Unofficial Bridgerton Soundtrack Beats Andrew Lloyd Webber at Grammys — and It Started on TikTok!
Bridgerton fans, rejoice — the viral fan-made soundtrack that transformed the historical drama into a musical has won a Grammy!
The Unofficial Bridgerton Soundtrack, created by Emily Bear and Abigail Barlow, won for best musical theater album at the 64th Grammy Awards Sunday night, beating out soundtracks by theater stalwarts like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Schwartz.
What began as a viral TikTok from composer and lyricist Barlow took on a new life after she recruited Bear to write the album with her and produce, and both women were present to accept their prize.
"A year ago when I asked the internet, 'What if Bridgerton was a musical?' I could not have imagined we would be holding a Grammy in our hands," Barlow said. "We want to thank everyone on the internet who has watched us create this album from the ground up. We share this with you... To little girls everywhere, if you have a dream, dream really big, chase them, and they might just come true."
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Added Bear: "This is really for all of my fellow female producers, composers, engineers that are still struggling to gain recognition and support for what we do. It's not that we don't exist – we do."
The duo's journey began last year, when Barlow was watching the Netflix series and heard Lord Henry Granville (played by Julian Ovenden) utter a single line of dialogue: "You have no idea what it's like to be in a room with someone you can't live without, and feel like they're oceans away from you."
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"If that's not a song, I don't know what it is," Barlow told PEOPLE in February 2021. "That's kind of the thing that just stuck with me."
She fashioned the line into a tune called "Oceans Away," and it soon went viral. Eventually, that snowballed into more and more songs, including a duet between characters Daphne Bridgerton and Simon Basset.
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At that point, Barlow reached out to Bear, a composer studying classical and jazz piano and composition at Juilliard and New York University, and they wrote and recorded an entire soundtrack, documenting the process on TikTok along the way.
Barlow told PEOPLE that among the more "mind-boggling" moments of the whole process was having "all of the cast members that I watched on screen two weeks ago, just DM-ing us and asking for the full songs."
