There isn’t a song on the planet more popular right now than “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” The breakout track from Disney’s animated smash-hit Encanto, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has been reaching heights that Disney songs haven’t achieved since the early 1990s. Everyone around the world is singing along to “Bruno,” so it may come as a surprise to learn that Encanto songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda initially wrote it as a pitch to prove to Disney that all of the film’s characters were important.
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During a recent interview with Collider, Miranda talked about one of the biggest hurdles with Encanto was convincing those in power to keep all of the characters. Executives believed that there were too many and that the film would get bogged down. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” was Miranda’s way of showing how it could all work, and the song went on to be Encanto‘s biggest hit.
“It’s straight-up crazy, because it’s an ensemble number with characters that are not really the main character, each getting solos. They overlap, and you kind of have to have seen the movie to understand what’s going on. So it’s just the least likely candidate for breakout success possible,” Miranda explained. “I couldn’t have engineered a more unlikely success, but again, it gets back to the biggest obstacle in this movie was hanging onto as many of these characters as possible and revealing them to each other in interesting new ways. I pitched this song as a proof of concept that we could hold them all, because I said, if we do a gossip number, we can hear from the other characters who aren’t going to get their own solos.”
“I can write a Dolores verse, I can write a Camilo verse, and we can hear what their musical voices sound like without devoting the real estate of an entire tune to them,” he continued. “That was literally the pitch. And the side result of that is you’ve got Camilo stans, and you’ve got Dolores stans, and it became actually this on-ramp for all these different folks, everyone has a different part. It’s a karaoke number where everyone gets to, it becomes an all skate. I’m so thrilled and happily surprised by it, but it also, it makes people want to watch the movie so they can understand what the song’s about.”
Little did Miranda know, his “proof of concept” track would go on to become the most popular Disney song since Aladdin was released, rising even higher on the charts than Frozen‘s “Let It Go.”
What’s your favorite song from the Encanto soundtrack? Let us know in the comments!
