Josie and the Pussycats was ahead of its time. Although the 2001 musical comedy was a box-office flop, the soundtrack was a hit — clawing its way to No. 16 on the Billboard charts and was certified gold after selling over 500,000 copies — and has only grown in popularity in the quarter century since.
In case you need a primer, Josie and the Pussycats follows the titular three-piece all-girl rock band who originated in the pages of Archie comics before going on to headline their own comic books and animated series. The lineup included lead singer Josie McCoy (Rachael Leigh Cook), drummer Melody Valentine (Tara Reid), and bassist Valerie Brown (Rosario Dawson). The nominal plot of the film finds the trio believing they’re being offered a shot at the big time, only to discover that they’re actually pawns in a conspiracy to deliver subliminal messages through music. Think of the film as a mix between They Live and the Satanic Panic of the ’80s with a healthy dash of Wayne’s World-esque product-placement parodies.
In honor of the film’s 25th anniversary this month, key figures from the soundtrack shared their memories with Gold Derby about its now-iconic playlist, including co-writers and co-directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont; David Gibbs, who wrote many of the songs and co-produced the album with Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds; and Josie’s singing voice, Kay Hanley.
“Deb met Bono the year that it opened. He totally got it and loved it,” Elfont shares about the reaction to the film. “It wasn’t until social media that we could see there were more people out there. They would reach out to us directly, say how much it meant to them, and it seemed to grow from there.”
Although the directors originally hoped that Cook would be able to sing the songs as well as play the lead role, it wasn’t to be (“I could not play an instrument. I could not sing. I do not know why they cast me in this role when I think about it,” Cook once quipped). Many people were subsequently considered to provide Josie’s singing voice — in fact, even Kaplan gave it a shot. Ultimately, the assignment fell to Hanley, vocalist for the alternative rock band Letters to Cleo. She was championed by Gibbs who fronts the band Gigolo Aunts, and their respective groups were old friends and touring partners. Besides singing, Hanley also co-wrote several Pussycats tracks, scoring the critical acclaim that had previously eluded her.
“In the Village Voice review, the critic said, ‘Finally, Kay Hanley sounds like she’s getting paid,’ or something like that.’ It was such freedom,” she recalls. “For the first time, I wasn’t representing myself. I was singing for someone else, and I definitely blew out my voice many times. You can hear that scratchy-scratchy thing, and that my voice was about to give way. When I listen to the soundtrack now, that’s how I sound. I don’t think I’ve ever sounded like that before.”
Even before Josie and the Pussycats, the foursome was no strangers to being involved with soundtracks packed with certified bangers. Kaplan and Elfont co-wrote and directed the 1998 teen favorite Can’t Hardly Wait, which was riddled with such ’90s radio anthems as Third Eye Blind’s “Graduate,” Blink-182’s “Dammit,” and Feeder’s “High.” Meanwhile, Letters to Cleo was featured on the soundtracks for The Craft and 10 Things I Hate About You.
“10 Things I Hate About You was a big deal because we actually appeared on screen,” she explains. “We definitely benefited greatly from that. It’s interesting because that came out after the band broke up, and by the time we got back together in 2015, we had accumulated all these fans who never got to see us and assumed they never would.”
Josie was released during a golden age for film soundtracks, which Hanley credits, in no small part, to a man named Ralph Sall, the music supervisor behind such movies as Grosse Pointe, Mean Girls, Encino Man, Threesome, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “He was a huge music fan,” Hanley says. “He had this idea of jumping over to the film side, inviting all his favorite bands to do cover songs, and then putting them in movies. People loved it.”
Gibbs, meanwhile, was contributing music to TV shows like One Tree Hill and Smallville, as well as the Tom Hanks-directed comedy-drama That Thing You Do! “[That film] was where I learned you could do things much faster and easier when you have a template,” the musician muses. “It was about a band that is a one-hit wonder, and it gives a glimpse into their life in the Beatlemania mop top era of the 60s.”
Hanley, Kaplan, Gibbs, and Elfont weren’t the only people behind Josie‘s music. Besides Edmonds, the music team included Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger (who died in 2020), as well as Jellyfish’s Jason Falkner, the Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin, and Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz. Gibbs and Duritz were living together at the time.
“Adam had this huge house in Beverly Hills on the very top of Benedict Canyon,” he shares. “I remember we looked down and our immediate neighbor below us was Sharon Stone. We could look into her courtyard. It was 10,000 square feet, so I moved in a bunch of friends and friends of friends.”
Gibbs recalls how Duritz was an insomniac and would walk around the house in the middle of the night, so they nicknamed him the “Phantom of the House.” In fact, that’s how the pair started collaborating on the Josie soundtrack.
