Exclusive: Inside the New Songs of MOANA 2 with Abigail Barlow & Emily Bear

Moana is back but, this time, she's singing a slightly different tune. The sequel to Disney's 2016 hit film is now in theaters and with it sees the return of Auli‘i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson, along with songwriters Opetaia Foa‘i and Mark Mancina. New to the franchise, however, are Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear.

Broadway fans may recognize the songwriting team from their work on the viral Unofficial Bridgerton Musical Album, which won the GRAMMY for Best Musical Theater Album in 2022. The duo took over songwriting duties from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who penned the songs in the first film.

Now, Barlow & Bear's musical efforts are on display for the world to see and are destined to become part of the rich Disney musical canon- something the duo doesn't take lightly. "Disney music lives forever. It's immortalized, and we are part of the Disney generation," Barlow shared during an interview with BroadwayWorld. "It's integral to our childhood, and I think that was very important when we first started this." Getting to pen new songs for a major Disney franchise project was "surreal" for Barlow, though Bear believes their previous collaborations helped prepare the duo.

Though the Bridgerton musical is their only other collaboration that has seen the light of day (so far), they have also worked together on other projects, "There were a bunch of things that started developing. We had a lot of practice in a lot of different styles before Moana."

"Any project on this scale is a huge undertaking," admits Bear. "We wanted to pay homage to the world that was already built, while also expanding what was created and showing new signs of characters. They're older, they've grown, they've evolved. The music should change too. Why would we want to just repeat what happened in the first movie?"

"Obviously, we're different writers and have different styles, but we wanted one foot in, one foot out," Bear explained of their mindset. The duo names Opetaia Foa‘i and Mark Mancina as the "cultural anchor" of the franchise, sharing that they helped carry the voice of Moana and Motunui into this second installment. To further capture that sound, they listened to Pacific Island music to discover and identify patterns that could assist in the new songs.

When the Moana sequel was initially announced, it was planned to be in the form of a Disney+ series. However, midway through production, the project veered in a very different direction. Instead, it would be an animated feature for the big screen.

Naturally, bits of plot and characterizations needed to change and, with it, the songs needed to be adjusted as well. "The songs evolved with the story a hundred times before we saw the final version," Barlow says. "The core themes of the project stayed the same, but how we presented the information changed," adds Bear.

Some of the new songs include another showstopper for Dwayne Johnson's Maui- "Can I Get a Chee Hoo?" - along with numbers for new characters like Matangi. In the sequel, Maui the Demigod has grown as a person and, though he is still Maui, "he's not, 'You're Welcome' Maui anymore." 

"I think Moana humanizes him in a way," explains Bear. With his new song, they aimed to capture "that balance of him evolving and growing into an empathetic human being and still being the Maui that we know and love." The character of Matangi sings a number called "Get Lost" - which may or may not be a Disney villain song. "Matangi is a very complicated goddess and a drama queen," says Bear. "So we wrote her a very dramatic song."

Barlow elaborates: "Ultimately, we don't really know her motives when we meet her. She gives Moana advice that came from a conversation we had with a real-life Wayfinder who said, 'Getting lost is the pathway to finding magic.' Disney villain songs classically take you on a ride: you start in one place, they pick you up, take you somewhere, and drop you back down in the story. We wanted to do that with 'Get Lost.'"

As for the legacy of the songs and their place in the Disney canon, the songwriters feel that the core themes of the movie haven't been tackled in this way before. "There was a quote in the story room from day one that said, 'You never stop discovering who you are,'" recalls Bear. "Learning to love yourself through the ups and the downs and accepting all the different versions of yourself is a big theme in this."

"No Disney Princess slash heroine has ever aged like Moana in this film," Barlow points out. "I think it's so special to see a character grow and become older. I hope that our legacy is strong in that." 

Photo Credit: Alex Feggi