Rolling Stone ‘New York Lonely Boy’: Inside That ‘Girls5eva’ Simon & Garfunkel Homage
How the sitcom’s creators and the folk duo the Milk Carton Kids came up with the show’s breakout song
By Heidi Gutman/Peacock
Early this year, Joey Ryan, half of the indie folk duo the Milk Carton Kids, received a text from his friend Sara Bareilles. No surprise there she, Ryan and Ryan’s musical partner Kenneth Pattengale have known each other for over a decade. This time, Bareilles asked if she could pass Ryan’s contact info along to some TV people she was working with. “I said, ‘Sure, of course, what is it?’ ” he recalls. “And she goes, ‘They want someone to do this song and it’s supposed to sound like Simon and Garfunkel.’ And we were like, ‘
One of the most delightful things about
Girls5eva, itself a delightful show, is the fact that there is an accompanying album of music to play on loop once you’re done watching it. The series focuses on a one-hit wonder girl group, Girls5eva, who find themselves once again in the spotlight after an up-and-coming artist samples one of their songs in his latest single.
Unsurprisingly, given that the cast includes Broadway stars like Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Andrew Rannells, among others, the songs often sound surprisingly credible as pop hits, even as their lyrics spoof decades’ worth of musical tropes. We spoke to the show’s creator, Meredith Scardino, and its composer, Jeff Richmond, to discuss the process of bringing the Girls5eva sound to life, and adapted their comments into the song-by-song guide below.
The songs come nearly as fast as the jokes in Girls5eva, Peacock s just-launched streaming sitcom about a B-list late- 90s girl group that gets back together when a present-day rap star named Lil Stinker samples its biggest hit.
Brought to you by the folks behind 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season one s eight episodes are jammed with original music: snippets of old pop tunes by Girls5eva and its turn-of-the-millennium ilk, new songs the women write in hopes of a comeback, a tender and hilarious folk ditty that dramatizes one character s worries about her young son. (The surviving members of Girls5eva, whose late frontwoman is shown only in flashback, are played by Sara Bareilles, Busy Phillips, Paula Pell and Renee Elise Goldsberry; most of the music was written by the series creator, Meredith Scardino, and Jeff Richmond, an executive producer alongside his wife, Tina Fey.)
LISTEN: The Milk Carton Kids Contribute to Girls5Eva Soundtrack theboot.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theboot.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“I can’t believe someone’s letting us do this,” Scardino tells TheWrap
Reid Nakamura | May 6, 2021 @ 5:48 PM
Heidi Gutman/Peacock
Peacock’s new comedy “Girls5Eva” features, naturally, a number of musical performances throughout its eight-episode run, but given pandemic filming restrictions, those numbers look a little bit different than your typical late-’90s, early-’00s pop concert.
“I put one performance in an abandoned mannequin factory because I thought it would give us a few more bodies in crowd shots, which was kind of cool,” series creator Meredith Scardino said in an interview with TheWrap. “It was definitely like throwing me into the deep end as a first-time showrunner, but I was really always amazed at how everybody rallied and made things happen, and I’m really proud of the product that we made.”