After the runaway success of “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie, Mark Ronson has sunken his teeth into a Saturday morning nostalgia empire with the theme song for the new Pop-Tarts movie, Unfrosted.
The all-star collab, “Sweet Morning Heat,” was co-written by none other than the film’s star, director, co-screenwriter, and co-producer, Jerry Seinfeld. Take that, Bradley Cooper!
Performed by Meghan Trainor and Jimmy Fallon, “Sweet Morning Heat” was written by Ronson, his producing partner Andrew Wyatt, Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Maxime Picard, Clément Picard, Trainor, and Fallon.
Featuring lyrics like, “There’s different flavors for no reason / ‘Cause you know though they pretty much all taste the same,” “Sweet Morning Heat” is vying for earworm supremacy this summer.
“Almost three months ago, I got an audio text from Jerry Seinfeld saying, ‘Jimmy, I can’t wait to do your show, it’s going to be fun. We just finished editing the movie Unfrosted – it’s very funny, and I think you’ll love it,” Fallon tells EW. “Jerry says, ‘I wrote a song with Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, and we were thinking of who should sing this, and you were the first person on everyone’s list — you can sing, but you also understand the comedy behind the song. It’s called ‘Sweet Morning Heat,’ and I think you’d be perfect. Let me know if you’re interested.'”
Fallon agreed immediately, and Seinfeld sent him an audio file with Wyatt singing the lyrics. “I started listening to it on my walk to work,” Fallon recalls. “I’m going down 6th Avenue, and I just sort of started dancing. It’s a bop. It’s really a good jam. And it’s funny. It made me laugh.”
And he wasn’t the only one who saw the song’s potential: “When I first played it for The Tonight Show and Questlove (which I probably wasn’t supposed to), Questlove was freaking out and was like, ‘What? That’s great, actually – Jerry wrote that? Jerome Allen Seinfeld wrote that?'”
Ronson also joined the project after getting a text from Seinfeld. “I called Andrew, my writing partner, and told him, ‘Jerry Seinfeld texted that he wants to write a song with us for his film.’ And that was it,” the Oscar winner tells EW. “He’s a legend. He could’ve asked us to remix the ‘Macarena’ and we would’ve done it.”
“We loved sitting in a room writing lyrics with Jerry,” he adds. “Writing lyrics can be an arduous pain in the ass, Andrew and I can argue over a single preposition for an hour, so when he left after the first session, we were sure we’d never hear from him again. And then he called the next day to say how much he enjoyed it. It was a lot of back and forth, and he rewrote some verse lyrics four or five times. But it was always a good vibe at the end of the day.”
As for how Trainor got involved, Fallon says Seinfeld threw out the idea of making the song a duet. “I’d just done a Christmas song, ‘Wrap Me Up,’ with Meghan Trainor for my Christmas album that’s coming out this year, and I’d had the best experience with her. I said, ‘I loved working with her; she’s such a pro — would you guys be down with that?’ Jerry was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Mark says that would be amazing, I love it!’ So I texted Meghan Trainor and was like, here’s an idea for us.” Fallon adds that he also knew Trainor “has a great sense of humor” and “would get into this.”
“Meghan blew us away,” Ronson says of the Grammy winner. “Her vocals, harmonies, and phrasing brought more to the song than we could’ve imagined. There couldn’t have been two better energies to bring this song to life.”
While the lyrics were written before Fallon joined the project, he did some improving — though he admits not all of his ideas made the final cut. “I did have some lines that probably got cut from the song too, like ‘I like them sushi style,’ like I eat my Pop-Tarts raw, which didn’t quite land, but I was trying all sorts of things to make Mark laugh,” Fallon says.
Still, the comedian is honored to be a part of “Sweet Morning Heat.” “I think it’s really cool, and I think the world needs a love dance song about Pop-Tarts,” he says. “So it will be fun to hear it. And who knows, maybe we’ll do it live on the show.”
Seinfeld’s feature directorial debut, Unfrosted follows the great breakfast pastry war of 1963, in which Kellogg’s and Post competed to see who would be the first to get a poppable tart to market. The film also stars Melissa McCarthy, Hugh Grant, Peter Dinklage, Amy Schumer, Christian Slater, James Marsden, and a cast of comedic all-stars that’s too long to list.
Unfrosted premieres on Netflix May 3.
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