Soundtrack king Kenny Loggins looks back at Top Gun (and Maverick), Caddyshack and Footloose
The “Danger Zone” singer talks about his first meeting with Tom Cruise, and Bob Dylan’s influence on “I’m Alright”

Few artists that can challenge Kenny Loggins for the (admittedly unofficial) title of King Of The Movie Soundtrack—in the 1980s, anyway. Loggins delivered chart-topping songs for Caddyshack, Footloose, and Top Gun, and even films that have not aged so well, like Over The Top, and Caddyshack II. Even for the films that have not endured as vividly, songs like “I’m Alright,” “Footloose,” “Playing With The Boys,” and “Nobody’s Fool” have become bona fide standards of the era, immediately evoking memories for moviegoers that linger long far beyond the boundaries of the screen. In fact, for Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer decided to literally recreate the audiovisual experience from the first film with an opening scene set to the original recording of Loggins’ “Danger Zone.”
To commemorate the digital platform release of Top Gun: Maverick, Loggins spoke to The A.V. Club via Zoom to about his return to the world of naval aviation—and more broadly the world of movie soundtracks. In addition to offering insights about the best way to make a great movie song, Loggins talked about his experiences on both the original Top Gun and its mega-successful sequel, and finally, his legacy as a reliable purveyor of songs that will forever be associated with multiple decades’ worth of blockbuster films.
The A.V. Club: Just to get started, as a songwriter or performer, what’s the key to writing a song for a film? And when did you figure out that formula?
Kenny Loggins: I think I may have figured out my version of the formula based on my experience. But I’d always been a fan of soundtrack albums. My big brother got me into that when I was a kid, and I noticed reoccurring themes, picking certain characters that you feel could use a theme, [but] paying attention to the temp music that the director puts in the film. Because directors, at least in the old days, would pick the songs that they felt applied to that scene. Some directors get more literal, some directors get a little more poetic with it, but from that I would get a sense of what they were after musically, and that would set the tone for the groove and the vibe of the song.
Like the opening of Caddyshack starts with the character Danny, and in the rough cut that I saw, Danny’s riding his bicycle through suburban golf America, and the temp song that the director chose was “Gotta Serve Somebody” by Bob Dylan. And I thought that was very strange because when I first watched the movie, it didn’t make any sense to me. That the song didn’t seem to connect to the character or that scene at all. And I remember scratching my head thinking, I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. And this was the first time that I’d written for a film, so I didn’t pay that much attention to it. I just figured it was kind of an arbitrary thing. But then at the end, to me, the quintessential Dylan [song] is “Rebel”—and this kid was not a rebel at all! It’s a movie about playing golf. It’s like, what the hell is this? And then it dawned on me at the end of the movie that he really did turn into the rebel, and he was the one who refused to go down that path. And I thought, “Oh, so the director is trying to foreshadow his transformation.” So that’s why I wrote “I’m Alright,” because then I saw, this is a character who’s going to eventually be all right. He’s eventually going to say, “The hell with you people.” So that’s really where that song idea came from. And the fact that they used Dylan at the same time that I was working on that movie, Stealers Wheel, Jerry Rafferty’s band had had a hit song called “Stuck In The Middle With You,” which was Rafferty doing Dylan—and I thought, “Hell, if Rafferty can do Dylan, I can do Dylan.” So my “I’m alright/nobody worry about me” is leaning into my Dylan-esque kind of parody.
AVC: You had huge hits with Caddyshack and Footloose. How was Top Gun different for you in terms of its success?
KL: Well, for starters, I didn’t actually write “Danger Zone.” Giorgio Moroder wrote 90 percent of it. I came in and made some chord changes, substitutions and additions, a couple of melodic lines here and there, some lyric lines, but not much. So I have a first-person connection with “Footloose” and “I’m Alright.” But I think [Top Gun] really was the hat trick of that. It became a third hit for me and really established me in that period where disco was controlling radio. It established me as a movie guy. And so I could do an end run around the disco period just by connecting to theme songs for movies.
AVC: You mentioned Giorgio Moroder. He’s probably the only person who could compete with you for the title of King of the ’80s soundtrack. Can you talk about that collaboration? He was obviously influential in disco, but he was also dragging electronic instrumentation into films.
KL: Well, he was also a pop writer, and that made a huge difference. His approach to film music was to integrate his pop approach when he recorded. All his songs from that period were using the first generation Yamaha. But he used all the stock sounds that showed up from the clinics in Japan. He’d record with the stock sounds and make hit records with them. We were all trying to get in there and futz with the electronics and make a unique sound that they hadn’t thought of yet. He went, “No, this is great stuff.” The DX-7. It was the very first, the DX-7, that really brought that kind of electronic musicality to pop music.