At the premiere of the Hulu musical comedy TV series, "Up Here," two-time EGOT winner Robert "Bobby" Lopez and his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, said they saw their love reflected on screen. While the new series isn't based on the song writers’ real-life courtship, "these characters have a lot of us in them," explained Bobby. 

Set in 1999, the eight episode series follows Lindsay (Mae Whitman) and Miguel (Carlos Valdes) as they fall in love while navigating old memories, fears and fantasies in their heads. It’s based on a musical the Lopezs premiered in San Diego in 2015. 

"We put so much of our love for each other into this show," Kristen told GRAMMY.com over Zoom. Adds Bobby, "She was kind of on the rebound. And I was just grateful to be able to date anyone because I was living with my parents at the time. We didn't know it was fate at first, but it became clearer and clearer." 

In the years since, the couple have earned a slew of awards for their combined efforts: Two Oscars (Frozen’s "Let it Go" and "Remember Me" from Coco); an Emmy for "Wandavision’s" "Agatha All Along; and GRAMMY Awards for Best Song Written For Visual Media and Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media. Bobby Lopez picked up an additional golden gramophone for Best Musical Theater Album at the 54th GRAMMYs for his work on The Book Of Mormon.  

In honor of the new series — for which the Lopezes wrote 21 original songs — GRAMMY.com spoke with the couple about the stories behind five of their greatest hits. 

"To be clear about it, we're not trying to make hits," Bobby said firmly. "We’re not Max Martin. We don't write pop songs. We're telling a story. If we're lucky enough to have a hit, which is a rarity in this day and age in terms of musical theater, it's because the audience reacts. it's always due, in part, to the story." 

"Who Am I and Who Are You?" ("Up Here") 

Bobby: We spent a good year working on the story, the characters and the concept of the show. It was around March 2021 when we wrote the songs for the first two episodes. The rest of the songs we had to cram into about four months. 

Kristen: It's a song that's about being right at the beginning of a relationship, when there's somebody very exciting. With each step forward, you're creating a trajectory that could either end in a 20 year marriage or end [right there] with a random guy.

[Director] Tommy [Kail] had this brilliant idea of building the sets next to each other, even though [the characters are] in completely separate places. For this one moment, while they're singing in harmony with each other, they're right next to each other. They are only separated by the divide of the scrim.

"Let It Go" (Frozen)

Bobby: It's so long ago that we wrote it that it's almost like we didn't write it. At this point, I'm just sort of a fan of it. 

Kristen: It belongs to everybody now. 

Bobby: The entire story was different when we first came on. Elsa was the villain like in the classic Disney story. She had blue skin and blue hair. The younger sister was the prim and proper one — the perfect princess a little bit obsessed with the details of planning her wedding to Hans. They were sort of unlikable. Elsa was very vindictive. 

Kristen: It was a great live action, but there wasn't the joy and the strong feelings that you'd want to hear songs about. So, we completely revamped the characters. The second child gets to be more of a wild kid. It's the first child who gets the pressure. We created an outline from there. 

There was this moment we called "Elsa’s badass song" where we knew she was going to transform from her perfectionism into the Snow Queen. We started talking about what were moments like that in our own lives where we had so much pressure that the idea of actually the whole thing falling apart would have been a relief.

Bobby: I imagined if I messed up on the SATs and didn’t get into Yale and my whole life was over. That’s how I related to her. You'd feel devastated. You'd feel destroyed but there might be a little spark of relief that the weight of the world is off your shoulder. 

Kristen: That really resonated with me because I was raising two small children and feeling so much pressure from every walk of life: Being the perfect mom, being the perfect wife, having a cool house and the right clothes and being the right weight and having a great career. 

I imagined if that fell apart and I got to hang out in my yoga pants and drink chardonnay for a day. We were walking in Prospect Park and I jumped on a picnic table and tried to imagine what that would feel like. We wrote the rest of the song that afternoon.

Bobby: [The lyric "let it go"] was Kristen’s pitch. Kristen said she wanted to pitch the song title "Let It Go." I said, "Yeah, I get it. I think it’s a little on the nose but why don’t we wait." Kristen wisely ignored me and everyone was like ‘yeah!’"

Kristen: There are very few moments in life where I will go against something we agree on in a public meeting. But in this one case, it was just right. I'm glad I did. 

"Into the Unknown" (Frozen II)

Kristen: Bobby thinks really hard about what is the role of the music going to be in every project. In "Avenue Q," it's about lessons. In "Frozen," every song is about love. And in Frozen II, every song is about growth.

