Although most of Greg Wells‘ professional life has involved producing or writing for big pop artists (including Adele, Katy Perry, OneRepublic & Timbaland, Twenty One Pilots and John Legend), he’s dedicated more of his time in recent years to working on films. Two and a half years, specifically (so far), as the music producer on both parts of “Wicked” — a job he describes as “Herculean” with very good quantitative as well as qualitative reason. It follows up his work as producer on the Grammy-winning No. 1 soundtrack for another full-on movie musical, “The Greatest Showman.” His classical and jazz training are coming in handy as he makes his name doing soundtracks that involve heavy orchestration as well as the ability to properly frame today’s top pop divas.
In this Variety Q&A, Wells goes into detail about why this project personally packs an emotional punch for him, his friendship of nearly 35 years with composer Stephen Schwartz, the back-and-forth processes that took two and a half years just for Part 1 of “Wicked,” and working with the leading ladies. Yes, the reports are true — he did try to hip-hop “Popular” up a little bit as one of his first tasks working on the soundtrack, a hiccup that he describes as actually leading to a beautiful working relationship with Ariana Grande. But the loveliest comradeship that came out of the musical work, as he describes it, was the one between Grande and Cynthia Erivo, which started with a confluence of vibratos that he describes as nearly supernatural, before it became a friendship outside the studio.
You’ve known Stephen Schwartz for 35 years, or close to it. Do you remember your reaction to first seeing or hearing “Wicked”?
The first time I saw “Defying Gravity,” I felt impaled after seeing it, and I actually had to leave the theater. I never saw the second act that night. So when I knew that Stephen Schwartz wanted me to get involved with this, the first thing I thought of was: I’m gonna get to have a hand in that song. And I’m sort of narcissistically trying to recreate that experience that I remember having the first time I heard it, for the listener.
So wait, you left at intermission, because you were so moved? Breaking the movie into two parts must really work for you, then, if that is how you experienced the stage show for the first time yourself, by choice
“Defying Gravity” was my conclusion that night. I turned to my date and I couldn’t even talk. I didn’t know what had happened. I’d known Stephen as a friend since 1990, but we’d never worked together, and he didn’t really tell me much about “Wicked,” so I didn’t know that song was coming. And I couldn’t figure out why I was reacting that way, either, but I had a lump in my throat the size of Jupiter, and I could barely speak, so I just turned to my date and said, “I think I have to go.” And we just left. That was my first experience, with that as the ending. So, you’re right, this does make a lot of sense to me, to break it up into two movies!
Let’s go back to that intensely emotional response you had to the music later on. But let’s talk for a minute about working with the actors and the whole music team. Did you feel like there was any general philosophy or idea that guided you through what turned out to be years of working together on this now?
We all felt enormous responsibility to make this as authentic and as impactful as we could get it, and I talked about it with them. We and (director) Jon Chu would talk about it a lot, (arranger) Stephen Oremus and I would talk about it constantly, and I would talk about it with the two leads as well. And it was a real uniting presence. There’s power in a common enemy — it’s what the wizard does, with the animals as the enemy. And what we were united by was: the fear of getting it wrong. (Read Variety‘s earlier interview with Schwartz and Oremus here.)
I was trying not to ruin it. I did not want to be the guy who destroyed “Wicked” for all the people that had seen the live version. But also, I was realizing that probably, unless something goes very wrong, a majority of people will discover “Wicked” through the movie, because most people don’t go see live musicals. They’re don’t live somewhere where that happens, and even if they did, it’s expensive and they probably wouldn’t think to do that. Most people, and I mean capital-M Most People, would not be aware of the original recording. Because it is kind of a boutiquey audience — a very, very big, passionate and dedicated audience, but not the same kind of audience you get by releasing a gazillion-dollar movie worldwide. And so it’s just constantly balancing… It’s almost like when Bob Dylan went electric — that was a big move, and if he was really worried about his original fans, he never would’ve done it. And he lost most of his original fans, as we all know. It all wound up working out in the end for him. But it’s so tough to know how far to take a thing, anyway. So it was just this funny balance of trying to put as much of my sensibilities in as possible while also paying massive homage to what it is and what it has been.
