As the crowds gather and anticipation mounts, it is the music that opens up the storybook and invites guests into a land where their greatest dreams can come true.

Just Like We Dreamed It’ is the song that has now introduced and carried Disney’s Once Upon a Dream Parade for countless performances since its 15th Anniversary debut. The songwriter behind the latest, and it has to be said, most popular entry in Disneyland Paris’ successful catalogue of popular music: Sunny Hilden.

Ms. Hilden, thank you so much for talking with us about the wonderful song you wrote for Disneyland Resort Paris’ 15th Anniversary!

Thank you. I’m very excited about it!

How would you introduce yourself?

Well, I am a songwriter and a singer. I’ve been a songwriter since being alive, I think. I just started writing things when I was a little girl. It just always was thrilling to me to put the notes and the words together. I’ve been doing that my whole life and never really wanted to do anything else.

I grew up in the Midwest, in the middle part of the United States. When I would say that I wanted to be a songwriter, the reactions back there would always be: “well, that’s what you’re going to do on a Saturday afternoon as a hobby, but what are going to do for a living?” But I wanted to do that for a living! And I love writing for Disney! It’s just always so positive! And there’s such a beautiful world in Disney.

You know, I only write positive lyrics. So, that’s just a perfect fit for me!

How do you write positive songs?

I think, for so many people of all ages, but for children especially and teenagers, we keep on creating who we are by what we hear and see in the world. A lot of people take their lessons not just from their parents and their teachers (and a lot of people only have one parent at home or no parents at all). They have to figure our their place in the world and how they feel about things. And so many of the messages we get are violent and negative.

So, I think it’s so important to send out into the world messages of positive content. You can dream anything you want to be that’s beautiful and you can make this by changing your thoughts. Think about your world and how you think about yourself and your place in your world. I just think it’s so important to have those kind of messages out there through art more than anything. It’s so important to learn “two times five equals ten” and things like that, but every single day of life, every moment of your life, you are living in your own brain, in your own world. So, how you talk to yourself in your head, I think, is more important than anything that people can learn.

They don’t specifically teach things like that in school. You’re taught very, very scientific things and mathematical things, and history and a lot of subjects that are very important and wonderful to learn. Art and music are some of the first things that are taken away from schools when they have to cut the budgets. I’ve never had a class of how to think, how to dream, how to live so that you can be anything you want to be. So, I think Disney is a beautiful teacher for the world, with a very important message. That’s why it’s such a wonderful thing to be a part of it!

How did you first come to work with Disney?

I had heard about the new park, Disney’s California Adventure, which was going to be right next to Disneyland in Los Angeles. They were going to be opening with a brand-new parade and they were having a difficult time finding the right song for it. I just came up with an idea that they liked very, very much: not just a song for the parade, but also an invitation for people to come visit the park and people to come visit the entire state of California.

So, I came with a song that worked on different levels, Come Away With Me. It was very fun to be part of that project. There are so many creative people involved in creating a parade. It’s just spectacular. The drawings that the artists came up with were just beautiful! And to see all that live was just glorious!

You also worked for Hong Kong Disneyland, as well.

Yes. I did the music for their parade, too, that came up last summer. It was a very fun project as well.

Now, about Just Like We Dreamed It. How did you manage to put dreams into music?

That’s a whole story! I have a giant, stuffed Winnie the Pooh that my father gave to me a long time ago. You know, I have stuffed animals all over my house! Angels, too. All sorts of positive things that inspire me. I’ve got angels all over my piano. They’re playing trumpets and guitars and singing. All of them play or dance. They have to audition to get there! So, I have this giant Winnie the Pooh, and when I was writing the song for the parade, I also had all the pictures of the floats, just all over my floor, beautiful, big picture of them they sent me.

I was just staring at the pictures and thought: “What am I going to write?” I had lots of little ideas of what to do, but I wasn’t quite sure what the overall theme was going to be. So, I took my Winnie the Pooh and kept asking him: “What do the children want to find here, at Disneyland Paris? What would they want to hear when they see this parade going by?”. Sometimes, my stuffed animals talk back to me and he said: “well, if you dream me alive, you’ll dream a song to life!” And that’s it! You dream and you dream and the song comes to you! And that’s what these Disney characters are doing in the park.

