Robert, who adds that they will bring their daughters to the ceremony as their dates. “The first time, we were white-knuckling it through these different events filled with famous people and all of this crazy, fancy stuff. We’ve been through it once before, so we kind of know what to expect and are able to relax a little bit.”

Not that there is that much free time in their schedules. On Thursday morning, Kristen was caring for a sick daughter while Robert was at tech rehearsals for Broadway’s upcoming Frozen musical, for which they wrote the songs. The day prior, Valentine’s Day, was no less hectic.

“We’re about to go into a time that, again, comes back to the song—a time when we are not with our children because we have to be at preview after preview after preview,” said Kristen. “We spent Valentine’s Day with our kids and all three caregivers, who are going to be, as we call it, Team Fro-Bro-Lo, which is Frozen-Broadway-Lopez. We had a Valentine’s Day dinner together getting on the same page, [going over] what happens in the mornings—what time does [our daughter] Katie have to be out the door? What happens at night?”

“We also sat in a darkened theater during the day, and passed Valentine’s Day cards to one another,” added Robert. “Her card to me was so sweet and sexy and wonderful.”

“We did kind of make out,” laughed Kristen. “Luckily we were in the last row so nobody yelled, ‘Get a room.’”