The Toy Story franchise is synonymous with you and you with it. But there’s nothing in the lyric that disqualifies it from being looked at that way. In this song, there was some concern about not evoking suicide because it’s for children. I’ve talked to people who seemed to be seriously considering it. Well, you can’t tell people not to marry people, but there’s times I’ve attempted that. So you don’t think about a time when, say, a friend was deep into drugs or something like that? I mean, I always suffer and agonize when I’m composing, but there was nothing from my life particularly. It’s not like I suffered and agonized to come up with this song. Just as in “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” where I wanted to emphasize the friendship. Woody is trying to keep Forky from throwing himself away. Are there parts of your personal life you may have pulled from to write this song?

This new song you wrote and performed for Toy Story 4, “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away.” Obviously we’re literally talking about a spork that wants to stay in the garbage. It’s more difficult in some ways because you can’t hide behind 40 violins. I hadn’t used that size orchestra before. This one maybe 40, which is a big difference. With Toy Story, I used a hundred musicians. What kind of orchestra did you work with?Ī smaller one than usual. I like it better to just play what’s going on in the scene. But I don’t really do scores the way some composers do, where there are definite themes, and they bring them back and develop them. There’s a hint of the past in them - a storybook, once-upon-a-time type of thing. The movie opens with two highly evocative themes: “What I Love About Charlie” and “What I Love About Nicole.” Sometimes he liked the piano version, and we would just use that. I just tell him to give me adjectives, like “loud” and “soft” and “pretty” and “not so pretty.” I’d send him stuff on piano that I thought I would expand later for the orchestra. And the music has gotten better through each picture. You have to be able to get along with the director you work with.

Marriage Storyis your second collaboration with Baumbach. Newman, 75, chatted with THR on working with Noah Baumbach, writing a song about an introverted spork and how he unexpectedly created Disney’s musical identity despite his affinity for darkness.

This year, he returned for Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 4 - which features a Newman score plus the original song “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” - as well as scored Netflix’s emotionally intricate Marriage Story. (“If I Didn’t Have You”) and 2010’s Toy Story 3 (“We Belong Together”). The wry singer-songwriter has been nominated for 20 Academy Awards, having won twice for compositions from 2001’s Monsters, Inc. In the world of film composing, few have had a career arc quite like Randy Newman.

Toy story 3 soundtracks