These are characters that somebody just drew on a page and, if the people who read the books and see the pictures love them enough, after they close the book or walk away from the theater, they dream them to life by just thinking about them and loving them and having them affect their life. So, I thought: “this is a great theme for the parade!” Because there’s all these wonderful, wonderful characters that people have known for their whole life and that generations of people have grown up with Cinderella and all the princesses … the mothers and fathers that go to the parks have told all these stories to their kids. I just pictured how the actual characters would love to meet the people who have been reading about them.

So, it’s a song about the characters on the floats coming to meet the guests that are in the park, and also, it’s a song about the guests in the park that come to meet the characters on the floats. And then, on another level, I wanted this song to be a kind of a love song.

What was the first thing you wrote for that song?

Well, the title. And then, as I was looking at the characters, I came up with the first line, the “once upon a time”. It used to be a long time ago, yet, if you dream it enough, all these stories, all these characters can be right here now. They don’t have to be something that you’re just reading about that happened a long time ago. You can meet them for real here at Disneyland. You can come to the park and here they are!

So, once I got the first line and the concept for the chorus, it almost wrote itself. It’s funny. I took my pen and it was just like somebody was whispering the song in my hear! Sometimes, it’s very difficult, you know, just to get little ideas here and there. It’s kind of like, if you get in a car and you’re just kind of driving around on a Sunday wondering: “where are going to go?”. Some songs are like that. And then, some songs are like you know exactly where you want to go and you go to your computer to get there. Every song is different.

For me, it’s almost like “how do you make friends”? Every person you meet, you create a friendship that’s different, which makes it fun. You never get stuck with always the same thing. You never get bored, that’s for sure!

From then on, how did you work on it?

Once you get even just the beginning seed of what it’s going to be, you have to create your own world of no distractions. So, sometimes I tend to turn off all the phones and work all hours of the night. I find it to be very effective just to focus and not stop. Sometimes, the main ideas come that way. Sometimes I emailed Katy (Harris, director of the parade) or Vasile (Sirli, musical director for the resort) at Disneyland Paris when it was two or three o’clock my time and it was their regular hours there!

So, actually, first, I just used my mind and my imagination. As I was writing the lyrics, the melody came to me. They came at the same time so that I could exactly match the second verse to the first verse. I’m very strict about matching the lyrics to the melody. Then, after I’m done with the lyrics, I went to the piano and figure out what the chords are going to be.

A lot of times, I can already hear them in my head, but I can experiment things on the piano and I’ve got a tape running the entire time to just capture what coming up. And then I go to recording, figuring out beats, what kind of groove it’s going to be. Figuring out the backup vocals is a lot of fun, too. I love doing that!

How did you shape the melody of the chorus, the famous “just like we dreamed it”?

I wanted it to be very much a celebration, a discovery. The verse is like a journey of figuring out that it doesn’t have to be something “a long time ago”, that all of these things that we love, characters that we love and places that we want to go are something that we can arrive, something where we can be whenever we want.

On one level, we can go to Disneyland whenever we want and on another level, we can just be what we want to be, just go where we want to go, and whatever we dream in our head, in our imagination, that’s going to come true in our live. So, I wanted to make the music of the chorus just burst like this. Boom! So, the melody had to go up, it had to burst up in the air.

So, that’s why I made it jump up a whole octave and just stay up there: “just like we dreeeeaaaamed it!”. It’s almost like the melody itself is flying and go wherever you want to make it a reality. I think it’s very important for a melody to tell the same story that the words are telling. It’s a wonderful puzzle to try to figure out and make that happen!

And how did you find the right melody for it?

Actually, we did some experiments with just dance and then more keyboard and then more guitar, kind of going back and forth with what we wanted it to be. Because it could have gone a lot of different ways. But Disney definitely wanted it to be pop and uptempo. There’s so many different kinds of pop now, and this was the groove and the flavour that they ended up wanting.

What did arranger Mario Marinangeli (Lizzie McGuire, Mickey’s Dance Party) bring to your song?

He actually added more of the California element in the way the guitars are structured and the overall vibe of the final product. He recorded all that in his studio. He did a wonderful job!

Speaking of Californian influence, what interests you in that style, since you come from Minnesota?

The city and the state are a land of dream in themselves. So many people come to Los Angeles with a big dream. There aren’t a lot of cities in the world where you can find that particular spirit. So many people come this city with a similar kind of dream of bringing their art form to the world. It’s a like a portal to learn how to do that. When you take college music, when you study music in school, so much is geared toward structure and counterpoint.

So, I learned counterpoint and I learned theory but there are so many things that are specific to pop music that are really not taught in college. Well, there are now, more so, now, especially out here. But California was the place to learn. There were seminars and workshops that were hard to find in a place like Minnesota. There was someone who came out to Minnesota to do a workshop and I learned so much that I just decided to go on there.

