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I'm Just Ken (WORD)
I'm Just Ken (PDF)
You can play in the same key as the 1st video in GCEA tuning if you put your capo on the 1st fret! Thanks to Chris Hill for submitting the song! We look forward to hearing him lead us in this fun and memorable song!
Producer Mark Ronson was inspired to write "I'm Just Ken" after reading the Barbie script and sympathizing with Ken's character. Ronson's colleague and fellow producer on the soundtrack, Andrew Wyatt, wrote the rest of the song before Ronson flew to London to record the vocals with Gosling at Eastcote Studios in March 2022. In an interview with Vulture, Ronson stated, "In the studio with Ryan, it was really his performance that lifted the whole thing. All these lines that felt a little bit throwaway-ish, delivered by him, suddenly took on much more." Gosling only had two to three hours to record the track.
After Gosling recorded his vocals, Ronson sent the track to Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, who found it "cool" and agreed to play guitar on the song. Guitarist Wolfgang Van Halen and Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese also played on the track.
As of August 2023, the song had over 100 million streams on Spotify and over 3 million views on YouTube. It won Best Song at the 29th Critics' Choice Awards and was nominated for Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards and Best Original Song at the 96th Academy Awards.
Barbie is a 2023 fantasy comedy film directed by Greta Gerwig from a screenplay she wrote with Noah Baumbach. Based on the eponymous fashion dolls by Mattel, it is the first live-action Barbie film after numerous animated films and specials. It stars Margot Robbie as the title character and Ryan Gosling as Ken, and follows them on a journey of self-discovery through both Barbieland and the real world following an existential crisis. Ahead of the film's release, marketing and promotional materials often contained the tagline, "She's everything. He's just Ken," an allusion to the song.