This post was written by Jina Hyojin and Shirley Song.
When we were growing up, the two of us, (Shirley, born and raised in Sydney, Australia, and Jina, born in Busan, South Korea), never watched any Hollywood or Australian films and shows where we felt represented on screen–there were hardly any Asian cast, let alone Asian leads/protagonists. How we would’ve killed to have films like Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I've Loved Beforewhen we were in high school!
Then, fast forward, XO, Kitty was announced!
You can imagine mine and Jina’s excitement–not only is the show a spin-off of To All the Boys, but it was also going to be filmed in South Korea, Jina’s home country. Furthermore, the fact that XO, Kitty was also going to be set at KISS, the Korean Independent School of Seoul, felt even closer to home as Jina also attended an international school in Busan, Korea.
In terms of the music score and tone for the show, we knew from the get-go that for XO, Kitty, we needed to establish a different sound from To All the Boys. This is now Kitty’s (Anna Cathcart) adventure, the youngest sister of the three, and it’s her time to shine. Therefore, we needed the music to also be fresher, newer, younger…
XO, Kitty | Official Trailer | Netflix
Scoring a New Adventure
Our score for XO, Kitty needed a modern/contemporary approach to the score to not only convey the glistening and bustling world of Korea but to also reflect how much Kitty has grown up since To All the Boys, and help portray her fun, bold, adorable, and somewhat cheeky personality as a matchmaker.
This is Kitty’s journey as she navigates through teenhood, discovers love and heartbreak, friendships, family, and loss…and our score weaves through the young, fun, and fresh sound to moments of nostalgia and sentiment.
n our initial meetings with co-showrunners Jenny Han (also the show’s creator) and Sascha Rothchild, we knew that K-drama was going to have a huge influence on the show, and our music needed to also pay homage to the K-drama genre. So much so that we were asked to also create an OST for the show.
For those who don’t know what an OST is, K-dramas normally have a main song that represents the sound and feel of the entire show. Usually, in dramatic moments, it’s a cue for the song to come in like when the lead couple kisses, breaks up, or reunites after several years!
When we were creating the OST love song, the show was still shooting in Korea, but from reading the scripts we knew that the love song was also going to need to double as a "heartbreak" song. The lyrics needed to reflect a female’s perspective of falling in and out of love and honor that at the end of the day, even if the love didn’t work out in the end, it was still love, and that everything would be okay.
'XO, Kitty'
Netflix
After we established and discussed the main themes and ideas behind the song, Jina, being the Korean in our duo, not only went to work and wrote the lyrics, but also recorded the vocals. The showrunners ended up loving Jina’s voice and performance on the song so much so that her vocals ended up making it into the OST!
Our music supervisors on the show, Lindsay Wolfington and Laura Webb, also helped us dial in musically to the tone and sound of the show. They did such an amazing job with licensing some of the biggest and hottest K-pop needle drops such as BTS, Black Pink, and ITZY. We knew that not only did our score need to pay homage to K-drama, but it also had to complement these K-pop hits!
We listened and drew inspiration from a lot of K-pop and wanted to make sure we incorporated a lot of fun and fresh synths, beats, and vocal chopping into our score. Even for those more nostalgic and sentimental moments where we would lean more towards that Kdrama sound using acoustic guitar, piano, and strings, we knew that we also wanted to modernize those score moments by incorporating vocals, vocal chopping, and beats that you hear in Korean ballads, EDM, tropical house and R&B songs.
We’re always wanting to do something different for every new project we’re on. Our musical approach for XO, Kitty is vastly different from some of our other romantic films and shows we’ve worked on, such as our score to Netflix’s Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star which is a larger orchestral score, and our score for A Tourist’s Guide to Love which is a more intimate, chamber score.
Jina Hyojin and Shirley Song
Netflix
We had so much fun writing the score for XO, Kitty, and cannot wait for Season 2! In the meantime, we’re working on a really heartfelt Amazon Prime film called Five Blind Dates, and a seriously fun Netflix show, Exploding Kittens, that we cannot wait to share with you all!
This post was written by Jina Hyojin and Shirley Song.
