TS: Did you and the other Mouseketeers get to see much of Walt Disney?
DG: We didn’t see Uncle Walt all that much. He would come onto the set about once a month and we revered him because we thought he was just wonderful. In many ways he was like a father to all of us. We would pass him in the hallways a lot and on the street and he would always call us by name because we had out t-shirts on. He pretty much kept a respectful distance. He came to see us at Disneyland one time when we were doing the talent shows four times a day every Saturday during the busy tourist season. I remember him being off to the side nodding and smiling and having a good time.

TS: Do you keep in touch with many of the Mouseketeers?
DG: I keep in touch with about half a dozen of them. The recent 50th anniversary event of the Mickey Mouse Club at Disneyland was the first big gathering in quite a while. They had an autograph session that was supposed to be two and a half hours, and it turned into four hours! But the world has changed, because I’m told that many people who collected autographs that day sold them on eBay for $120 and up!

TS: How did you start working for the Walt Disney Company again after all these years?
DG: I had been working as a composer starting in the late 1980s. I did a lot of music for Universal Studios Theme Park, like the Wild West Show, as well as the Flintstones and Beetle Juice shows. I was also doing a lot of TV scoring. About four years ago I got a call from the DVD department at Disney. It was around the time that they started putting bonus material onto DVD releases. Of course, they needed original music for all the new bonus material, and that’s how I started working for Disney again.

Since then, I’ve done all the major Disney DVD releases. For instance, Beauty and the Beast Platinum Edition has 52 minutes of original music. The budget for a DVD release doesn’t really let us pull in an 18-piece orchestra to record, so we usually program about half the instruments digitally and then we bring in live musicians to flesh out the rest. With today’s technology, it’s pretty amazing.

TS: How did you team up with Marty Panzer?
DG: I first worked with Marty back in the mid-90s when I asked him to write the lyrics for the EFX show starring Michael Crawford at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Marty has written huge hits for Barry Manilow, Julio Iglesias and others. One of his most memorable tunes is Through the Years, which he wrote for Kenny Rogers. He’s a wonderful lyricist and a treat to write with. So, years later, I asked him if he wanted to work with me on a new Winnie the Pooh theme song for Disney. That collaboration was successful, so they asked us to write 26 songs for Disney’s Magic English, followed by songs for Winnie the Pooh’s Once Upon a Halloween.

This was giving us a lot of experience writing theatrical songs for children, as opposed to Britney Spears-type pop songs. Then we got a call asking for some original songs for the princesses. They wanted us to write the kind of songs that little girls will love and that they will be proud to sing for their little girls when they grow up. The result was The Disney Princess Tea Party Album.

TS: How successful was the Tea Party CD?
DG: It was released in February and by June it had sold more than 30,000 copies. Disney calls these albums “evergreens�? because they can last a long time. It’s not like you have to make a big splash right away and then something else replaces it. They can last for quite a while.

TS: What comes first? The lyrics or the music?
DG: Most of the time Marty’s always ahead of me, especially because these songs are so lyric driven. We need a concept first because it’s not about the groove, it‘s about the story. So he’s usually about two or three songs ahead of me.

On the Princess Christmas Album I did get a chance to write the music first for Christmas is Coming, although it’s typically the other way around. Of course, we go back and forth changing a lyric here or a melodic line there, until we get it just right.

Then we have a third process which most people don’t have. We have to go through Disney Character Vocals, a department that Roy Disney created to keep the integrity of the characters. For instance, Pocahontas wouldn’t sing a Christmas song, and Ariel wouldn’t say certain things that relate or pertain to land based things. When we did the Tea Party Album, we were totally unprepared for this process, but for the Christmas Album we were ready for them!

We gave Pocahontas and Mulan songs that aren’t specifically about Christmas since they wouldn’t celebrate Christmas. For example, we gave Pocahontas the seasonal song Holly and the Ivy, which Marty wrote pretty much all new words for.