Yes, that is Saoirse Ronan singing in Steve McQueen’s “Blitz.”
In the World War II drama, now streaming on AppleTV+, Ronan plays a young mother, Rita, searching for her young son who has been sent away and gone missing.
In one scene, Rita who works at a bomb-making factory, gets up to sing a wartime tune “Winter Coat” in front of her co-workers. Ronan is tipped to be in the running for best supporting actress, but landing the role was not that simple. The song was always in the script. Ronan says, “There was never a question of not being able to sing if he gave me the role.”
McQueen and Ronan met over Zoom, but it wasn’t until the actress had a singing lesson and vocal coaching that she landed the role. “He gave me the role once she (Fiona McDougal, Ronan’s vocal coach) reported back to him and said that I wasn’t tone deaf.”
“Winter Coat” was written by Nicholas Britell, Taura Stinson and McQueen.
The song idea came from something close and personal to McQueen’s heart. McQueen told Variety, “My father died about 18 years ago, and I got left his winter coat. I remember when he died, I put it on because I wanted to be engulfed by him.” He continued, “I love the idea of embrace and tactileness of a coat. So as I put this coat on, it felt like a hug.”
The idea was the song would lean into the wartime optimism that tomorrow would be a better day.
Enter Emmy-award winning composer Britell, a long-time McQueen collaborator.
Britell explains that musically McQueen wanted something that didn’t feel like an heirloom piece from the past. “It was so important to him that they feel direct and accessible and affecting to a modern audience.” That creative brief posed a challenge. Britell says, “That was quite an assignment because if it doesn’t feel true to the time, it could pop you out of the movie.”
So, he spent time thinking about the types of harmonies and chords. Even then he had to be careful because “some chords you’re like, we’re in 1968.”
McQueen and Britell spent time together working on the beginnings of the song at Abbey Road in London. Says Britell, “We worked a lot there together and that was quite wonderful to really think it through and lay out the groundwork. Steve had a whole set of lyrical ideas of what that meant for him.”
Together with Britell’s musical concept and McQueen’s lyrical ideas, the song started coming together.
But Britell didn’t know how to make it a finished song, and so he turned to Stinson.
Stinson, who has co-written songs for Destiny’s Child, Mary J. Blige and Cynthia Erivo, was the perfect collaborator to finish the song and piece it all together.
Stinson says when she got the song, it felt like the words needed to pull on your heartstrings. “My goal was to make sure that every phrase is gut-wrenching.” To make sure the song didn’t pop out of the mood and fit into the narrative, she thought about her grandmother. “I played the demo, and she said, ‘Wow, that sounds so familiar.’ She said it sounded exactly like something I would have grown up on.’” And that was all she needed to know she was on the right track to deliver the song, one that felt like Rita also sang at home.
When it came to performing the song, Ronan and McDougal spent a lot of time rehearsing. She credits her vocal coach for making her “feel safe, calm and secure enough to be able to perform the piece in front of 300 extras.” Up until that point, even the crew hadn’t heard her sing. “It was really beautiful. You know, it was a very emotional day.”
Adding to the day’s emotions, Ronan says many of the extras were young women who would have had grandmothers or great aunts or knew family members who played pivotal roles during the war. Says Ronan, “It made it really poignant. It really felt like we were singing about something deep, and something that would be a source of comfort.”
Watch the video above.
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