Do you remember any kind of moment where you realized and felt exultant that the alchemy between Cynthia and Ariana was really working for real, and not just the theoretical, hoped-for thing that came in casting?
I was with them when there was a lot of early rehearsal and a lot of figuring out who sings what. We were doing a lot of that stuff in that studio that was built for us at ElstreeStudios. Universal had built a really beautiful studio for me and the two girls and the whole music team on the film set at Elstree, where they were rehearsing and then subsequently would be filming a lot of it, half-an-hour north of London. For two months of rehearsing and recording there, I watched them get to know each other better and immediately plug into a dynamic that was beautifully empathetic and respectful. They’d never met before this project and obviously had never worked together before. Very quickly, this beautiful thing emerged, fast, and it got to the point where their vibratos synced up.
Now, that’s almost an impossibility. Two totally different singers; the only thing similar between the two of them is that they’re pretty much the same height — they’re both around 5’1”. But very different artists with very different instruments, and a different thing that shows up when they sing. Now, for weeks we were rehearsing this stuff, on good mics in a studio environment, before they did it live on-set. And if it was a duet, they weren’t overdubbing; they were looking at each other. And I started noticing they’re so close to each other that it often sounded like one person singing.
I was working really late one night by myself at Elstree, which, by the way, it’s where they shot “The Shining” in the ‘70s. I’m there by myself — it’s me and a security guard at the front gate, and in this enormous complex of buildings, I was the only one inside except for a small cleaning crew that would go throughout the night cleaning different rooms…
This already sounds like a spooky story.
And I’m looking at the waveforms, and Ariana’s track was on top and Cynthia’s was just below it in ProTools. And I noticed that the shape of the vibrato on both, which shows up as sort of like a bumpy thing — it looked identical on both tracks. And if someone says a word like “timing” with this, that shows up as a really defined bit of the sound wave, and you see it very visually; it’s really obvious. And that stuff was so tight, it almost looked like someone had edited it to be synced up almost perfectly. But it is literally just how they sang it live in the room. And it kept happening and happening.
I took a screenshot of this particular couple of bars. I can show you the photo. [See below.] I sent it to them both that night, on Nov. 2, and I wrote, “I had to take a photo of this ‘cause it’s nuts. This is both of you singing on ‘For Good.’ Look how the timing, the dynamics, even the vibrato is almost identically in sync. No one could try to do this. I don’t think I’ve seen/heard anything like this.” They both were so happy and couldn’t believe that was happening. Ari suggested I color-code the waveforms to represent each character. If they tried to do that, I’m not sure they could do it — I don’t think anybody could — but it just kept happening all the time.
The waveforms for Ariana Grande’s and Cynthia Erivo’s voices singing a duet, as captured by music producer Greg Wells
Courtesy Greg Wells
That was endemic through the whole thing. The chemistry between the two of them is my favorite element of anything in this movie that’s out right now. At the very least, it’s infectious, but it’s so moving and authentic and it was happening in real life. They were doing it through the characters, and now they have this beautiful friendship outside of the movie, born out of this incredible experience. It was amazing to play a small role in that, and also just to watch it happen and to hear it happen.
Do you think Ariana or Cynthia ever worried about their voices being compared with the previous voices who had done it?
I truthfully do not ever remember a conversation where they expressed a concern about that. They’re such fans of what Kristin and Idina did. My recollection is that it was more like: We want to respect the work in in the most sincere way possible, and also if we’re feeling a moment where we want to inject our own thing into it, we’d like to be able to try that. And they were given that platform to do that. Some of it, Stephen Schwartz loved from the start; some of it was too much for him; some of it he didn’t like at first, and then he came to love it. Cynthia’s take on it was like, “I have to be me doing this. it’s gotta come from inside of me.” It’s not method acting, but she really, really does feel the stuff. And once we saw the difference… Because she could sing whatever you asked her to sing, and there were plenty of moments where that happened. But then if she sang something that just came through her naturally that … like, the food tastes different at that point. It’s another feeling altogether.
