Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music From Vintage Disney Films

While the timing for this tribute album was accidentally fortuitous, marking a delineation point between the old Disney canon and the “Disney Renaissance” that took off with 1989’s The Little Mermaid a year later, Stay Awake is better approached as a tribute to the absurd breadth of Hal Willner’s creative vision (and his Rolodex). Willner’s collective here emphasizes the timeless-feeling cross-generational appeal of this music by making it cross the boundaries of culture, genre, and era, a version of the Great American Songbook with a whimsical pop-culture bent and a testament to where the curious wonder of childhood can take you when you get older. The sequencing aims to be cinematic in itself, building atmosphere around thematic medleys and the cavernous warmth of Ken Nordine’s “word jazz” narration (“somebody told us what we wanted to be… it was candy for the mind”). And there’s an emphasis on subversive, surreal distortion with a vague undercurrent of menace and bewilderment that Disney’s more contemporary corporate mythos is hellbent on avoiding. There’s still room for levity: Los Lobos’s Louis Prima-goes-Tex-Mex rendition of The Jungle Book classic “I Wan’na Be Like You (The Monkey Song)” still sounds like the most joyful villain theme in the whole Disney catalogue, and as beautiful as it is, there’s something inherently, wonderfully absurd about hearing Aaron Neville’s quavering grace set to the Mickey Mouse Club March. But the odder angles are hit with both irreverence and accuracy: Tom Waits cackle-growling through an industrial-Dust Bowl terror-blues deconstruction of “Heigh-Ho! (The Dwarfs’ Marching Song)”, Bonnie Raitt and Was (Not Was) converting the maternal sorrow of “Baby Mine” into a sultry yet reassuring torch song, and a medley that segues from Betty Carter’s weathered and contemplative noir-jazz “I’m Wishing” to the Replacements turning “Cruella De Vil” into a six-beers-in hootenanny. By the time it gets to Sun Ra & His Arkestra galumphing, then gliding through a fittingly hallucinogenic “Pink Elephants on Parade,” it really sinks in that Disney’s soundtrack to dreams is at its best when it accounts for how intangibly odd dreams can feel.