It took until Frozen II for Anna’s reindeer-loving boyfriend, Kristoff, to enjoy his first solo number, and when that moment comes in the animated sequel, audiences are in for a surprise. The true-blue ’80s ballad titled “Lost in the Woods” is a wild departure from the classic musical-theater numbers and Oscar-friendly ballads that make up most of the Frozen soundtrack, and no one was more surprised about this shift than Kristoff himself, Jonathan Groff. “In the moment they handed me the song, I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said. “I found it personally—and even when I still watch the movie—to be truly shocking when it starts. Like, Oh wow, we’re doing this. Okay, here we go.”
The song, which is available online today, is paired with even wilder visuals in the movie and gets a reprise over the credits performed by ’90s alterna-rock gods Weezer. Groff and Frozen II songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez took Vanity Fair behind the scenes of Kristoff’s big emotional solo.
For some Frozen fans, this Kristoff song is even more hotly anticipated than Elsa’s next big earworm. The cast of the original Frozen was stacked with talented theater stars like Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, and Santino Fontana, all of whom got a chance to flex their vocal cords…except Groff. A Broadway star and Glee darling at the time, Groff was left with only a snippet of a ditty called “Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People.” When Groff went on to debut the role of sassy, petulant King George in Hamilton, the retroactive dismay over his Frozen role only grew. “We are ashamed,” Kristen Anderson-Lopez joked, “and will be for the rest of our lives, that he didn’t sing in Frozen.”
“Oh, it was so sweet that people were more upset that I didn’t sing than I was,” Groff said. “It was really sweet that people would express that to me all the time including Kristen Bell who was like, ‘Well, you need to sing more in this movie.‘”
A challenge in Frozen was that Kristoff was a rather gruff, solitary figure, not exactly prone to break out in song and express himself. Even as Frozen II loomed, Groff says, “I couldn’t personally imagine how they were going to get a mountain man to sing. The first one, okay, he’s got a lute, he’s singing a ditty with his reindeer, I buy that. I totally buy that. But how are they going to get Kristoff to sing? I couldn’t even imagine it.” Neither the Lopezes nor Groff wanted to just shoehorn in a song that didn’t make sense for the plot. And, in fact, there was an earlier version of a Kristoff song that didn’t wind up working at all.
“We had originally written a song for Kristoff called ‘Get This Right,’ which was about him putting this huge amount of pressure on himself and it was totally a comedy song, but it kind of fell on the ground for many reasons,” Anderson-Lopez explains. Over the course of the film, Kristoff is trying (and repeatedly failing) to propose to Anna. “[He’s a] a guy that spent his entire life alone in the woods so much that his only friend is a reindeer that he even provides the voice for,” Groff says. “And then in parallel, Anna is a girl that spent her entire life inside the castle walls without ever having any social interaction. It’s like these two socially awkward people come together and of course there’s this inability to express the feelings, and how do I do this, and I want to do it right but I don’t know quite how to.”
For someone as self-consciously closed off as Kristoff, the Lopezes found inspiration in, of all places, karaoke. “There’s nothing better than a man feeling his feelings in a real way at a karaoke bar,” Anderson-Lopez says. “I’ve seen a lot of drunk dudes singing Journey at karaoke,” Groff adds. “And it’s ‘funny’ question mark? There’s also a level of necessity for expression. And Queen is a part of that. Queen was so theatrical and big and when you do something that’s theatrical and big like that and it’s sung by a man, it gives boys the opportunity to really be theatrical and express themselves.”
Kristoff’s unique relationship with his reindeer, Sven, allowed the Lopezes even more musical leeway here. The song is a quasi-fantasy sequence where Sven and a number of other reindeer—also voiced by Groff—provide the backing vocals. This particular element was a stroke of genius from the animators who suggested to the songwriters that they might have some fun with a full supporting reindeer chorus. “That allowed us to go to that stacked Queen-meets-Chicago kind of place,” Anderson-Lopez says. “Bobby laid down like 18 different tracks and then Jonathan Groff did them 18 times. So not only is this a solo for Jonathan Groff, but it’s actually 18 Jonathan Groffs. We gave you 18 Groffs.” Anderson-Lopez is hoping this gift will finally get them off the hook with grumpy Groff fans.
To get Groff in the mood on the day of recording, the Lopezes went down a YouTube rabbit hole of ’80s power balladeers including Bryan Adams. “I don’t think we listened to Journey or Michael Bolton, but it’s like that kind of energy,” Groff says.
For the Lopezes this kind of musical departure presented both a risk and a thrill. “We had never done this before,” Bobby Lopez says. “But where the distorted guitars kick in. I mean, come on. That is the quintessential moment of the ’80s and it just seemed to be perfect.” But the duo were even more delighted by the visual surprises the Disney animators came up with based off one little scribbled note on their lyrics sheet: “Feel free to take this to an ’80s video kind of place.”
“The brilliance of the animators can’t be overstated,” Groff says. “When I saw the hair flip and the singing into the pinecone. The Queen references to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with the reindeer, the sort of emotional walking, even like the supertight close-up on the face. I just lost my mind.” It’s a tonal departure from some of the more earnest musical moments elsewhere in Frozen but Groff suspects that added element of comedy might make the flood of Kristoff’s emotions go down easier, especially with young boys watching Frozen II.
“Normally you’re seeing the girl pining over the guy singing an emotional ballad,” he explains. “And in this one Anna goes off to go on a huge adventure and they’ve inverted it. Now it’s giving the boys the opportunity to feel their feelings and sing about whatever is going on for them, which is so potentially exciting considering how many kids are going to be watching the movie.”
Though it wasn’t written with a rock band in mind, the stacked harmonies of “Lost in the Woods” also makes it perfect fodder for the Weezer cover treatment and that version plays over the film’s closing credits.
“Bobby played the keyboard for the Weezer,” Anderson-Lopez says. “So now I just tell people: This is my husband, he’s in Weezer.” Bobby Lopez laughingly adds that he got permission from the band to claim membership. “We wrote our first Weezer song,” he jokes as he considers his potential future as a rock star.