Can you think of a moment where she pushed for something different and it really works?
Yeah. At the end of “I’m Not That Girl,” there’s this beautiful little riff I can’t really sing, but right before she sings “I’m not that girl,” there’s this little… [He hums the part.] That was taken out because it was deemed to be too much. And she heard one of the almost-final mixes and her comment was, “That little ad-lib moment, can we please put that back in?” And I love it. It’s one of my favorite moments in the whole track. There’s even an Instagram post by another singer that I reposted a few weeks ago, somebody highlighting that moment as being their favorite moment.
And certainly the battle cry at the end of “Gravity.” She didn’t want to jmimic what Idina (Menzel) had done. She wanted to make it her own thing. I remember watching her sing the one that became the final keeper version — just incredible. She really, really, really has to feel this in her own way, and I think that that took a moment of adjustment, and then it just all started to make a lot more sense. I don’t think everything that she wanted to change and do made the final version, but a lot of it did.
And what were your feelings about how much you could change what was familiar to fans from the original cast album, yourself?
The orchestration is completely different, of course, but in terms of the feel of the songs, it was so important to me to have the the fabric of it feel familiar and recognizable… There was only one thing, and Stephen Schwartz is very, very sweetly taking some of the heat for this. In the press a few weeks ago, there started beig articles saying that the song “Popular” had been hip-hopped — like, had these funky drums put onto it — and that the music team ws really into it, but that Ari heard it and was like, “No, we’re not doing that.” Now, that is true! But what’s really true is it was all my fault. It wasn’t the Stephens’ (Schwartz’s and Oremus’) fault at all. And it was an amazing lesson for me in how much I have to learn about making movies.
I had actually produced a version of “Popular” with Ariana singing on it for that U.K. artist Mika, as a duet, in 2012. (It appeared on Grande’s debut album as well as Mika’s under the name “Popular Song.”) And that had kind of a funky track under it, so there was already a proof of concept of the song surviving very well with Ari singing on it that kind of sounded like that. I heard that piano part — that kind of dink-dink-dink — and I’m like, “That’s ‘Hard Knock Life’ by Jay-Z. We could really do that.” Now, I had just come onto to the project, and they hadn’t filmed anything yet; I hadn’t met Ari yet. Stephen Schwartz had given his blessing to that early version of “Popular” and even became friends with Mike because of it, and so I said, “Is it OK if I try and make it funky here?” And they said, “Sure, if we don’t like it, we won’t send it in, but go ahead and try it.” So I chased it, and musically, I loved where it finally wound up. It was one of the first things I submitted. Stephen Oremus and I played it for Stephen Schwartz and he said, “This is great. I think we should send this in.” So we did. We sent it in to the movie team — to Jon and to Ariana.
Crickets. A week of crickets… two weeks of crickets. And my self-loathing Canadian really kicked in. I’m like, “Oh no. I’ve already lost their confidence! What’s happening?” And I started hearing like little rumblings about Ari saying something about the drums, and I’m like, “Oh, she thinks I’m too old. It should be some 17-year-old with a laptop and headphones.” And finally I said, “I’m gonna meet her anyway, and we’re gonna be working together for a long time. Can I get on a FaceTime with her?” No problem. The next day, she and I were on a FaceTime and she could not have been cooler or lovelier. She is that person — exactly the same as she was the first time I talked to her (in 2012). So I apologized about the drums, and I said I was worried that maybe she thought I’m too old to do a track like that. She says, “No no no, not at all! Let me explain. It sounds fantastic. The problem is, I’ve been working for at least a year with my acting coach, and we’ve really been getting into: Who is Glinda? What makes this character really tick? What’s the thread count of Glinda?… I feel that there’s nothing about Glinda that’s cool. There’s nothing about her that’s slick. There’s nothing about her that’s funky. She would never sing on a song that sounds this cool.”
