Ryan Gosling has a hit on his hands with “I’m Just Ken” from the Barbie soundtrack, his first single to chart. It helped propel the soundtrack to #2 on Billboard’s albums chart.
And it turns out singing the song himself was his idea!
Via Vanity Fair, Mark Ronson wasn’t sure if the lyrics would fly at first:
When the seven-time Grammy winner first read Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Barbie script, he immediately connected with the Ken they’d written for Ryan Gosling to play. “You really fall in love with this hapless, but immediately sympathetic figure,” Ronson says. “I instantly had this idea for this lyric: ‘I’m just Ken / Anywhere else I’d be a 10.’ It just seemed funny. It felt a little bit emo, like, this poor guy. He’s so hot, but can’t get the time of day.”
After looking everything over, Gosling wanted to perform the song himself, which was a wise move. Again Via VF:
In fact, he related to the song so deeply that he asked to perform it in the film. To accommodate the request, Gerwig rewrote an important scene late in the movie—and asked Ronson and Wyatt to write a score that would lead into the song. (Eventually they agreed to write the score for the rest of the film too.)
From there, Ronson decided to “take it all the way,” bringing in Slash and new Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese to play on the track. Warner Bros. gave fans a sneak preview of Gosling’s performance on the rock power ballad in a new teaser for the film.
Bros are doing covers all over social media, some even extending Slash’s epic guitar solo:
Here’s the full song:
Image: YouTube / Barbie
