Six years after its release, the Disney musical Frozen remains the most popular animated film of all time. The teaser trailer for the November sequel, Frozen II, has drawn more than 36 million views since appearing on YouTube in February. If you wer

"Let It Go"

April 05, 2019

Let the storm rage on

Six years after its release, the Disney musical Frozen remains the most popular animated film of all time. The teaser trailer for the November sequel, Frozen II, has drawn more than 36 million views since appearing on YouTube in February.

If you were neither the parent of young children nor a connoisseur of animated musicals in 2013, it’s hard to explain the cultural force that was Frozen’s signature ballad. “Let It Go” was the perpetual soundtrack of children’s play dates, car rides, and birthday parties. It stalked your days and haunted your dreams.

Voiced by Broadway star Idina Menzel in the role of Elsa, a lonely young Scandinavian queen with great hair and the unfortunate tendency to shoot ice from her palms when stressed out, the song is both impossible and irresistible. It tells of a young woman in the throes of discovering and embracing her powers, and is belted out after Elsa flees her kingdom to live in exile in the snowy mountains, where she constructs a fabulously intricate ice castle and ditches the accoutrements (glove, cloak, tiara, human company) of court life.

An analysis of streams of Disney songs on Spotify finds that “Let It Go” does indeed stand alone, as distinct and indomitable as an ice castle on a hill. With 280.5 million listens, “Let It Go” is the most-streamed song from the modern Disney musical catalogue, an era that began with the 1989 release of The Little Mermaid. Why can’t we let it go?

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AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

By the digits

$1.27 billion: Amount Frozen grossed in global ticket sales

243: Spots the name Elsa jumped in UK girls’ name rankings between 2013–2014

8%: Jump in foreign tourism to the western coast of Norway, which resembles Frozen‘s setting, between 2014 and 2016

4%: Jump in Disney shares after the company confirmed in 2015 a Frozen sequel was in the works

10.9 million: Copies “Let It Go” sold in 2014 as the year’s fifth best-selling song

94.3 million: Additional streams “Let It Go” has over the second-most popular Disney song, the ballad “How Far I’ll Go” from the 2016 film Moana

7.5 million: Views on YouTube of the “Let It Go” cover by the French metalcore band Betraying the Martyrs

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Origin story

"Terrifying and exhilarating and a little bit selfish"

“Let It Go” was written by songwriting team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, a Brooklyn, NY-based husband-wife duo who had written previously for Broadway shows and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh. (They’re responsible for seven other songs from Frozen, including the equally sticky but not nearly as majestic “Love Is an Open Door.”)

The story outline they received originally had a slot for “Elsa’s Badass Song.” As they set about envisioning what a tumultuous ballad fit for an ice queen would sound like, they turned for inspiration to singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann, Avril Lavigne, and Lady Gaga.

“I got very emo in the writing of this,” Anderson-Lopez told the LA Times. “We thought, ‘This is an artist trying to find her own voice.’ We tapped into, ‘What is that experience where you stop caring what everybody thinks and start expressing what’s really in you?’ It’s terrifying and exhilarating and a little bit selfish.”

Later, people involved in the making of the movie would call the song, which marks the pivotal point in the plot, a pivotal point in the creative process. “The minute we heard the song the first time, I knew that I had to rewrite the whole movie,” screenwriter and co-director Jennifer Lee told the New York Times.

The window into the glittery wasteland of Elsa’s tortured soul added complexity to the character and made her more empathetic than a traditional fairytale bad sister (as exemplified by the character in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” on which Frozen is based).

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Quotable

“Frozen both honors and subverts our expectations of a princess movie. There’s a handsome prince, but he’s the villain. True love is the answer, but familial love, not romantic. Tropes have their place, but Frozen manages to refocus them.”

—Screenwriter John August to the New York Times

"Like a drug" for toddlers

At the height of “Let It Go”-mania, the New York Times talked to parents about the transformative effects the ballad seemed to have on their toddlers: “It was like jump-starting a car, connecting little bits of her brain that fire every system at once.” Another said: “It’s like a drug. I only use it on days we need to be somewhere and he’s still sleeping.”

Charted

A chart showing the top streaming Disney songs by year.

Streaming isn’t an ideal metric of Disney popularity—megahits such as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast had their heyday long before the dawn of Spotify, so the full reach of “Hakuna Matata” is probably not captured in the platform’s metrics. But the top-40 most-streamed Disney songs as of March 10, 2019 are a pretty good indicator of which Disney anthems have resonated most in the last decade or so.

