WASHINGTON – The John Legend-Common duet “Glory” (“Selma”) just won the Golden Globe for Original Song. But it’s anyone’s guess as to which songs Oscar will nominate Thursday, Jan. 15.
Indiewire is predicting a few frontrunners, including “Lost Stars” from the inspiring flick “Begin Again,” originally titled “Can a Song Save Your Life?” The film is director John Carney’s follow-up to his breakthrough “Once” (2006), which won the Oscar for Best Original Song with “Falling Slowly.”
WTOP caught up with the film’s music composer, Gregg Alexander, former frontman of the New Radicals, who landed a smash hit with “You Get What You Give” (1998).
“We just walked around London for a couple hours, talking,” Alexander tells WTOP. “After a couple cups of coffee, this mad Irishman (Carney) and this mad guy from Detroit (Alexander) had concocted this crazy idea of different visions for how the whole thing could come together: the script, the movie, the casting, everything.”
Co-written with his New Radicals bandmate Danielle Brisebois, “Lost Stars” appears twice on the soundtrack — once performed by Keira Knightley, who plays a struggling singer-songwriter, and once performed by Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, who plays Knightley’s egotistical boyfriend.
“Adam is such a fantastic singer. We’re both tenors, but we can go into falsetto. We kind of have similar range vocally,” Alexander says. “When he came in and sang, it was pretty intense. … I was like, ‘Oh my god, he’s hitting those notes really good. Is he doing it better than I did?’ He brought out that little bit of Lead Singer Disease, I call it.”
“With Keira, she’s done so many period pieces and classic English movies, we weren’t sure if she was gonna show up on a white horse,” Alexander jokes. “But she came into the studio so down-to-earth, very hardworking and really fearless. … We were almost protected by the Gods of Music or something. Somehow we were sent a great actress who could actually sing.”
Knightley’s character is “discovered” in a dingy nightclub by Mark Ruffalo, a desperate record producer who offers to cut an album with her in various locations across New York City. Alexander says he never directly collaborated with Ruffalo, but was impressed by his down-to-earth nature.
“He came to the studio once or twice and that was a lot of fun,” Alexander said. “He went outside the studio for a little bit and I heard that every other person that walked by was talking to him or taking pictures, and he seems to handle that attention incredibly well.”
Alexander says he’s an “absolute cinephile,” inspired as a kid by the movie music of “The Sound of Music” (1965) and later “Purple Rain” (1984). Still, his favorite movie-music moment might just be Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” blaring from John Cusack’s boombox in “Say Anything” (1989).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4clhZZ6sdjk
“That would have been a great scene (for “Begin Again”),” Alexander jokes. “But boomboxes are so heavy and Keira is in such wonderful shape — those things probably weigh more than she does.”
Nowadays, boomboxes have been replaced by iPods, allowing Knightley and Ruffalo to share earbuds as they walk around the Big Apple, listening to the “Casablanca” hit “As Time Goes By.” To paraphrase Dooley Wilson, the world will always welcome lovers — and great movie music — as time goes by.
“It’s kind of like love,” Alexander says of penning “Lost Stars.” “When you’re looking for it, you never find it. But when you think it’s permanently left the room, that’s when it comes walking back in.”
And so, Alexander will be watching Thursday to see whether “Lost Stars” makes this year’s Oscar nominees. If so, he could follow in the footsteps of Idina Menzel, whose Oscar night performance of “Let it Go” last year sparked the infamous “Adele Dazeem” gaffe and made Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack the year’s top-selling album.
“I’d be totally be open to performing with Keira and Adam, I just don’t know if their security would let me close enough,” Alexander jokes. “Adam did such a mind-blowing version in the film, he’d probably be an amazing ambassador for that, but if he wanted me to sing background, I’d be up for it.”
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