Hayley Williams and David Byrne learn to take the good with the bad on their new collaboration, “Open the Door.” The record will appear on the official soundtrack to The Twits, the forthcoming animated film featuring characters adapted from Roald Dahl’s book of the same name, heading to Netflix on Oct. 17.
“Tears are like magic and laughing is fun/If you can have both of them, why just have one?” Williams asks in the opening verse. “Everything matters and all things belong/Fear is the same place that courage comes from.”
Byrne joins on the chorus, singing, “Open the door, look what we’ve done/Open your heart, how far we’ve come.”
“I still can’t quite believe that I spent the last few years collaborating with David Byrne, a musical hero of mine since I was 13,” The Twits director, writer, and producer Phil Johnston shared in a statement when the song was first announced in August. “From the first demo he sent me, on which the featured instrument was a 100-year-old banjolele, I knew I was going to love the songs he wrote. Throughout the process, my collaboration with David has been incredibly fun and surprisingly easy, probably because I’ve been stealing from him for so long.”
“Open the Door” will appear at the end of the film. “When David and I started talking about an end-credit song, the first potential collaborator David brought up was Hayley Williams,” Johnston said. “The first word I said was ‘yes.’ Followed by ‘please.’ I still can’t quite believe that two of my favorite songwriters wrote a song together for The Twits. The saying, ‘never meet your heroes’ simply does not apply here. I met two of them, and boy howdy, it’s been a dream come true.”
Byrne and Williams dip into each other’s orbits frequently. While on tour, Paramore added “Burning Down the House” to their setlist, while Byrne has been performing “Hard Times” during his Who Is the Sky? tour.
“I owe David Byrne for pulling me into the music for this,” Williams said. “It was so fun and so surreal starting a song from scratch with him.”
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