Review
Genre and Mood
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone sing City of Stars as a duet in La La Land: a soundtrack song with jazz inflections and the pace of a ballad, bittersweet, romantic and full of longing. Its composer, Justin Hurwitz, called the tone hopeful but melancholy at the same time, and the duet carries both feelings at once.
Song Summary
Hurwitz wrote the melody and Benj Pasek and Justin Paul the words. It began as a melody called Ballad, meant for Emma Stone’s Mia; Pasek and Paul wrote much of the lyric on a plane, polished it late into the night and sang it at Hurwitz’s apartment the next morning, and Hurwitz said that what they sang that morning is pretty much exactly what is in the film. After the first read-through Damien Chazelle felt Sebastian’s voice was missing, and the song went to Gosling’s character. Hurwitz has called it a song about yearning.
Musical Breakdown
No source lays out this recording’s form, so this page follows the voices.
Verse 1
Sebastian has already sung the melody alone, earlier in the film, on the Hermosa Beach Pier. In the duet it returns at the piano, the instrument the character plays, with the jazz inflections Hurwitz says come from him.
Main Section
Mia joins him, and the solo becomes a conversation. Variety describes the duet as simply staged and piano-based, a deliberate contrast with the bigger numbers around it.
Outro
On the soundtrack album, the ninth of fifteen tracks, the duet ends after two and a half minutes; streaming services credit it as City Of Stars - From “La La Land” Soundtrack.
Concepts in Focus
As a soundtrack song, City of Stars has to work inside a story. In the film the duet was sung live, not lip-synced: Gosling and Stone sang in one room while Hurwitz played an electric keyboard in another, feeding them through earpieces. Chazelle shot it in one afternoon, dropped a crane for a Steadicam, and kept a take with Stone laughing in it. Gosling took piano lessons six days a week; Hurwitz said there were no hand doubles.
The album holds three versions of the melody, each an alternate version with its own job: Gosling alone (1:51), this duet (2:30), and City of Stars (Humming), credited to Hurwitz featuring Stone.
Artistic Context
Hurwitz, Chazelle’s college roommate, found the melody one summer at his parents’ house in Wisconsin, after many demos. The soundtrack, produced by Hurwitz, Marius de Vries and Steven Gizicki, came out on Interscope on 9 December 2016; the duet followed as a single on 3 March 2017. For another star singing in character, hear James Newton Howard, Jennifer Lawrence – The Hanging Tree.
Impact and Reception
City of Stars won Best Original Song at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards and was nominated for a Grammy. The soundtrack topped the UK albums chart and reached number two on the Billboard 200; the single reached number 53 in the UK and number one on Japan’s radio chart. Listen to the solo first, then the duet.