 Bobby: There's no such thing as "Let It Go" part II. You can’t write a sequel to a song. It doesn’t work. In Frozen, Ana is the protagonist…in "Frozen II", it's Elsa’s story. "Into The Unknown" is Elsa's "want" song. We wanted to make it a duet but we didn't have a character for her to sing it with. So we invented this voice that was haunting her and calling her away. It became a mystery of who the voice is.

No one said ["make another hit"] to us and we wanted to create a successful story. We were just told to do it the same way we did the first one: let's make a great story with these two of these characters that we love.

"Remember Me" (Coco)

Kristen: "Remember Me," had to be both a lullaby and also a tour-de-force signature song for a bombastic, narcissistic performer. 

Bobby: We listened to every single hit song that had ever come out of Mexico, and really did our research about the different styles of Mexican music. We're not Mexican. I'm Filipino, and Kristen is Swedish and Irish. It was a process of downloading everything there was to learn. Then we tried to forget about it and write the song we needed to write. 

There was a puzzle-nature to it, because the lyrics had to mean two things and the music had to work in two ways. It had to be an uptempo, slightly smarmy, flashy, signature closing song. At the same time — when you slowed it down, simplified the arrangement with keeping every note of the tune the same and keeping every chord of the progression the same — it needed to transform into something far more sweet, intimate and from the heart. That was the trick of it.

I like to wait, before I write anything, before I play anything, before I feel like this could be it. We had waited and waited and waited. It was really time to write it. When I sat down to the piano after we got the kids out to school, I was still not dressed.

Kristen: He was in his boxers.

I just wrote the lyrics on the F train. But I think an important piece of this is that we're songwriters who had to leave our children at home in New York and go to Burbank to work on Frozen and Coco. We were actually writing little original lullabies for our own girls that they could sing with their babysitter. So it was very close to my heart. It was this idea of leaving a song that's like a bedtime hug for your child. So it really flowed from there.

Bobby: Something that people might not know or understand is that the timeline of when we wrote that song was very close to when we wrote, "Let It Go." We were working on both movies at once. It was just a great moment in our lives. I guess we were really feeling very inspired having young kids. It will do that to you when you're writing for Disney.

"Agatha All Along" ("WandaVision") 

Kristen: "Agatha All Along'' surprised us and came out of nowhere. It was something about the pandemic and this moment in January 2021. We were completely isolated after so many months. We, as a country, were watching this show about a woman who was also isolated. 

Bobby: She’s literally living in a bubble. 

Kristen: That's one of the reasons that "Wandavision" hit in such a big way. "Wandavision" was the most fun job ever. We, as Gen Xers, grew up watching these TV shows. If you were sick, you started with "I Love Lucy" in the morning and by eight o'clock you were watching "Family Ties." So it was in our DNA. 

Bobby: It was a treat to finally have a break from writing musical theater numbers where you have to be so involved with the creation of the story. With this, it's just music playing in the background. We had so much freedom to just execute.

Kristen: It was called "That’s So Agatha" in the script. It was supposed to be a "That’s So Raven" idea. We were in college when "That’s So Raven" happened so we didn't have that in our musical DNA so much. What we did have in our musical DNA was "The Addams Family" and "The Munsters" — all of these themes that were kind of Goth, camp and jazz inspired. That's how we found "Agatha All Along." And the most important thing was also matching Katherine Hahn’s energy.

Bobby: The funny thing was, when we read all the scripts at the beginning of the process, we were bowled over by it. But we kind of forgot a lot of the details. We knew that Agatha was the villain but we didn't know exactly why. We forgot what it was that she was doing all along. 

We asked Marvel before we started writing it, "What did Agatha do again?" They explained it to us and we said we were not going to put any of that in. We don’t understand that. We are just going to write that she did it all along. It was her.

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Nominations for the 72nd Annual Tony Awards were announced on May 1, with a trio of wildly popular musicals leading the way. The Tina Fey-penned "Mean Girls" musical and "SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical" each earned a whopping 12 nominations. Following close behind, "The Band's Visit" earned 11 nominations. All three of the top nominated shows are up for Best Musical along with "Frozen," which earned three nominations.

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The "SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical" nomination for Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written For The Theatre includes a host of GRAMMY-winning artists, such as Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, John Legend, T.I., Cyndi Lauper, and Lady Antebellum.

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The Tony Awards also announced their recipients of honors in non-competitive categories, including a Special Tony Award that will be bestowed to Bruce Springsteen for his one-man show "Springsteen On Broadway." A full list of the nominees and recipients can be found on Playbill.

