For those of us who love losing themselves in the GFFA, 6th September will be a banner day as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Oga’s Cantina: R3X’s Playlist #1 arrives on all streaming services and digital retailers and Billboard chat with the executive in charge of music, Walt Disney Imagineering Matt Walker and senior music producer Yaron Spiwak.
When your team was composing and recording the music that the DJ would spin in the Cantina, what was the goal or mission statement?
Matt Walker: We wanted this Cantina to fit within [the] story [of the land], and I gave [Spiwak] that challenge [to] figure out “What are the intergalactic hits that our droid DJ would … collect and play for this motley group of questionable clientele in this far end of the galaxy?” Create this playlist. Go.
Yaron Spiwak: I’ll answer in two parts. I think one of the cool things about Imagineering is that we don’t only imagine architecture or stonework. We also reimagine music. How to stay true to the movies and still be inspired by them, but also represent the place that is coming to be. And a trick that we used is mixing a lot of different styles of music and kind of create a new one. Like, we would take a little bit of Middle Eastern and mix it with Chinese and put African vocals on it, and then put it in a Pro Tools session and filter it and reverse it, and then basically if you can’t recognize the instrument, or the style, that’s how we kind of made it out-of-worldly.
The second part is: how to make it a hit. We approached a lot of artists that we’ve always wanted to work with. A lot of the time, how we hire people is we use reference music, and we just found a lot of cool reference music, that we all liked, and approached a lot of these artists that we used as an inspiration.
