Yes, that’s 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 was sent away and disappeared.
In one scene, Rita, who works in a bomb-making factory, gets up to sing a wartime tune called “Winter Coat” in front of her co-workers. Ronan is expected to compete for Best Supporting Actress, but landing the role wasn’t that simple. The song was always in the script. “There was never any question that I wouldn’t be able to sing if he gave me the role,” says Ronan.
McQueen and Ronan met over Zoom, but only got the role after the actress took a singing lesson and vocal training. “He gave me the role as soon as I reported it to him (Fiona MacDougall, Ronan’s vocal coach) and told him I wasn’t deaf.”
“Winter Coat” was written by Nicholas Brettell, Tora Stinson and McQueen.
The idea for the song came from something close and personal to McQueen’s heart. McQueen said diverse“My father died about 18 years ago, and I left his winter coat. I remember that when he died, I put it on because I wanted him to swallow it,” he continued. “I love the idea of hugging the coat and the feel of the coat. So, when I put that coat on, it felt like a hug.”
The idea was that the song would lean into wartime optimism that tomorrow would be a better day.
Enter Britell, the Emmy Award-winning composer and longtime McQueen collaborator.
Britell explains that musically McQueen wanted something that didn’t sound like an inherited piece from the past. “It was very important to him that they felt direct and accessible and resonated with a modern audience.” This creative brief was a challenge. “This was a big task because if it wasn’t time-matched, it could take you out of the movie,” Brettell says.
So, he spent time thinking about types of harmonies and chords. Even then, he had to be careful because “some of the strings are like, ‘It’s 1968.'”
McQueen and Britelle spent time together working on the beginnings of the song at Abbey Road in London. “We worked there a lot together and it was really cool to really think through it and lay the groundwork,” Brittle says. “Steve had a whole bunch of ideas lyrically about what it meant to him.
Combined with Brittle’s musical concept and McQueen’s lyrical ideas, the song began to come together.
But Brittle didn’t know how to make it a complete song, 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 put it together.
Stinson says when she got the song, she felt like she had the words needed to tug at your heartstrings. “My goal was to make sure every statement hurt.” To make sure the song didn’t take away from the mood and fit the narrative, she thought of her grandmother. “I played the demo, and she said, ‘Wow, that sounds so familiar.’ She said, ‘It sounds just like something I would have grown up with.'” And that was all she needed to know she was on the right track to deliver the song, a song that felt like Rita also sings house.
When it came to performing the song, Ronan and McDougall 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 extra people.” Until that moment, even the crew had not heard her sing. “It was really beautiful. You know, it was a very emotional day.”
Adding to the emotions of the day, Ronan says many of the extras were young women who had grandmothers or great aunts or knew family members who played pivotal roles during the war. “It made it really poignant,” says Ronan. “It really felt like we were singing about something deep, something that would be a source of comfort.”
Watch the video above.