This year's Tony Awards will be hosted by GRAMMY nominees Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban. Bareilles was nominated for the GRAMMY for Best Musical Theater Album at the 59th GRAMMY Awards for Waitress. The show will air live on Sunday, June 10 from Radio City Music Hall in New York City on CBS at 8 p.m. ET.

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In a repeat from the Oscar success of Frozen four years ago, the movie Coco won on March 4 for Best Animated Feature as well as for Best Original Song. The previous winning song was titled "Let It Go" and encouraged self-expression. This year's "Remember Me" is an instruction that will be obeyed, as songwriting couple Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez must now consider whether there is room for their second Oscar on their awards shelves.

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At the 57th GRAMMY Awards, the Frozen composers won for Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media and for "Let It Go," which won Best Song Written For Visual Media. Robert Lopez previously had won Best Musical Theater Album at the 54th GRAMMY Awards for composing The Book Of Mormon together with "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

The acronym EGOT stands for Emmy, GRAMMY, Oscar, and Tony, the four major entertainment industry awards voted on by peer professionals. Thanks to his track record of Broadway and television success, this second Oscar win puts Robert Lopez over the top to become the first person ever to win two of each award.

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Robert Lopez has won three Tony Awards for his stage work, Best Book Of A Musical and Best Original Score for The Book of Mormon and a previous Best Original Score for the imaginative Avenue Q, which combined human actors with puppets. He twice won the Daytime Emmy Award in Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for "The Wonder Pets," which ran for four seasons.

Getting The Latest Music News Just Got Easier. Introducing: GRAMMY Bot. Find it On KIK and Facebook Messenger

The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition has officially launched, and it will work to bring musical opportunities to students nationwide, especially in underserved communities, starting with Nashville, Tenn., Philadelphia and New York City.

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A group of more than 30 organizations, including National Association for Music Education, the NAMM Foundation, VH1 Save the Music Foundation, and Lang Lang International Music Foundation, the Coalition will provide strategic funding and services to its targeted school populations.

"The big dream was what if every young person had the opportunity to be involved with music through the public school system," Recording Academy President/CEO Neil Portnow told Billboard. "What if we were able to pool our energy, efforts and resources with others in the music industry who are also doing fine work in music education to attack this big dream? The partnerships we are creating with school districts, teachers, parents, and youth are designed to drive systemic change across geographies and communities nationwide."

One of the organization's first initiatives is a partnership with Disney*Pixar's new film, Coco, which sees a 12-year-old guitarist chase his dreams of being a great musician. Walt Disney Studios, GMEC and Berklee College of Music's Berklee Pulse will collaborate to provide educational materials. In addition, Disney*Pixar will donate 300 Cordoba guitars with Guitar Center providing an additional 300 guitars to be delivered to partner schools before the end of the year.

This first initiative is just the beginning of what the GMEC hopes is a long-term effort to bring the far-reaching benefits of having a music education to students nationwide.

"The benefits of music education extend far beyond the classroom," says GMEC Executive Director Dr. Lee Whitmore. "By increasing the number of students actively making music, we're fostering the development of essential cognitive and social skills that better prepare them for success as well as beginning a lifelong appreciation of music."

Berklee Online Adds Master's Programs For Music Production, Business

"I feel I’ve always been in the business of shedding labels, but the world is doubling down," says Ani DiFranco. 

The GRAMMY-winning singer has long been heralded as rebel-rousing and outspoken. On her latest release, Unprecedented Sh!t, DiFranco continues to counter the ideologically divided world, and the labels it imposes. The album is DiFranco's 23rd, and arrives May 17.

It's not coincidental that Unprecedented Sh!t arrives in the midst of pre-election campaigning, affirming DiFranco's drive to use music as a vehicle to protest deep-rooted inequality and prejudices in America and beyond. On "Baby Roe," DiFranco reaffirms women's right to agency over her body and her access to a safe abortion. (DiFranco’s charitable foundation Righteous Babe has long supported women’s rights initiatives, including the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and National Institute of Public Health.) Reproductive freedom is "an essential civil right, the centerpiece of what it means to be free as a woman in society," she says.

DiFranco has never shied from wearing her heart on her sleeve and championing her political views. Pre-election in 2016, she penned Binary, an album that explored themes of women’s right to choose, non-violence, and the fundamental necessity to coexist despite different views. The album epitomized what fans have long known: DiFranco’s politics are personal, delivered with a vulnerability and earnestness that gives her songs incredible resonance. 

