Though she is an indie pop superstar in her own right, Lykke Li says writing a song for someone else to sing was her “dream in life.” So when her longtime friend and colleague Andrew Wyatt reached out for her help on a finale song for “The Last Showgirl,” the Pamela Anderson vehicle, about a veteran Las Vegas performer having to come to terms with her revue shuttering, Li was happy to oblige.
Over breakfast at the famed Tower Bar in Los Angeles, she and Wyatt reflected on the road that led them to their Golden Globes and Critics Choice Award-nominated song for “The Last Showgirl” titled “Beautiful That Way,” written with and performed by Miley Cyrus. The pair have known each other for decades, having both worked extensively in Sweden (Wyatt with his band Miike Snow,) even having co-founded an artists collective and record label called Ingrid in 2012. “We feel very lucky,” said Wyatt. “We know people who are really talented and really successful, but not competitive with each other, and not really just out for themselves. That’s kind of rare in this business.” Li agreed, saying “Everyone’s always trying to bring each other into whatever everyone’s doing.”
It may be a Swedish thing. “When you’re in Sweden, which is so different from being here, it’s really not about the biz. Here, it’s like ‘Managers, splits, this, that.’ In the back of everyone’s mind, they have to pay the cleaner, the gardener, the mortgage, the baby mama, the this, the that. In Sweden, it’s literally like, ‘Let’s just hang and have fun and make music,’” said the singer-songwriter.
Hence why Sweden not just plays a role in how they met, but how Wyatt and Li began working on the song soundtracking the end of Gia Coppola’s acclaimed film. In order to convince the recent Oscar nominee to be composer, the first thing the director sent Wyatt were some stills, with an invitation to pop by its speedy 18 day shoot in Las Vegas. He would end up watching the final cut the day after performing his Best Original Song nominee “I’m Just Ken” at the 2024 Academy Awards. “I literally had just finished the whole ‘Barbie’ chapter of my life and then went straight into this.”
Upon first watch, he noticed “There was this Dean Martin song at the end of the film, and I said to Gia, ‘I’d love to try to put an original song in here.’ And she was like, ‘Ok, cool. What do you got?’ Right before I went to Sweden, I was [in LA] working with an orchestra on some of the big band music, that’s in the show that’s in the film. And there were some great players. So, I just drew up a chart and they played through it a couple of times, and that became, what’s the backing of the track.”
When preparing to expand upon the track he had laid down, Wyatt said “I was also aware that the topics that this film was dealing with were not something that I could write lyrics for because it’s just different for guys, moving on in this business or getting up there in years.” It was Wyatt who was hesitant about approaching Li to write a song meant for another singer, but the timing happened to be perfect, as she was also in Sweden, working on new music that was adjacent to what “The Last Showgirl” explores.
Though at the time she was not keen on what she had written so far for the album she’s working on, she described her line of thematic thinking as “‘It’s closing time. The curtain’s falling…’ I was at that stage in my songwriting. I was so interested in that kind of last dance. So then, when we spoke about the film, that’s literally all I’m thinking about and interested in.”
Wyatt shared some of the stills with her that he had gotten from Coppola, and the lyrics poured out. “I get some words intuitively. So it was like, ‘Oh, what’s a symbol for female showmanship or even just a female life with so much beauty and pain, love and pain, this duality,” said Li. Having learned English from watching “Baywatch” reruns growing up in Portugal, the musician was also building off of her perception of Anderson, much like how the film does. “What is a sex symbol or a symbol of a woman? When I was a child, it was her in the red bathing suit. So what’s the symbol for that kind of woman, that their beauty is also their pain. The rose is that. It’s so beautiful, but it has its thorns, and it’s very feminine. So then we went on that track.”
Given that Wyatt is also a longtime friend of Cyrus’s, who has already done a bit of work on her upcoming album, the composer had pitched the recent Grammy winner on singing a song for the film, but did not have something to show her until the very last minute. She was “deeply ensconced in her own album process” and he was exhausting himself trying to complete the score. “I thought maybe we weren’t going to get an original song after all, because we were kind of really down to the wire,” he said. “The film locked on September 4, or something, and we wrote the song and finished the song in August.”
The person who actually helped seal the deal on Cyrus’s involvement was “The Last Showgirl” star Jamie Lee Curtis, who knew of the singer’s early chats about the film with Wyatt, and used the opportunity of them both being inducted in as Disney Legends at the same ceremony to say “You have to do a song for this, Miley.” Wyatt added, “the next day, Miley actually reached out to me and that’s when we got the ball really rolling.”
Ultimately, Wyatt sent over a demo that actually had him singing the climactic track, and Cyrus made a few changes. “She wrote some words and wrote some different melodies in certain spots, and then did it at her place with her engineer, and then sent me the vocal back, and then I went and wrote the string arrangement on top of it, to support the vocal and that’s what’s in the film.”
“She is the ultimate showgirl,” said Li of Cyrus. “Miley also has this thing where she’s 30, but she sounds [older]… It’s like how Bob Dylan used to sound 80 when he was 22. She just has all these layers of experience and spiritual transformations that have happened and happened and happened. And so, she has all those incredible layers to her voice, but a toughness and a resilience underneath that, which gives her a lot of soul,” said Wyatt.
The process of listening to someone else sing Best Original Song contender “Beautiful That Way” was gratifying to Li in surprising ways. “I felt like I’ve never been taken seriously as a writer,” she said. “I have been writing songs forever. But there’s something different. Now it’s a woman singing it again, but she has a bit more lifetimes on her voice.” Li’s had a similar experience hearing covers of her hit “I Follow Rivers.” “That’s the thing that makes me the most proud, when people send their versions. I’m like, ‘Oh, that means I am a songwriter somehow.’”
According to Wyatt, “Every artist brings different things to a song, and every arrangement brings something new out of a song.” “That’s when you know that it’s a good song,” replied Li. “I feel like a great song is actually a baton that you pass on.” To see “Beautiful That Way” within the context of the film only makes the song feel even more timeless. “The powerful thing about [pairing] image and music, it’s like you’re creating a sense memory for the viewer,” said Li. “When you get it right, there’s nothing more. It’s like all the layers into the soul, memories.”
“The Last Showgirl,” a Roadside Attractions release is now in theaters in Los Angeles, with a national release to follow on Friday, January 10.