And there’s something about the energy of so many people having the same dream in the place, which is, interestingly, the same energy of being in Disneyland itself with everyone walking around in the same dream of having a wonderful day there. And I think it’s good for the song.

Did you sing the demo yourself?

Yes. At first, I just sang it “female”. Everything was female, but I wrote it in such a way where it could be a duet. Disney wanted it to be duet and ultimately we ended up making it that way. That’s something the writer has to keep in mind as you’re writing it because some songs can only work as a duet and others ones can only work with one singer. So, I kept in mind to keep options open.

Who did you work with at Disneyland Paris?

Katy Harris, the show director of the parade, and Vasile Sirli, the music director of the resort. I talked with both of them a lot about all this. They even flew to California as well. But we did a lot over the phone and through email at first. Katy, also, loves Winnie the Pooh so much!

How did she present Disney’s Once Upon a Dream Parade to you?

She made it such a wonderful experience because she sent me drawings of what the floats would look like and this is so helpful for writing. It’s almost like writing a song for movie, having a visual picture of what everyone is going to see going by. It’s such an important to achieve what she has in her imagination.

She also described what each float meant. She told me she wanted a song to tie everything together, because, for each float, there were going to have the classic beautiful songs that everyone knows for these characters. And they wanted a song that would tie everything together. The parade takes 25 minutes to go by wherever you’re standing, they wanted almost like a book end: something to start the parade and end the parade and maybe a little bit in the middle as well ; something that would tie all these classic Disney songs and classic Disney characters together. That was my job.

So, I ended up coming up with a little slow intro part to the song as well, which they loved and then ended up keeping as well. A kind of an invitation for everyone to come and experience the parade and have a little dream-like quality to it, almost like you’re waking up: “ooh!” And here it is!

And how did you work with Vasile Sirli?

He’s wonderful! He liked everything that I first submitted which is really fun for a songwriter to have that reaction, that they ended up using everything that I sent. And then, for the middle of the parade, what they call “show stop” when the parade stops, they wanted the characters to be able to come off of the floats and actually reach out and shake the hands of the children. So, they wanted a variation of the song for those moments.

For that part of it, we went back and forth with Vasile two of three times, messing with various ideas of how to break down the music. That was an interesting puzzle to figure out how long they were going to have the parade stopped. At first, it was intended to only be two minutes, but you can’t do an entire formulate song in two minutes. You have to cut off something. So, I would send them a version but they told me: “oh, we miss the bridge!” and then “oh, now we miss the verse!” So, they ended up with letting just go longer, and the show stops are 2 minutes and 40 seconds or something.

Disneyland Resort music director in California Bruce Healey was also involved in that process. Can you tell me about that?

Bruce came to the final recordings , for recording the final version. He was very helpful in figuring out which mixes and which sections to send. Because it’s so complicated putting together all the music for the whole parade. Once the song is written, then comes the whole process of putting it all together. You know, it was a world-wide process, with the orchestra recorded in London and all that. So, he was very helpful with the logistics of all that and helped me to pick the voices, too, because we wanted more opinions on the singers.

Indeed, how did you choose the singers for your song?

There was no live audition. It was by tape. So, a lot of people sent us their tapes . You know, some singers are wonderful singers, in hitting the notes and in their sound, but don’t have the right expression, that joy and enthusiasm. That’s a very special thing that you have to have for singing Disney songs that are so positive and happy. There’s so much on the radio that is negative that, when they demo things, they may only have songs like that on their reels and they don’t know how to sing about happiness.

So, one of the facts in choosing a singer was that they had to be able to come across with that happiness, that excitement and enthusiasm and the capacity to believe in what they’re actually singing. That’s how we chose Renee Sandstrom et Ruben Martinez.

You wrote a song about dreams. So, what would be your dream?

My dream is constant. It is to be able to move everyone who hears music that I write, move them to feel at home in this world and feel as they could be anything they want to be. For example, they can be as happy as they decide to be. I think that if everyone on earth were to think more positively, the entire world would be free of war, poverty and anything that keeps anyone down.

Just to think positively about our whole world and about our own self and our place in the world because everyone’s place in the world is a beautiful place. All we have to do is think of it that way!

I just try very, very much to inspire positive feelings and happiness through music. Music is a wonderful tool to be able to do that!

With all our thanks to Sunny Hilden!