Ray Parker: Putting your song in a film can be unbelievably huge exposure for the artist because the films cost so much money that the money they spend on promoting you by accident along with your song is chump change. That’s not even what it costs to put posters down one street, you know? And you get the benefit of that and your music is tied to that film for all eternity. And some of these film composers now, I mean, they’re worth $1,000,000,000.00 or something, you know? My hero, John Williams is doing unbelievably well, right? I mean, he’s making, like, you know, just huge sums of money. So I would always recommend an artist if he can get his song into a film, that would be a nice thing.

It’s difficult to write the subject of matter of a film and not difficult. I think when you start on your own, you can cut anything. You can cut fast, slow, love, politics. You may write anything. So it’s conforming in one sense, but it also narrows where you’re gonna go. Like, for instance, if the guy says, “I need a up tempo song. I want saxophones in. I want violins. I want this and this,” your route gets narrower and narrower. And in my case, you know, my biggest film song was Ghostbusters, you know, and to me, that was an impossible song to write. I mean, because the first thing he said is, “I want it up tempo. I want this. I want that.” I was like, “Oh, that’s easy. Blues – okay, I got it. I’m a musician. I can cut it. I can cut it.” Then he says, “I want the word Ghostbusters in it.” Okay, now we’ve heard the song so it’s a lot easier, but if you go back to when you never heard the song and somebody says – you sing Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters – it’s like, “How am I gonna say Ghostbusters in a song? I’m ruined here. It’s never gonna happen,” you know? And we’re not singing about girls. We’re singing about a ghost. I mean, like, where is this coming from? And so, to me, I had to almost make it into a commercial. It – I don’t know if you noticed, but I never say the word the Ghostbusters in the song. I let the crowd say it and that’s the only way I could get that funny word to fit the song, you know? So it just became one of those crowd chanting things and I only had two days to do it, so my time constraint was really, really, really tight. And so that’s how that whole thing just came about like that and I think I was just blessed with the idea and everything to get it done in the two days, so –

Interviewer: You wrote the entire song in two days?

Ray Parker: And recorded it.

Interviewer: And recorded it in two days?

Ray Parker: Yeah.

Interviewer: That’s unbelievable.

Ray Parker: Yeah, so I wrote the entire song and recorded it in two days and that just goes to show you what the human brain can do when you’re under stress. It was almost like a kid who hadn’t done his homework and started it two days before the, you know, the big due date.

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