There’s a new Bluey album out.
Up Here is the fourth album from the team behind the beloved Australian TV show, and the first to feature a chamber orchestra. It’s something composer Joff Bush didn’t think would fly when they first started making the show.
“They would have been like, ‘You want to hire hundreds of people and a chamber orchestra?’” says Bush. “It’s really ambitious, but having that many adults dedicate their craft to make this music as beautiful as it can be, for children? It was just wonderful.”
Given the gargantuan success of Bluey music to date, it seems a good idea to just let Bush make whatever he wants.
So far, the show’s music releases have reached more than 1bn audio streams globally. The bouncy theme song (you know the one) has been streamed 126m times – and the soundtrack debuted at number one on the Aria album charts – a first for a children’s album. It also won an Aria award, and hit the top spot on the Billboard US kids album charts.
The show is astonishingly popular – Australians have watched 4.8bn minutes of it. Adults often confess to watching it after their kids have wandered out of the room.
On the new album, we get a stirring rendition of Sleepytime, the track from a fan-favourite episode, in which Bingo vows to sleep through the night in her own bed for the first time.
“That one makes me cry,” says Elise, nearly 40. “I’ll hear snippets from the other room and well up.” Her younger son, Heath, 7, says: “My mum gets very emotional and my dad does a little bit and I think it’s kind of very silly because how can a TV show make you feel such emotions?”
“The trick on that episode – I call it seeding,” Bush tells me. “We look at the end, where Bingo says the line ‘I’m a big girl now’, and we know that’s a psychological step in a child’s development. We wanted to have [Gustav] Holst’s Jupiter from The Planets play over the end sequence and we asked ourselves: what’s the most powerful thing that goes along with a child finding their independence? It’s the idea that no matter what, you’ll always be loved and your parents will be there. That’s a powerful emotion for anyone – I feel it even saying it, I’m like oof.”
So, how do you get that across in the score?
“I seed elements of Jupiter from The Planets whenever the parents are showing love for the kids. So, dad’s carrying Bingo back to bed and you hear just this echo, like it’s … just echoing in the distance. You get a subconscious association with what that means, so when we do bring it out in all its full glory at the end you feel it even stronger now than just an isolated scene with that music.”
The music of Bluey is not just emotionally devastating; it’s also incredibly joyful. Every child I speak to – Poppy, 5; Bonnie, 3; Lucas, 7; Elara, 4; Felix, 10; and Heath, 7 – says a variation of the same thing: that the opening song “makes me happy”.
Elara says “I can really sing it” and though she doesn’t always dance, she sometimes does. Poppy says she thinks it is “very musical statue-y”, by which she means it is perfect for a game of musical statues. Sophie, Poppy’s mum (full disclosure, Sophie is my sister) says she loves the music because “it signals an episode of what I know will be a heart-warming, sweet, funny and affirming story of a loving family just trying to figure everything out together.”
That’s the simple truth at the heart of the show that Bush understands more deeply since becoming a father two years ago. “Watching it now, I get it – why a certain episode hits you in the feels more.”
Bush’s daughter doesn’t yet know her father’s role in the Bluey music. She went to one of the recording sessions, though. “She was just enamoured by it,” he says. “I gave her a shot at conducting the orchestra. She’ll probably grow up thinking that’s normal.”