And I said, “Are you saying that Glinda claps on one and three instead of two and four?” It’s a musician joke. And she cracked up. She said, “Yes, exactly! That’s it!” And then I said, “Are you saying she claps ahead of the beat on one and three?” “Yes!” And then I said, “I feel like such a dummy, You’re giving me such a lesson here. I’ve spent my whole career trying to make things just sound as good as possible coming through the speakers. I’ve never really had to think too much about, does this fit the narrative of the character in the thing?” And as soon as she said it, I was like, ohhhhh, yep, that makes sense. So then I did a new version, whre I didn’t even realize I’d done it, but I still left a tiny bit of too much funkiness in the bass drum pattern — which does (now) appear in the very last four bars of “Popular,” but at the time it was before that. And she’s like, “You have to take all that out. It’s just too rhythmic. It’s not her. I don’t want to play her cool. I also don’t want to be accused of coming in as ‘Pop star Ariana Grande has pop-ified Glinda.’ That’s the last thing I ever want to read.”
That was a big, resounding, crushing penny drop — but in the best way possible for me. It was this amazing lesson that she taught me from my very first conversation. And so I’ve just tried to keep my eyes and ears and brain open to how any anything I do also influence what’s gonna happen 30 minutes or 50 minutes later. And in making records with people on a much smaller team, if you were the artist and I was the record producer, we’d spend three, four, five months making an album with just you and me and a recording engineer — if it’s a band, maybe a couple other people — and that’s it. In the world I’m usually in, I filter all that other stuff out. I don’t let managers or record company people come into the room until we’re done working for the day because it puts everybody in an overly analytical place and hurts performances. But on a movie, it’s really like a medium-sized army with different divisions and division heads, and everyone’s trying to put out a specific fire, but they’re all talking to each other and there’s input coming from all over the place. Broadway’s like that too— almost everybody gives input. I asked Stephen Schwartz about this several months ago, and I said, “So who’s got veto power?” And he said, “Well, I do if it’s my musical. But I listen to pretty much all the ideas. It could come from almost anywhere.” Again, more things I’m not overly familiar with that come with making movies. It’s really like walking backward into this.
That’s so interesting. Out of curiosity, since you recorded an entire version of the soundtrack vocals in the studio as backup before they did it live, on the final soundtrack album, is it exactly what we hear in the movie, vocal-wise, or were there moments where it made sense to go back to the pre-recording?
I used the exact same vocals that are in the movie, and there were just a couple of incidents where Stephen Schwartz felt that he wanted an alternate. I noticed when I saw the final mix of the movie at Warner Bros. before it was released that there’s one little line that Ari sings in “What Is This Feeling?” that’s different in the movie than it is on the soundtrack. It used to not be different, but they changed it in editorial, on the dub stage, and I’m sure they sent it to us to say, “Hey guys, you should update your vocal files so that it does this.” And I’m pretty sure our composer felt like he preferred it the way that it was. So there’s just a couple little moments like that, small things that are a little bit different.
The edits are definitely different. For the soundtrack, we had to suture together pieces that had been separated into multiple sections for the film. “Gravity,” for instance, stops and starts several times because of what happens in the movie. It would sound insane if we did that on the soundtrack. We had to do that with lots of different songs. Also, there’s a really beautiful, Aaron Copland-ish compositional moment that Stephen Schwartz wrote for “Defying Gravity,” and I just adore it. He wanted it to be in the movie right around when Glinda puts the cape on Elphaba and she’s about to really become the wicked witch. Stephen wrote this absolutely gorgeous part, and Jon felt like it was too much. He wanted something that felt more like what he already had cooking in the temp track, which was also fantastic. And so Stephen said, “Well, you know, I want this piece of music to live, so let’s use this on the soundtrack album.” So there’s like a few creative differences like that. But vocally, other than I think one or two words — and I mean, honestly, just like one or two, definitely no more than like four or five words — it’s exactly what’s in the movie.
