'The Idea of You' soundtrack producer says he wasn't thinking about One Direction while writing music for August Moon
Savan Kotecha is the lead songwriter and producer behind "The Idea of You" soundtrack.
The movie features a fictional boy band called August Moon and its dreamy front man Hayes Campbell.
Kotecha spoke to BI about the comparisons to One Direction, who he also worked with in the past.
August Moon might be the hottest boy band in the world. The five-piece group incited a surge of curious headlines and feverish tweets when their infectious new single, "Dance Before We Walk," was released earlier this month.
The only catch? August Moon isn't real.
The faux-famous band plays a key role in "The Idea of You," premiering at SXSW this weekend. The film stars Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes Campbell, August Moon's dreamy front man, while Anne Hathaway plays Solène, the older woman he falls for.
Their love story begins at Coachella, where Campbell is booked to perform on the main stage. In this fictional world, August Moon is a sensation, able to attract throngs of screaming fans at the world's biggest music festival — and even charm the mature single mom in the crowd, who's only there to supervise her teen daughter.
But the entire premise falls apart if the music isn't good.
Enter Savan Kotecha, a renowned producer and songwriter who knows the recipe for boy band success.
Kotecha has worked with stars like Ariana Grande ("God Is a Woman"), The Weeknd ("Can't Feel My Face"), Demi Lovato ("Cool for the Summer"), and, crucially, One Direction. He served as the band's vocal coach on "The X Factor" and helped write a slew of their early hits.
When he met with director Michael Showalter and producer Cathy Schulman, Kotecha shared stories from two decades of experience with "various boy bands." It was an easy sell. "Luckily, they agreed to let me play in their sandbox," he told Business Insider.
And so Kotecha was tasked with making real music for a fake band.
"The Idea of You" is based on a buzzy novel by Robinne Lee, but in terms of the soundtrack, Kotecha was given extensive creative freedom. He read the script and immediately began hearing songs in his head.
"I know these guys," he said. "Through different acts I've worked with, collectively, I've seen that experience. I connected with the experience that the Hayes character goes through."
Among other collaborators, Kotecha reunited with Carl Falk, with whom he cowrote One Direction's iconic debut "What Makes You Beautiful." Their efforts resulted in a dynamic collection of pop bangers that hint at themes like vulnerability, youth, and self-discovery — guaranteed to make any Directioner swoon, whether current or retired.
Indeed, fans have been gleefully documenting the similarities between August Moon and One Direction ever since "Dance Before We Walk" dropped alongside the movie's juicy trailer.
Given Kotecha's history with the band, it's tempting to assume that August Moon is based on One Direction. But Kotecha said he was more preoccupied with creating an authentic musical identity for the band that was detached from any real-life influences. He said he brought August Moon to life by asking practical questions: How much do these guys dance? How far along are they in their career?
"It might sound like I'm not telling the truth," Kotecha said. "Not once did we bring up or think One Direction. So in our minds, this was just 'boy band.' This was just 'great pop songs,' or what we thought were great pop songs."
Still, he understands why fans have made the comparison. "That's just my melody language," he said, "Carl's and mine. When we get together, that's what we do."
Kotecha said they drew inspiration from several groups, including One Direction, Westlife (another Simon Cowell brainchild), and a few others that "didn't quite go all the way."
Throughout his career, Kotecha has observed many iterations of the boy band blueprint: the bonds forged under pressure; the clashes in the studio; the hunger to be taken seriously as musicians; the member who yearns to follow his own path.
"If you think about the manufactured act experience, it is a machine," he explained. "There's a red thread between a lot of those experiences, so I felt like I had a grasp of that."
He approached the soundtrack with that thread in mind. "I Got You" was written to be younger and "cheesier," like an early-days hit, designed to please the label execs. "Guard Down" is a bombastic second-album single, a bid for radio domination.
By contrast, "Dance Before We Walk" is meant to represent August Moon's evolution and foreshadow Campbell's solo career. ("I'm off the moon and I'm hitting the ground like a rocket," he sings. The symbolism is intentional.)
"You'll see throughout the movie that he's writing 'Dance Before We Walk' and toying with the idea," Kotecha explains. "This is when he's sort of branching out and going, 'Wait, I can do this as a musician. I'm actually not just a manufactured boy band guy, I'm actually a musician and I want to be taken seriously.'"
A few songs on the soundtrack, including the one that shares the movie's title, credit Hayes Campbell as the performer instead of August Moon.
These songs are focused on his growth and perspective as an artist, rather than sticky pop hooks. "For the boy band songs," Kotecha explained, "you don't sacrifice the melody for the lyric."
Again, One Direction fans are sure to draw a connection between Campbell's character arc and Harry Styles, the breakout star of One Direction who managed to become a critical darling as a solo artist.
While the original novel isn't Wattpad-style fan fiction like the "After" series, the author did say Campbell is an amalgam of muses — including Styles. "I made him into my dream guy," she told Vogue.
But maybe it's the actor, not the character, who most deserves the Styles analogy.
Of course, the movie's wardrobe and marketing departments help to emphasize the resemblance, but Galitzine's vocal performance isn't fake. He's a real singer; in fact, he recorded lead vocals for all nine original tracks, several of which are performed in the movie's elaborate concert scenes.
Galitzine is charismatic onstage, comfortably commanding a sea of enraptured concertgoers. Watching through a screen, you'll start to wish you were one of them.
Even after spending more than two decades in the pop world, Kotecha is rhapsodic about the genre's power to inspire passion, to connect people, to transcend language — and the unique power of boy bands in particular.
"I remember when we did One Direction, we had these discussions about what the style should be. And some people wanted it to sound very current at the time, which was like that Rihanna dance-pop," he said.
But Kotecha pushed back. To his ear, boy bands — from the Jackson 5 to New Kids on the Block to The Backstreet Boys — have never sounded like other stuff on the radio. They sound resolutely like boy bands: optimistic, approachable, always slightly to the left of what's considered "cool."
"That's what makes fans feel like they own it. If the older sibling loves it, thinks it's too cool, it's not good. The younger sister's not going to protect it," he explained. "I was in high school back when *NSYNC came out, remember? That wasn't cool. Guys didn't like that, and it was almost like that made the girls want it more."
Nearly 10 years after One Direction broke up, there seems to be a new wave of appreciation for this subgenre.
BTS hysteria has barely ebbed since the group went on hiatus, *NSYNC just reunited, and 4*Town from Pixar's "Turning Red" was nominated for a Grammy. Come springtime, when "The Idea of You" will be streamable on Amazon Prime, August Moon is poised to pick up the torch. Why now?
"Nostalgia may be kicking in, but I also feel like it's time for another boy band," Kotecha said. "This is more than just songs or music. This is community."
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