Interscope RecordsThe soundtrack for A Star Is Born has spent two weeks at #1 on the Billboard charts. One of the many people who worked with Lady Gaga on songs for the project was her longtime collaborator Paul Blair, aka DJ White Shadow, who tells ABC Radio that he can’t believe that those songs are now part of a major Hollywood movie.
Describing what it was like creating songs for Gaga’s character Ally and Bradley Cooper‘s character Jackson Maine to perform in the movie, Blair says, “It’s a super-crazy concept to me to have been sitting there writing lyrics to a song for a person that doesn’t exist…and then to hear Jack say to Ally, ‘What about this for a lyric?”
“It’s something that you sat in the back of a bus or on a park bench or writing stuff down in the back of a car,” he continues. “And now Bradley Cooper’s saying it to Lady Gaga on a movie screen? It’s like, what?”
Blair co-wrote six songs on the soundtrack, including “Look What I Found” and “I’ll Never Love Again.” He says when he and Gaga wrote songs for Ally, he literally had to ask Gaga about her own experiences in the music business to capture the character’s mindset.
Explaining the process, Blair says, “There were times where it [was] like, ‘O.K. this it the first song that she’s gonna have in the film. She’s coming off the idea that she’s not capable of writing a song that other people will actually enjoy…So, Gaga, how did that feel for you, when you were doing it?'”
A Star Is Born also features songs co-written by Diane Warren, Mark Ronson and Lukas Nelson, Willie Nelson’s son. The song “Shallow” from the soundtrack is currently a top 10 hit.
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