When Emily Bear and Abigail Barlow were hit with a lawsuit from Netflix, it felt like their lives were over.
Before they were Barlow & Bear, the two songwriters and composers were working in separate parts of the music industry from a young age. But after meeting in 2019, they quickly formed a tight-knit songwriting partnership. The two auditioned and pitched to score films and television series, with varying levels of success. But it was a silly video written from the perspective of characters in Netflix’s Bridgerton series — then in its first captivating season — that they posted on TikTok that took the pair from virtual unknowns to Grammy-winning recording artists. But after a viral and extremely public lawsuit with Netflix, the two are prime examples of artists who got their start online — and are now learning how to leave it behind.
“It was a fever dream,” Bear, 23, tells Rolling Stone. “There was no master plan. We just started writing. And the more we wrote, the more the story unfolded.” For Barlow, 26, it’s similar: “It was lightning in a bottle,” she says.
Based on the best-selling novels from regency romance author Julia Quinn, the Shonda Rhimes-led Bridgerton follows the Bridgerton family as the eight siblings find love in 1800s London. Barlow posted a snippet of a song she had envisioned, a musical take on one of the main couple — Simon and Daphne’s — most swoon-worthy fights, arranged by Bear. “What if Bridgerton was a musical,” the caption read, as Barlow sang about fighting on their honeymoon and included the direct line in the show as the central premise: “I burn for you.” People loved it so much that they kept asking the pair to write musical versions of other popular scenes. The two began posting a months-long collaborative process on TikTok of writing a project that eventually became The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical.
“Bring yourself back to the first Covid-19 winter. It sucked. Every creative was suffering. We were suffering. The theater was suffering,” Bear says. “Everything was dark, bad, gloomy. So when this started popping off and it was music that lit a fire within us, why not keep going?”
“Having a peanut gallery chime in when we’re writing together was interesting, I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager,” Barlow adds. “Building a social media following and trying to see if anyone wants to watch me sing. So when we did it, it just felt right. It felt like camaraderie.”
With the full audience participation of their combined 2 million TikTok followers, Barlow and Bear released a concept album, The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, in 2021. The two were internet darlings, popularity that only grew when it won them the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, making history as both the youngest nominees and winners in the category. “We want to thank everyone on the internet who has watched us create this album from the ground up,” Barlow said while accepting the award, to rapturous excitement from followers online. “We share this with you.” But less than four months later, Netflix had served them with a lawsuit that accused them of misrepresenting permission from the streamer and the show’s creator, while trying to profit off of intellectual property they didn’t own. The internet swiftly took Netflix’s side and for the composers, it felt like the same internet that had given them the latest push in their careers had suddenly — and swiftly — turned on them.
“I had been growing my social media following since I was 16 years old. It was part of my identity as a songwriter to share every single part of my process. To say, ‘Do you like this? What do you think of this? Am I good enough? That was how I approached social media for so long,” Barlow says. “And when we went through that together, thank goodness I had Emily’s hand to hold because it was really hard. It was like watching a castle that I had built since I was 16 years old crumble to the ground.”
“Being in a spotlight can be amazing and it can be terrible,” Bear adds. “There were some really hard weeks because I thought my life was ending. But that’s what every teenager feels like when something happens to them. What it showed me is that I love music more than anything else. Because if you do not want to stop through everyone on the internet being mean, then you know you really love it.”
Netflix reportedly settled the suit in September 2022 before either Barlow or Bear ever had to respond in court. (Barlow, Bear, and Netflix declined to comment on the specifics.) While both of the composers acknowledge it was the best result they could have imagined, they do note that the experience radically changed how they viewed the internet and its purposes. Because while they were experiencing the most hate they’d ever received online — they also got their dream job. Disney contacted the pair to compose the songs for their new animated film Moana 2. It was a once-in-a-lifetime win for Barlow and Bear, as Disney collaborators and composers like Lin Manuel Miranda, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and Robert Lopez often become synonymous with the award-winning music they compose for the films. But the duo only knew how to post through their careers, and suddenly those platforms seemed like the last place they were welcome.
“It was so painful,” Bear says.”
“I wrote a whole [unreleased] pop album about basically feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just been gifted the opportunity to basically play a Disney princess, and everyone online hates me,’” Barlow says. “It’s silly but that dichotomy really helped me process it.”
It took almost three years for the two to score and write the music for Moana 2, in theaters Nov. 27. They had to work around other projects, like Bear’s time as the pianist on Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, which meant Bear spending months playing full shows in Europe only to stay up and attend scheduled five-hour writing sessions over Zoom. (How do you say no to Beyonce? “You don’t,” Bear jokes. “There was a lot of lost sleep.”)
“We wanted to stay and live in the world that was already created musically. It’s so lush and epic and beautiful, but the characters have evolved now,” Barlow says. “Working with Opetaia [Foa’i] and Mark Mancina [composers on Moana] was such a privilege.”
And since big shoes doesn’t even begin to describe the outsized impact the first Moana’s musical setting had on the success of the film, the duo also note getting advice from Moana’s original composers — Foa’i, Mancina, and Miranda — was extremely helpful. “If you couldn’t tell from the Bridgerton experience, we love anything epic and big and dramatic, so I think we bring that drama in scale, because the world has expanded tenfold,” Bear adds. ”[Foa’i and Mancina] and Lin were a great resource, because they’ve lived in this world for a long time, and they were a huge part of the distinct voice of the first movie. But we don’t want to be a carbon copy of the first movie, and we obviously have our own writing style, so we wanted to pay homage, while also bringing it into a new phase.”
With the release of Moana 2, Barlow and Bear say they’re excited to be able to watch fans react to their take on the film’s sound — and, to be completely honest, excited to be able to fully devote their attention to something else. Bear scored the Lindsay Lohan-led Christmas movie Our Little Secret, which premieres on Netflix the same day as Moana 2 hits theaters. They’re also working on their own musical, which they hope they can bring to Broadway before Barlow turns 30. “I think you can do it all, just not all at once,” Barlow says. “So we’ll take it project by project and day by day.” They say they probably won’t ever make another Unofficial Bridgerton Musical album, at least not the same steps, but they’ll continue to write on their own when they feel inspired. And if Netflix ever wants to revisit the intense fervor that The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical inspired as the show continues into its fourth and highly anticipated season? “Well,” Bear says. “They know where to find us.”