Culture

Pianos anchor both Abigail Barlow’s and Emily Bear’s Los Angeles apartments. Self-described “Barbie girl” Barlow, 25, has a shiny magenta lacquered Yamaha U1, as brightly hued as her hair and her bedazzled Stanley mug. The “old-ass” Steinway upright — a refurbished turn-of-the-century specimen purchased from “a random warehouse downtown” — belongs to 23-year-old Bear.

It would be tempting to assume that the two musicians are polar opposites, based on their instruments as well as their backstories. Barlow is a pop singer-songwriter who first dreamed of becoming “a musical theater actrice”; Bear was a wunderkind classical and jazz pianist, a Quincy Jones protegée who played for Beyoncé on the Renaissance tour and was intent on writing film/TV scores. And while both entered the industry in their teens, it wasn’t until a mutual friend introduced them in 2019 that they started writing songs together. Their creative partnership (and friendship) has been, as Barlow says, “just like alchemy,” ever since.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Barlow & Bear co-wrote The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical Album, inspired by the book series and hit Netflix drama, which became a viral sensation, racking up 60.3 million on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate, and winning the duo the best musical theater album Grammy Award in 2022. (Netflix sued the pair that July for copyright infringement when it put on a live, for-profit performance of the album at the Kennedy Center; the suit was reportedly settled out of court a few months later.) But now, their collaboration is about to hit the mainstream. Barlow & Bear’s music for Moana 2, in theaters Nov. 27, will make them the youngest (and only all-women) songwriting duo to create a full soundtrack for a Disney animated film. Two of their songs — “Beyond,” a soaring showcase for star Auli’i Cravalho (Moana), and “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Maui) — will, Disney reveals, be submitted for Academy Award consideration.

Like much of the musical theater-­loving world, Walt Disney Music president Tom MacDougall first became aware of Barlow & Bear as a team through Bridgerton. (For Bear, it was also a full-circle moment: As an 8-year-old pianist, she had met MacDougall, who gifted her a Tangled score signed by storied composer Alan Menken that still hangs on her wall.) About three years ago, he met them for lunch to “sort of put it on our radar that he might have a project for us,” Barlow recalls. She and Bear didn’t expect much to come of it — but MacDougall was impressed by the storytelling in their Bridgerton music. “That spirit of deciding to musicalize this thing that wasn’t a musical gave me the confidence they could pull [a Disney film] off,” he says. “If they could conjure up the spirit to create songs where they didn’t exist, I had a good feeling that if we gave them moments to build songs around, they’d be able to deliver.”

A year later, in 2022, Barlow & Bear met with the creative team for Moana 2 — a sequel to the 2016 animated film about the titular young girl who sets out to save her Polynesian island — which was then planned as a Disney+ streaming series. “Both of us, weirdly, were going through similar struggles to what Moana faces in this new journey,” Bear explains. “It was easy to put ourselves in her shoes and understand that she’s just a young woman trying to find her place in the world, as are we.”

Around the middle of last year, Disney reenvisioned Moana 2 as a feature film — by which point Barlow & Bear were immersed in learning the ropes of composing for Disney, absorbing some imparted wisdom of their Moana composing predecessor, Lin-Manuel Miranda. “He gave me a stack of books about how to structurally craft a lyric not only to be storytelling-­accurate, but to roll off the tongue, to fly off the page and into people’s minds and hearts,” Barlow says.

For her part, Bear dove into the treasure trove of foundational material from Moana by their soundtrack teammates, composers Opetaia Foa’i (a Samoan-born singer whose Polynesian music group, Te Vaka, performs on both Moana soundtracks) and Mark Mancina. “They recorded a huge library of logs and skins and vocal samples, so there were grooves that inspired entire songs,” Bear says. “Even if we started or wrote a song on our own, the root of it was still Opie.”

Though Barlow and Bear both admit that working on Moana 2 still feels surreal, they don’t have much time to soak it in: They’re booked and busy, in part because of that Grammy win. But both say the award’s significance to them was more symbolic. “We grew a lot as human beings through the whole [Bridgerton] process, and becoming like, ‘mature, professional girlie’ was something my soul desperately wanted and needed,” Barlow says. Bear agrees. “I’ve done a lot, but mostly as a kid, and for some reason that felt like it didn’t really count. I’ve been working so hard to outrun the ‘prodigy’ label,” she says. “[The Grammy] was really big for me because it was the first time people purely judged me based off music I did as an adult.”

Their post-Moana 2 slate as a duo includes the forthcoming biopic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers starring Jamie Bell and Margaret Qualley and their first produced stage musical, currently in development with a creative team attached. Bear (who is also an Emmy winner for her score for the PBS documentary Life) has scored two forthcoming films: Anderson .Paak’s feature debut, K-Pops, and Our Little Secret, a Netflix Christmas film starring Lindsay Lohan. Barlow, with a chuckle, says she may soon “release the album I wrote, like, a year-and-a-half ago.”

And then there’s the mystery “little musical idea” that first brought them together, a “very production-heavy” show “bringing you down the rabbit hole of what pop musical theater can be… which is very dear to us,” Barlow says with a knowing grin. It’s a reminder of the excitement they felt when they first met — and still feel in any session together. “We’re in love, musically,” Barlow says, “for real.”

This story appears in the Oct. 26, 2024, issue of Billboard.