The transformation from a minor key to a major key indicates triumph the shift from quietly muttering to loudly belting shows her newfound confidence the rising scales bring her from the depths of her sorrows to the heights of her pride the upward leaps in her melody indicate excitement, hope, and motivation. .Īnd then there’s the close synchronization of the music with the fabulous animation.
Words to frozen song let it go full#
Consider the bridge section (“my power flurries through the air into the ground”): the melody is made up of rising scales, the orchestration is super high-energy, and it culminates in a final chorus that is loud, major-key, full of upward leaps in the melody, and has a super-high final note.Īgain, this is all musically significant.
But by the end of the song, all of this has drastically changed. This is all significant: in Disney music, minor keys often indicate sadness, low registers indicate darkness, descending melodies indicate loss, and the low energy makes it feel like she’s muttering to herself. Thus, the music begins in a minor key, in a low register, quietly, with a descending, low-energy melody. Her kingdom fears her she’s been called a “monster” in public and she has fled to the mountains for a lifetime of solitude. Elsa, whose entire childhood was clouded by trauma, has just seen her worst fears come true. Data for some songs are not available on Spotify, most notably Aladdin’s Friend Like Me and Arabian Nights, and we are only counting the streams of the original recording.Ĭonsider the song’s position in the film’s narrative. Note: This table covers songs from 1989 forward. With 280.5 million listens, “Let It Go” is the most-streamed song from the modern Disney musical catalogue, an era that began with the 1989 release of The Little Mermaid. Years later I remain shaken by the aggression of that act, and wonder what cold-blooded message that otherwise-genial pair of fifty-somethings was trying to send.Īn analysis of streams of Disney songs on Spotify finds that “Let It Go” does indeed stand alone, as distinct and indomitable as an ice castle on a hill. It tells of a young woman in the throes of discovering and embracing her powers, and is belted out after Elsa flees her kingdom to live in exile in the snowy mountains, where she constructs a fabulously intricate ice castle and ditches the accoutrements (glove, cloak, tiara, human company) of court life.Īt Christmas 2014, the peak of Frozen mania, my (Corinne’s) parents gifted my delighted 3-year-old a light-up karaoke-style machine that played “Let It Go” in an endless loop.
Voiced by Broadway star Idina Menzel in the role of Elsa, a lonely young Scandinavian queen with great hair and the unfortunate tendency to shoot ice from her palms when stressed out, the song is both impossible and irresistible.
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