She is a lyricist who has always worn her heart on her sleeve and, in 2019, brought that candor to a bestselling memoir. No Walls and the Recurring Dream detailed her Buffalo, New York childhood and adventures as a young folk-punk musician, a music label founder (Righteous Babe Records in 1989), a wife and mother. DiFranco continued to evolve post-memoir; in 2021, she dropped new album Revolutionary Love, and in 2023, released the 25th anniversary edition of Little Plastic Castle. She is, unsurprisingly, determined to rally the disillusioned into using their vote and their voices in the face of some, well, unprecedented s—. Indeed, she’s been writing her second children’s book, Show Up and Vote, to be released on Aug. 27.

But making record after record, touring and running her Righteous Babe Records (founded in 1989) hasn’t stopped DiFranco from exploring new artistic territory. She made her Broadway debut in the popular musical "Hadestown" in February this year, nearly 15 years after creating its original studio concept album.

DiFranco was life-altering for a generation of teenagers in the 1990s, perhaps peaking with 1995's Dilate. DiFranco’s spirited, down-to-earth delivery and fearlessness felt empowering, especially when the radio was otherwise transfixed by male-dominated grunge bands. DiFranco sang about burgeoning and disintegrating relationships. Her albums were documents of a buzzing, raucous city life; tales that played out in Chicago, New York, on trains, in shabby apartments, in cafes and bars. Not until "Red Letter Year" in 2008 did listeners hear a more relaxed DiFranco, who moved to the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans the same year.

A transition from thriving in a bustling urban environment to the remoteness of her Louisiana home, which she shares with her 15-year-old daughter and 11-year old son, altered DiFranco's perspective. Today, DiFranco is prone to discussing the consciousness of rocks, plants and wildlife as easily as reproductive freedom. This spiritual awareness and a grounded observance of modern America presents both lyrically and musically on Unprecedented Sh!t, which seamlessly blends organic instrumental and vocal tracks with dissonant, warped synth effects.

DiFranco is unafraid to talk about aging and contemplating new ways to make music, now that she has finished a 23-album "series" of her life thus far. She is, of course, "an artist ‘til I die," so there is no risk that Unprecedented Sh!t is the last we will hear of DiFranco.

Ahead of the release of Unprecedented Sh!t, Ani DiFranco spoke with GRAMMY.com about her latest album, her Broadway debut, and a career of DIY achievements.

You have released 22 albums before this, which is a huge body of work for any artist. How is Unprecedented Sh!t a continuation of those ideas and stories, and how does it diverge?

In some sense it’s a continuation, and in another sense it’s a divergence in any of my records. There’s a sort of sonic divergence when you’re working with [producer] BJ [Burton], obviously. All my albums are unique in and of themselves, some veer more personal while some veer more political. Sometimes I’m more inward looking, and sometimes more outward looking.

I think we all have these different moments in our life that we move through. On this album, there was a lot of looking at my society, my culture, and speaking to things bigger than I.

I feel like I shouldn’t say this, but I wonder if it’s the last in a series.

What series is that?

The 23 albums series in the life and times of Ani D. I’m 53 pushing 54,  and I hate to make any statements about my farewell tour or anything, but I feel less motivated to write songs the way I have been. It’s a mode I’ve thoroughly explored. These days, I’m working on a theater piece and writing songs towards a theatrical production.

I’m always creating and inventing in my mind, but there’s definitely an itch to change the mediums.

There’s a lot of dissonant sounds, especially in the two tracks "Baby Roe" and "Unprecedented Sh!t." There's a sense of things falling apart, and that the world is driving you to the edge. Tell me about the state of mind you were in when you wrote those songs.

The reason I wanted to work with BJ is because he lives in world of machines, [and has] an immense facility with machines I know nothing about. After so much making, recording and producing my own records, I have longed to incorporate the noisiness of modern life, and the presence of machines in our lives. I couldn’t do that on my own.

In this modern age, the playing of instruments is just one spice, one ingredient to use in modern recording. There are so many ways to make sounds, put together tracks. With BJ, I was able to explore other worlds. So inherently, through us and the process, this sort of anxious, punishing, frenetic noise of the world comes in. The tenor of life in this world right now expressed itself in the music and recordings, balanced with moments of deep quiet and retreat.

The super dissonant, chaotic sounds BJ created from my guitar [are] really extraordinary. I would make recordings of just me and my guitar, and I overdub a few things — like me playing percussion, or vocal overdubs. He just manipulated [those sounds] in his spaceship, surrounded by buttons, toggles and dials, to create the soundscapes but the raw materials were extremely organic.

