Barlow & Bear Make History With ‘Moana’

An afternoon with Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear quickly makes you feel like an underachiever. 

The songwriting duo, who are 26 and 23, respectively, are already Grammy winners as Barlow & Bear; individually, Bear toured as the pianist on Beyoncé’s 2023 “Renaissance” tour and was a prodigy of Quincy Jones’, and Barlow a pop songwriter and singer. Working as a duo since 2019, they now are making history. As the composers for Disney’s “Moana 2,” in theaters Wednesday, they are both the youngest composers and the first all-female team to write the songs for an animated Disney movie. 

The duo had a general meeting with Tom MacDougall, the president of music at Disney, and when he ended the meal by suggesting he might have a project for them, they didn’t think much of it. 

“Nothing comes out of those meetings,” Barlow says.

About a year later, they got an email revealing that a sequel to “Moana” was in the works and the filmmakers were interested in meeting with them.

“We really hit it off because I was the same age as Moana is when we first got hired on this,” Bear says. “And we were going through a big life change and trying to grapple with the change in ourselves, in the world around us and everything. And that’s a big thing that Moana is going through in this movie. So we immediately connected with her and felt like we would do a good job putting ourselves in her shoes and singing her songs.”

The process for “Moana 2” had them in the writer’s room every week for more than two-and-a half years, working on songs as bits and pieces of the animation came in.

“To us, writing musical theater is all about being able to put yourself in the shoes of someone else and honoring their perspective on the world,” Bear says. “And this just made it a lot easier because we could immediately identify with [Moana]. Putting ourselves in her head and trying to understand what she probably felt like at this huge moment in her life, it just flowed.”

“And she becomes an even bigger leader in this film,” Barlow says. “So having to step up to the plate as a songwriter that has never done anything outside of writing a pop song, which is my background, that was how I really connected it. I just had to put myself in the shoes of a Disney heroine, which is a fun challenge.”

Barlow, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., started doing musical theater at a young age, going on to be a competitive dancer. She participated in a scholarship program as a kid where she had the opportunity to meet a pop songwriter and it opened up her world. 

“I was like, ‘oh, this is what I want to do forever,’” she says. She graduated high school early and moved to L.A. at 18 to “chase the songwriter dream.”

Bear, meanwhile, is from Rockford, Ill., and has been playing piano professionally since she was a child. She appeared on “The Ellen Show” starting at the age of 6, performed at the White House and released a jazz album produced by Jones, all as a kid. When she landed at NYU, she discovered film scoring and knew it was what she wanted to pursue. 

“When I heard my music played with an orchestra for the first time, I was like, this is the best in the world. Why wouldn’t anyone want to do it?” she says.

They met through a mutual friend in L.A. who thought they’d be a good songwriting match. 

“I had her over to my house. We watched ‘The Bachelorette,’” Barlow says. 

“And she made cinnamon toast crunch macarons,” Bear adds. 

“We just bonded over being girlies who graduated high school early,” Barlow continues. “And the struggle of living in L.A. as an underage girl,” Bear says.

Writing “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical Album,” which would go on to win them a Grammy, was originally Barlow’s idea. 

“I was at home driving myself crazy because all I was doing was writing pop songs. It was like a crapshoot of songs that I was writing. And I just lost inspiration and found it in the ‘Bridgerton’ TV show,” she says. 

The timing worked out perfectly: for more than six months leading up until then, Bear had been trying to get gigs scoring projects but had been striking out. 

“No one wants to hire a 17-year-old to score their movies,” she says.  “But looking back, if I had gotten any of those jobs, we would’ve never done ‘Bridgerton.’”

The press tour for “Moana 2” has taken them from L.A. to Sydney, Hawaii and London, where they’ve gotten to meet fans of the film and, hopefully, future composers. 

“Age is just a number, but I think writing for a peer is so cool. And if some young person sees us and sees Moana and we all look the same, I think that’s really powerful,” Bear says.