FEATURETTE: How The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Brings Lucy Gray Baird’s Songs to Life

Check out a behind-the-scenes look at The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes with an in-depth look at how Rachel Zegler and the filmmakers brought Lucy Gray Baird and the Covey's songs to life.

There's also a new Billboard interview with director Francis Lawrence, producer Nina Jacobson, and music producer Dave Cobb on the music of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes that shares insights into the music-heavy prequel film.

An exerpt:

Four years after he finished work on the final big-screen adaptation of the zeitgeist-y Hunger Games book trilogy, director Francis Lawrence got a phone call from producer Nina Jacobson, another veteran of the series. And she wasn’t looking to reminisce.

Suzanne Collins – the mind and pen behind the dystopian sci-fi series – had just rung up Jacobson with some news: “Hey, surprise! I’m almost finished with a new book.” Lawrence sums up their reaction: “Wow…. Okay!”

After reading the book in early 2020, not long before it arrived on shelves, Lawrence was officially in. “I love a villain origin story,” he says of Songbirds, which tracks the rise of trilogy antagonist Coriolanus Snow. The same went for Jacobson. “Suzanne trusting me with this series, we’ve had an incredible rapport and bond,” she says. “I was all in.”

“[Collins] told me about the history of Appalachian music of the ‘20s and ‘30s and how often they were based on songs or ballads or poems that had been passed down for generations and collected over time,” Lawrence says of the music that inspired the character of Baird. Collins advised the director to check out Ken Burns’ 16-hour documentary Country Music (“this was during the pandemic, so I had time,” he adds) for context, but both of them realized that finding the right musical collaborator for the film – someone who lived and breathed this music — would be essential to making sure Baird felt like a dusty, jagged diamond in the rough.

Enter Dave Cobb. A Nashville mainstay who’s produced albums for Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson (i.e., country singers who value grit over studio polish), Cobb’s contributions for 2018’s A Star Is Born and 2022’s Elvis proved he could work within the Hollywood system without sacrificing his musical ethos.

When his name came up during pre-production, the team got on the phone to feel out his interest level. The connection was immediate.

As for the nine-time Grammy winner, Cobb tells Billboard that Collins’ vast knowledge of history – music, political and otherwise – made him excited to hop on board and write songs to accompany her lyrics from the book.

“One of the things that was so attractive about working on this film [is that] I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a more intelligent person in my life than Suzanne Collins. She’s an absolute genius, by any measure,” Cobb says. “Suzanne telling me the impetus of the story had me captivated. I’m a history buff, and everything in this film — everything she’s written for Hunger Games — is derived from real history. “I had to make [the songs] feel like turn-of-the-century, timeless classics. That’s a very hard thing to do.” 

“Rachel is such an incredible talent that she ended up singing everything live [on set],” Cobb says of Zegler. “She’s so naturally gifted – it was effortless for her. Rachel has this beautiful, almost ‘30s American pure voice. She can sing anything.”