There’s also one moment in “What Is This Feeling” that’s different on the soundtrack, because Stephen Schwartz had a couple of things that he wanted to hear things a certain way, and he realized he had more creative license on the soundtrack album. But we all kind of came to a place of wanting to give the fans (a true experience of the film music on the soundtrack).
There have been many times where the record company releasing the soundtrack overthinks things — it happened on “The Greatest Showman,” where Atlantic had Kesha re-record “This Is Me,” and I have to imagine that somebody thought this is gonna give the song more legs, just like on “Frozen” Disney thought that having Demi Lovato, who’s such an amazing singer, sing “Let It Go” would make the song work at radio. But because people had fallen in love with the movie, the only thing fans wanted to hear was the version of the music that was in the movie, because that wallop of the impact of hearing the music accompany the visual narrative — there’s just nothing like it. I hate it when the fans feel like they’ve been tricked or fooled or something. People are so much smarter than they’re giving credit for.
What most moved you about “Wicked” when you first encountered it, all those years ago?
Well, Stephen’s writing is so full of surprise and there’s such range to it, and those two qualities are usually my favorite qualities in any kind of art or storytelling. I hate seeing the joke coming. I can’t stand it when you know you’re expected to laugh. I love sort of being sucker-punched by the surprise of it — I like that in music an I like that in storytelling. The brilliant thing about Gregory Maguire’s book, and where Stephen Schwartz ran with it, is this thing operates on different levels. Especially the first half of the live musical and especially movie one, where it can be interpreted as “this is like a family movie.” Which actually, for me, makes it even more insidious and even more evil, even more wicked, that things feel very light. Even though you can tell pretty early on, in the opening (“No One Mourns the Wicked”), that something is not right, that this is not just a good time.
So I love how it functions on different levels. I love how it’s just heartbreaking, with the arc of the story, listening to “The Wizard and I” and how hopeful (Elphaba) is, and that character has just been literally shit upon her entire life. So I, like so many others, resonate strongly with the underdog factor in the story. And for me, without question, it’s a cautionary tale about the danger of anything that is different or something you don’t understand, to label that as wicked, as bad, as evil. I love the inclusionary message that is in “Wicked,” and it was really important to Jon Chu to crank that part up in the film. You know, how the wardrobe of the students at Shiz University is very gender-neutral. That’s absolutely intentional. It feels great to have something like that out in the world right now, given the election we just had.
Did you ever figure out why, when you first went to the stage show, it moved you so much that you had to leave at intermission and come back another time to see Act 2?
It took me years to put my finger on it, or even adjacent to it. I think the reason that I felt impaled the first time I saw “Defying Gravity” was because of an experience I’d had with a music educator. He was a great, brilliant mind, and I wound up going to his college and playing in his band and got close to him, before I realized he was actually wishing to keep me in a box — that he didn’t want me to do anything that’s different from his own career, that he viewed me as a threat. That blew my mind when I was a kid. And later I’d meet older record producers that I really admired who were worth gazillions of dollars, had these storied careers, and I could never understand that they would view me or someone like me as like a potential threat. It just seemed nuts to me. I’m, like, still half on the turnip truck! Anyway, obviously not as tragic a story as what Elphaba has to contend with, but it really spoke to me in a big way. It really did my head in when I realized this as I was still a teenager, and I had to do a big reevaluation of goals and what it was I was aiming for and what I thought was important to me and what now wasn’t.
It was a hard-earned epiphany, that one. But everybody feels like they don’t belong. I don’t think anybody feels like, “Oh, I’m completely a part of the pack.”
There’s been a lot of discussion of how topical the story feels, which will influence how dark it strikes people, depending on how tuned in they are to that.
The pursuit of power and how the wizard is using dark magic to silence the animals has all sorts of political allegory connotations… [SPOILER ALERT FOR PART 2 AHEAD.] Also, as I heard Stephen Schwartz point out once when we were in the London studio two years ago, he’s like, “Well, you know, this is a story about a man trying to kill his daughter.”
