- This year marks the 10th anniversary of Disney's animated hit, "Frozen."
- "Let It Go," the song performed by the main character Elsa, is now an international phenomenon.
The soundtrack to Disney's "Frozen" was not an immediate success.
When the album first hit the shelves in November 2013, it didn't make the top 10 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. But by early January the following year, the record climbed to the top of the summit, displacing Beyoncé at No. 1, and that's largely down to the success of one song: "Let It Go."
Over the holidays, something magical happened. "Frozen" fever set in. Families flooded theaters to see it ("Frozen" was the first No. 1 of 2014 at the US box office — six weeks after it was first released). Little girls everywhere aspired to be one of its two lead characters, princesses Anna and Elsa. But most of all, no one could get "Let It Go" out of their heads.
"'Let It Go' is the obvious high point," wrote Vanity Fair's Katey Rich in December 2013, describing the song as the "best part" of "Frozen."
Fast-forward to March 2014, Idina Menzel, the voice actor behind Elsa, performed the hit song at the Oscars. The same night, the song's writers and coproducers, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, collected the award for best original song. "Frozen" was a phenomenon.
To date, "Let It Go" has sold over 9 million copies in the US, has been viewed over 3 billion times on YouTube, and has been recorded in over 40 languages. And 10 years since Elsa first mesmerized cinemagoers, the song is a perennial favorite among amateur karaoke singers, ranging from young to old.
The irresistibility of "Let It Go" might be explained by its similarities to other popular songs, composer Joseph Church, who was the musical director for the original Broadway production of "The Lion King," tells Business Insider.
"The first lines always remind me of the [first] verse of 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody' by Whitney Houston," Church says. "The bridge of 'Let It Go' is 'Material Girl.' I mean, it's Madonna's song, the verse almost note for note in a lot of ways."
That familiarity works in Disney's favor, says Church, who now teaches songwriting at New York University, because our past music habits tend to shape the new music we accept.
"It's not plagiaristic, it's just derivative," says Church. "I was really shocked the first time I heard 'Let It Go.' I said, 'Wait a minute. I've heard that song before.' And I think that's kind of what other people feel."
Music professor Joe Bennett from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, tells Business Insider that husband-and-wife duo Anderson-Lopez and Lopez use one of the most popular chord progressions in contemporary music in "Let It Go."
The sequence of chords one, five, six, and four has been used in numerous hits ranging from "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey, to "Paparazzi" by Lady Gaga, to "Zombie" by The Cranberries.
"The one, five, six, four progression is so common in popular music it has its own Wikipedia page," says Bennett.
Bennett, who describes "Let It Go" as a "wonderful crossover between pop and what we might call 'Disney music,'" believes Lopez and Anderson-Lopez deliberately leaned into techniques used in pop music to give "Let It Go" broader appeal.
"It's written with a full awareness of the tropes of musical theater and contemporary pop," the music professor says. "There are so many techniques in there that are designed to carry the listener along."
The chord progression is one technique to captivate the masses, according to Bennett. Another is the chorus' simple hook.
The phrase "let it go" is repeated a total of four times in each chorus, embedding it in the listener's brain.
Repetition is key to making a pop song catchy, says Christopher Wiley, senior music lecturer at the University of Surrey in England.
"That 'Let it go, let it go,' it's so evocative," Wiley says.
The repetition in the chorus may seem to some like lazy or easy songwriting, but Keppie Coutts, a professional songwriter from Sydney, Australia, disagrees.
"I think people who are not songwriters tend to think of pop music as being easy, but they're mistaking something that is simple for something that is easy," Coutts explains. "Simplicity is often much more difficult to achieve than something that is complex."
And there are hidden complexities to "Let It Go" if one dives into its lyrics. Coutts says that "let it go" takes on a different meaning each time the chorus is sung.
At this point in the "Frozen" story, Elsa has fled to the mountains after inadvertently revealing to the citizens of Arendelle that she has the magical power to manipulate ice and snow.
"The first time she sings the chorus, she's letting go of other people's expectations of how she should behave," Coutts says. "The second part of the song is about her letting go of her self-imposed limitations on her power and really seeing what she can do."
And the final chorus, completing her journey of self-acceptance, is about letting go of her past, says Coutts.
The hopeful and encouraging lyrics can take on personalized interpretations for listeners, too.
Bennett, the Berklee professor, describes "Let It Go" as a song about self-assertion that is particularly powerful as we grow up.
"As we try to define our place in the world, a lot of the time we are thinking about how do we come across to others?" he says, adding that he believes the chorus is about letting go of those thoughts.
Julian Woolford, the head of musical theater at the Guildford School of Acting in England, suggests that the song has a queer subtext about coming out.
"It's about saying, 'I'm out and proud as the snow queen,'" he says. "I think that that speaks to so many people because, in a sense, we always want to feel ourselves becoming more powerful."
The song inspires communal feelings of self-acceptance and growth, and that's what makes it so memorable to this day. We can all put ourselves in Elsa's position.
"It becomes something that is just so ubiquitous that everybody knows and everyone wants to sing along with," Woolford says. "It touches something very human in you."