Million-dollar question

Why is "Let it Go" so damn popular?

Musically, the song ranges over two octaves, which puts it beyond the reach of virtually all but professionally-trained singers, says Christopher Wiley, a music lecturer at the University of Surrey. (It was written specifically for Menzel, who famously starred in Broadway’s Wicked and sang on that musical’s official recording.)

The chorus is strong, and that climactic note at the end (“Let the storm rage ooooooon!”) is unforgettable, he says. “But in other respects I’m at a loss to explain why ‘Let It Go’ is so wildly popular,” Wiley wrote to Quartz. “I also wonder whether a child whose age is in single digits can really grasp the full complexities of lyrics like ‘My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around.’”

But as Vasco Hexel of London’s Royal College of Music pointed out, “Let It Go” is a song tailor-made for the streaming age: The arrangement is far more economical than the over-the-top excesses of other Disney songs, and Menzel’s vocals have an accessible, almost conversational style.

It also has the classic traits of an earworm, as music psychology researcher Lassi A. Liikkanen told Today. It’s simple, repetitive, and yet filled with moments of intriguing incongruity into which the brain can’t help but endlessly fall—as if it were a foiled snowy monster and the song were an icy crevasse.

Read the Obsession on earworms

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Williams College music professor W. Anthony Sheppard has a much deeper analysis of the intricate way the mechanics of the song weave with the “emotional winter” of the plot.

Reuters/Bob Strong

Pop quiz

Which piano balladeer was Anderson-Lopez most influenced by for “Let It Go”?

Tori AmosJohn LegendRegina SpektorBilly Joel

Correct. “If I was influenced by anything, it was Tori Amos, because I love her and I think she really understands having a secret,” she told writer Gregory E. Miller.

Incorrect.

If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.

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Quotable

“I see Elsa.

She looks like fear.”

—A 4-year-old reviews the Frozen 2 trailer

A deep dive into "Let It Go"-ology

Sam Zerin is a doctoral student in historical musicology at New York University who also runs the blog DisneyMusicTheory.com. Asked by Quartz to share his thoughts, Zerin offered the following:

“Consider the song’s position in the film’s narrative. Elsa, whose entire childhood was clouded by trauma, has just seen her worst fears come true. Her kingdom fears her; she’s been called a ‘monster’ in public; and she has fled to the mountains for a lifetime of solitude. Thus, the music begins in a minor key, in a low register, quietly, with a descending, low-energy melody.

“This is all significant: in Disney music, minor keys often indicate sadness, low registers indicate darkness, descending melodies indicate loss, and the low energy makes it feel like she’s muttering to herself. But by the end of the song, all of this has drastically changed. Consider the bridge section (‘my power flurries through the air into the ground’): the melody is made up of rising scales, the orchestration is super high-energy, and it culminates in a final chorus that is loud, major-key, full of upward leaps in the melody, and has a super-high final note.

“Again, this is all musically significant. The transformation from a minor key to a major key indicates triumph; the shift from quietly muttering to loudly belting shows her newfound confidence; the rising scales bring her from the depths of her sorrows to the heights of her pride; the upward leaps in her melody indicate excitement, hope, and motivation. . . .

“And then there’s the close synchronization of the music with the fabulous animation. The animation is so emotionally stirring and memorable. That wide open landscape in the opening, showing how tiny and alone Elsa is… the magical construction of the icy bridge and then the castle… her final exit into the fiery sunrise, a symbol of a bright tomorrow… it’s hard for me to imagine any of this imagery without the accompanying music.

“When I imagine the opening landscape, I hear the sadly descending melody and the sparse orchestration. When I imagine Elsa raising the castle from the ground, I also hear her rising scales that make her voice soar higher and higher. When I imagine her walking proudly into the sunrise, I hear her belt out that final super-high note. So the success of the music works hand in hand with the success of the animation: the two become so intimately connected in one’s memory of this scene that remembering one serves as a reminder of the other.”

Zerin’s analysis is as sound as any we’ve heard, though there’s also a spirited discussion going in the responses to his question to Twitter on the subject. Let the storm rage on.

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Poll

Are you a “Let It Go” fan?

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Today’s email was written by Dan Kopf and Corinne Purtill, edited by Jessanne Collins, and produced by Luiz Romero.

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