We were recording the orchestra at AIR Studios in London and, several days into the recording sessions, Stephen was sitting beside me at the console when someone made a comment: “Ooh, that sounds quite spooky.” Again, Stephen didn’t miss a beat and he said, “Well, it is a horror movie.” And he meant it. He wasn’t trying to be funny; in his mind, this has many aspects of a horror movie. And I get that. I think that’s lost on a lot of folks, but that’s OK. That (lighter aspect) is partly what makes it so tragic. But it also does function pretty successfully as… not lighter, but just a joyful kind of exciting entertainment. There’s so many levels to this — like life, right? It would be so nice in life if it was really as easy as fundamentalist religion where things are white or things are black, things are good or they’re bad. This really blows that up, especially the way the story ends. Without ruining… I mean, anyone that’s seen the live musical already knows how this ends. It’s far from a happy ending, but it’s not a completely tragic ending. The whole thing is so complicated.
Can you talk about being friends with Stephen for decades before you get the call…
Thirty-five years later! I always say to to younger musicians or singers — or it’s just a life thing in general — you never know how one thing’s gonna lead to the next. All this stuff only makes sense in hindsight.
I moved to Los Angeles from rural Ontario, Canada, on a Canadian government arts grant to study piano with Claire Fisher, this incredible musician who did all the string arrangements for Prince and really brought bossa nova to America, and another pianist named Terry Trotter, who played with Frank Sinatra and Larry Carlton for years. Those guys started recommending me for little jobs, and one of those first jobs was being the additional keyboard, kinda synth player, basically being the fake orchestra for this really beautiful cabaret singer from New York named Jane Oliver. Jane had a very dedicated fan base, and Stephen Schwartz was among that fan base. I met him through Jane, and Stephen would hang and buy all of us dinner and regale us with amazing stories — but never talked about his own career, never talked about himself. Once I started having some kind of career years later, he would come by my studio sometimes and meet some of the artists I worked with. Never in a gazillion years did I ever think we would ever work together because he was so clearly like in the lane of what he’s doing, which certainly at the time was not what I was even pointed toward.
We were having this email exchange about a really talented new artist I work with named Jake Wesley Rogers — Elton John discovered him a couple years ago, put him on his podcast. He’s about to actually release a new album, and the song that I have on that album I had sent to Stephen Schwartz. He was commenting on Jake’s song and a few other things, and then the last paragraph of his email to me in June 2022 was, “Oh, by the way, I’m putting together a small music team for the ‘Wicked’ movie that we’ve been working on for several years, and we’re ready to lock in and do it now. Would you like to jump on board?” We got on the phone soon after that, but I was worried… It’s really an amazing thing to have Stephen as a friend, where we would hardly ever talk about work. We would talk about the fact that we never talked about work. And one of the first things I said to him was, “If we work together on this, I’m worried it might mess up our relationship.” And he’s like, “I don’t think it will. I think we’ll be OK.”
He is different when he is working, and it’s actually really fascinating. You know, this is his baby, one of his many creative babies; in so many ways, if not in every way, he is truly the artist on this project. Obviously he’s not starring in the film, but he birthed this thing, and to see him bring it to the essence of where he’s feeling it is a fascinating thing. It’s so fascinating to watch him drive the ship from this very passionate, brilliant place, a side of him I never got to see when we were hanging out, having dinner.
So two and a half years, basically, is your work on this, so far?
Yeah. I started just a couple weeks after that first phone call; in early July 2022, I was on board. When I got hired, the only cast members that had been hired were Cynthia and Ariana, so there was a lot to do. I haven’t worked on that many movies. I’ve really just been producing records and writing songs. I think “Wicked” is my fifth or sixth movie, but typically a bozo like me gets hired on a film when the film is almost finished, so I’ll come in for like the last half-year of it. This one, I was on it six months before they began shooting. We had to construct all the tracks in a malleable way where we could pivot with tempo and transposition of keys, because we didn’t know who was going to play Fiyero, for instance. And I did, like, fake instruments — like, MIDI tracks for everything. Fake drums, fake orchestra, fake all of this, all from this keyboard right here. And then I wound up going to London for two months in the fall of 2022, in that studio at Elstree, working hands-on with both ladies. Stephen Oremus was with me the entire time. We never met before and thank God we worked well together, because it could not have gone better. He really gave me a lot of space, but also just the right amount of “Oh, we don’t need that. We really need this, do more of this.”