The only thing not manipulated is my voice.

On "New Bible," you sing "Our roots are meant to be interwoven" and that "men should stand down when women give birth." Tell me about your view of women, their role as leaders and mothers, and whether your views have changed over time.

I think that my views haven’t changed in that I feel differently, but I understand more in terms of reproductive freedom for women. It’s an essential civil right, the centerpiece of what it means to be free as a woman in society. As I get older, I understand with my full being that consciousness supersedes the body. Our spirit bodes and re-embodies, and this is one of many lives, identities and stories, and essentially me and you are one being. We are God, you and I and every living thing. Women are agents of creation. I wrote a song, "Play God," a few years ago: "you don’t get to play God man, I do". I’m literally the creator in this situation.

You have to respect creation and agents of creation, such as women. I speak to it in "New Bible" and in "Baby Roe," that we need to step back a minute from patriarchal religious dogma, from political debate, and look at what it is to be alive. It is not the body. Consciousness is the spirit, the soul, is God, and is light, and that is eternal. So, there!

Did performing as Persephone in "Hadestown" on Broadway have an impact on the music or themes on this album, in which you sing about hell and the sanctity of women, or was there just an organic alignment?

I relate very much to the character, and I have been involved in the trajectory of "Hadestown" since the beginning, since it was a gleam in Anaïs Mitchell's eye, so it’s very cool to come back into the fray after all these years to perform the part on stage. 

There are two couples in the musical: Orpheus and Eurydice, the young starry-eyed lovers, and Hades and Persephone, the old couple, married for eons as Gods. They’ve been through it all together, there’s a real push and pull tension between them, and Persephone is the bestower of life on Earth, joy, and bounty, while Hades is the captain of industry and the underworld — which represents the hell of the modern world and its enslavement of humankind. 

It’s a prescient modern take on Greek mythology. The relationship between her and Hades, you know they don’t ride into the sunset, but there’s hope – like, "we’ll try again next year" – and after being married for 20 years [to music professional Mike Napolitano], I very much relate to that need to renew one’s love and one’s relationship.

I’ve been a fan of yours since "Dilate" and so many of your songs are deeply personal to me. Do you have favorites from your earlier albums, or songs of yours that feel deeply necessary to perform live and to revisit frequently?

Certainly there’s a bunch that have risen as favorites for me, mostly because they work live, they’re very playable, and [are] other people’s favorites. Some that don’t work well live because they’re too slow, or sad, or too something, are my secret favorites. Those are "Hypnotized," "Hour Follows Hour," "Albacore" or "The Atom," which is epic at 10 minutes.

There’s a lot of allusion to nature on this album, which is quite different to those earlier albums in which you were in bars, on trains and on the road. Tell me about how your connection to the land informs who you are, how you live, and your perspective.

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been a city kid most of my life and I’ve been rapt with the human drama therein, but like many humans, it gets old. The land —  all the forms of consciousness that are not human, all the sentient beings…plants, trees, rocks — is something more profound than human drama.

I live in Louisiana, New Orleans, way, way, way on the edge of town, right on the Mississippi River, which feels both very remote and very New Orleans. It very much feels like home after 20 years now. It’s an immense place, culturally and musically, and I love being surrounded by snakes, owls, the birds on the river: herons, eagles, ducks, egrets. It’s immense and wonderful. Turtles wander by in this big swamp. I really love it there.

You sing "I defy being defined" on "The Thing At Hand." Do you feel that rather than growing into firmer descriptions or identifying labels, you’ve actually shed them instead and is that liberating or confusing?

I feel I’ve always been in the business of shedding labels, but the world is doubling down. I sang about relationships with women and men when I was young, or I sang about my experience as a young woman not wedded to gender being the defining character of a person, or sexual orientation, or race, or blood. I feel like I've always tried to write revolution through just the approach to storytelling and my songs. You cannot hold me down with your preconceived notions of identities and "us and them" and tribe, so I feel like I've always been at this work. And in America, I feel like identity politics has become so fever pitched.

I’m a child of the '70s when identity politics was about asserting identity and waking up culture to the fact that we’re not all middle-aged white dudes, but it’s as though the tool of liberation has become the cage itself. [My children’s book] The Knowing speaks to this: Use identity for whatever purpose it serves to know and find yourself, your tribe, to know you’re not alone but also beware of identity and ending up in a silo, at odds with your fellow humans.

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