That went on until right until the top of December and then they started shooting. And then I came back here to L.A. and there were tons of changes to be made, once the choreographer was up and running. And then Jon would realize, “Well, we actually need another 30 seconds of music here. We need actually another minute of music here. We need to chop this music out. It doesn’t work anymore. We need a different approach for this one musically.” Tons of sort of changing the shape of the clay. And the pedal just stayed down, just like a brick was just on the gas pedal the whole time, never let up. And we have another movie to make now! Musically, it is the most challenging job I’ve ever worked on. I’m pulling on every iota of my musical training.
You were classically trained and then went to jazz college up in Canada, before you became a studio musician in the ‘90s, before moving up to become a songwriter and record producer.
I had to pull on every bit of that to make this work. Because I was literally staring at the screen I’m looking at you on right now, and I’m sight-reading bass clarinet charts at 1:30 in the morning — that, by the way, are not in the normal treble or bass clef — and having to kind of try and transpose it, and sometimes I was not successful in doing it and I’d make mistakes. And then in trying to make the tracks, I set this bar for myself where I wanted the MIDI tracks to not sound like MIDI tracks. I wanted them to really feel authentic, and I realized that whatever I came up with, that’s what Jon was going to shoot the movie to. And I’ve been doing this long enough where I realized like whether people want to or not, they are going to get used to hearing the thing that they’ve heard hundreds of times, so I wanted to make sure that whatever the MIDI thing was was close enough to what I imagined the final result might sound like. At some point I got so fearful of turning things in that didn’t sound finished. I wanted to inspire confidence in the performers and in the choreographer and in Jon. My head was in that blender for months and months, and then we had the writers’ strike and then the actor strike, and we weren’t allowed to work on any of it, so I had a bit of time off to see my family.
As soon as that was over, we were having a Zoom meeting with Mike Knobloch, the head of film at Universal, figuring out schedules of when we’re going to London to record the studio musicians who are gonna play the drums and guitars and bass and keyboards, and then after that we would do the orchestra sessions. And then we got to Stephen Schwartz, and he puts his hand up and says, “Wait, there’s a misunderstanding. Greg’s gonna play the real instruments (based on the MIDI tracks). Obviously the orchestra will do it in London, but Greg’s the band. Let’s move on!” Now, I have to assume that Stephen Schwartz was thinking that the entire time. In my career as a producer, a lot of my productions have come from songwriting sessions that then wound up becoming the record, where I’m playing all the instruments, so the demo for the song often sounds like a record. And I was hired on “Wicked” to play nothing; I was hired to just produce and mix. But when he said that, my workload definitely more than doubled, it possibly quadrupled.
We got it done by the skin of our teeth. Then it was the orchestra, and then there was a lot of mixing the film. Andy Nelson, the rerecording mixer, set me up in a room at Fox that he helped design, and I was in there for a month doing 7.1 mixes from my stereo mixes. Then it was time to mix the soundtrack album in Atmos…
What are you most satisfied about with your work on the film?
There were two things that, as a fan of this, I wanted to try to bring to the table, and I didn’t know how much I would or would not be allowed to do it. It’s a huge credit to both Stephen Schwartz and Stephen Oremus, the executive music producers, that they really gave me a wide berth. I mean, the more I threw at it, the happier they got. And I was so shocked by that, because I’ve worked with folks before who have written kind of well-known things and they don’t really want it to sound differently than it did originally. But they both really wanted to hear new versions of it. And there was only one instance when Stephen Schwartz said, “You know, that drum fill there …” He didn’t say, “Take it out.” He said, “Can you just turn it down a bit?” That was it. Everything else, they let me sort of really attack it and they gave me tons of fantastic direction, and they’re making me look good.
But they really let me do the two things I wanted to do, which was bring out the teeth when appropriate, bring out that real underbelly. I like “The Shining.” I don’t like gore, but I like being psychologically scared. And then I wanted to kind of inject the music with a bit more kind of… How to say this? Drums are my first instrument, and rhythm is important to me. There’s always been fantastic drumming on every version I’ve ever heard of “Wicked.” But I knew that we weren’t going for a pit orchestra thing. Because it’s a movie, we were able to create whatever soundscape we wanted. Whether it was like a vaudevillian soft-shoe vibe for Jeff Goldblum and “Sentimental Man,” or whether it’s “Popular,” where it just sounds like harpsichords on stage with pyrotechnics or something, to a straight-up pop song.
How many instruments did you play? The two Stephens said that there were about 85 pieces to the orchestra, at its peak, but counting all your parts, it would be more tha a hundred.
Basically I’m playing all the bass guitar, all the drums and a lot of the keyboards. Stephen Oremus and Dominic Amendum are also playing keyboards on this. And then I’m playing all the electric guitars and acoustic guitars. The thing I was talking about earlier with sight-reading viola parts and bass clarinet (for MIDI parts), that all got us to a point where we had a thing that really did sound a lot like an orchestra. But when JeffAtmajian got hired, this brilliant orchestral arranger, he took whatever I had helped cook up and blew it up and did his own thing with a lot of it. And then I would get MIDI mockups of his arrangements sent to me, and I would put that into my track that I was working on…
The word “iterative” has never been used more in my life than in the last two and a half years. I never really used that word before, but now it’s almost the only word that I say all day long. Tempos changing all the time, keys changing almost as often as the tempos. Tons of input, because the music team would get it to where we loved it, and then to where Stephen Schwartz loved it. Which sometimes was right away, and sometimes he was not happy, or almost happy, and we had to tweak. He always knew exactly what he needed, and those are my favorite kind of people to work with, who know when the food doesn’t taste good or when it does taste right. Then we’d have to play it for Jon Chu too, and he’s directing the movie and it’s gotta feel right to him. Sometimes it would land, and sometimes … who knows what’s going on, and if the mix just sounded really different than the rehearsal MIDI tracks that I’d done, but sometimes it was like, “This is not working for me,” and to have it feel right for him, sometimes it would take multiple revisions or multiple trips to the drawing board.
Where do things stand on Part 2, as far as your work on it? Some people might have imagined you guys did everything at once, but from all indications, there’s a lot of work to do.
No, the only thing that was done all at once were my MIDI tracks. It was over two years ago that that was done, and it was all the songs for both movies. But the process of Jeff Atmajian, our orchestra arranger, writing his charts, that has begun now for movie 2. The process of me now ditching those MIDI tracks and replacing them with live drums, guitar, bass and keyboards, that has just started now. We’re staying on this until I think we’re at AIR with the orchestra in May or June, and then we’ll be mixing all summer, and then it comes out in November.
You can’t give any spoilers about the additional material that Stephen has written, but is there anything you can say about the fresh songs fans are curious about for part 2?
They will not be disappointed. Stephen’s one of the great composers of our time. And he’s written some stuff that, again… it’s a movie, where it’s different. There’s things that Jon was able to do is able to do in the arena of it being cinema that you just couldn’t do on stage. It would be too hard to pull off. So it made sense to have Stephen Schwartz come up with some new material to augment what’s going on. There’s some really beautiful stuff that the fans have not heard yet, and I’m no predictor of the future, but I think they’re gonna be pretty happy. Really gorgeous stuff.
You talked earlier about feeling like you were walking backwards into the filmmaking process, but two and a half years in, it can’t feel so backward anymore. Even with more to go, you have to feel happy about at least being done with Part 1.
I’m still working on it. I’m still working on movie 1. A few days ago I finished an edit of “Defying Gravity” and “Popular” for radio. Even though it’s been out, even though the cat has left the bag, I’m not sure I’ll ever be done working on it.