“There’s a song called ‘You Don’t See Me,’ which is credited to multiple writers, and that’s really just me and Adam,” he says. “That was actually an old Gigolo Aunts song with the unfortunate title of ‘Snowball’ that was written in 1989 or 1990, but never went anywhere. I used the chorus chords in a different key a few years after that first song called “Cope.” That song was Deb Kaplan, Harry, and me writing the chorus, and then I wrote the melody. Adam wrote all the other lyrics, and they’re very “Counting Crows.”
In the film, “You Don’t See Me” plays as Cook’s Josie is relaxing in a bath — and being brainwashed — while listening to it on her Discman. “There are versions of that that I’ve got that are quite different, with different singers, before Kay sang the lead on it,” Gibbs says. “I put strings on it, and it turned out really beautiful. It’s much sadder.”
“There was another song called ‘Merry Go Round’ that Adam and I wrote, and we recorded it,” he continues, recalling the songs that didn’t make the cut. “We didn’t finish it, and Kay never sang it, but I wish she had, because that song is catchy as s–t. I thought for sure that was the song they’d want, but they didn’t.
“There was another song called ‘Straight to the Top,’ which never got recorded,” Gibbs adds. “It was way more rock, and it had a great riff. The only recording I have is a cassette tape of me playing it on an acoustic guitar and Adam singing it to housemates who were sitting in the hot tub, drinking beer. They were all wasted, and everyone was laughing. I wish that would come out someday.”
Another track that never made it to the finished film was “Mean Streak,” which Hanley repurposed for her 2002 solo record, Cherry Marmalade. “When you’re writing a bunch of songs fast, they can’t all be winners,” she says, matter-of-factly.
As popular as the other tracks are, “3 Small Words” remains the crown jewel in Josie and the Pussycats’ tiara. It’s the quintessential sound of the film’s world and the women who inhabit it… although it wasn’t the filmmakers preferred sound at first.
“They wanted more of an upbeat, power-pop vibe,” Gibbs recalls. “Somebody had said, ‘I wish we could get a female Blink-182.’ There was also a time when everybody wanted a song that sounded like “All Star” by Smash Mouth. I remember that I got the opening riff, and I couldn’t sit still. I reached out to my friend Jason Sutter, who was in Smash Mouth, and he played drums on it. He’s gone on to drum for everyone from Chris Cornell to Marilyn Manson to Cher.”
Gibbs recorded “3 Small Words” on a cassette tapes, with just drums, guitar, and his own humming of a slightly different melody. After giving it to Elfon and Kaplan, they came back the next day having written a bunch of lyrics, and asked Gibbs what he thought. “The lyrics were hilarious,” he says now. “There was a rhyme scheme, and there was a rhythmic pattern. It all worked.”
“I once did a songwriting thing with a pre-fame Katy Perry,” adds Gibbs. “I played ‘3 Small Words’ and a few other tracks, and she was like, ‘What? You wrote those songs? Oh my God, I love that soundtrack.’ It was pretty weird.”
While Josie and the Pussycats are the titular stars, it would be remiss to gloss over the vocal stylings of the film’s fictional boy band, DuJour, played by Breckin Meyer, Seth Green, Donald Faison, and Alexander Martin. Their hits include such perfectly-named songs as “DuJour Around the World” and “Backdoor Lover.”
“We ran out of time with the songwriting group and realized we still had those songs to do,” Elfont explains. “‘Backdoor Lover’ was one where I had a melody in my head that was a total rip-off of Backstreet Boys with a little Michael Jackson. We wanted it to seem like the most half-assed lyrics, so that’s exactly what we did.”
“A lot of those songs are about — for better or definitely for worse — getting in the pants of a teenage girl,” Kaplan adds. “Which is like, ‘Ew,’ but we also thought: ‘In that case, let’s go all the way and make it about butt stuff. No one will notice!'”
According to Elfont, Universal had no issues with Du Jour’s racy material. “To the studio’s credit, they knew exactly what movie they were making,” he says. “When we gave the script to them and went off to make it, [former Universal Pictures head] sent us a copy of Putney Swope to watch. Everybody who got it was on board with what we were trying to do. They liked the edginess and the double entendre.”
“We wrote ‘DuJour Around The World’ in the back of a car when we were out scouting,” Kaplan remembers. “They were literally first-pass lyrics because that’s how dumb it had to be. I mean, ‘Nobody rocks the mic like DuJour, Ride on your motorbike with DuJour?’ We were like, ‘The worst idea wins.'”
Interestingly, the filmmakers say that Kevin Richardson from the Backstreet Boys auditioned for a role, but not as a member of DuJour. He was interested in playing Josie’s romantic interest, Alan M., a role that ultimately went to Gabriel Mann.
Fast forward to 2026, and Josie and the Pussycats is hitting the mark closer to home. Sort of.
“My son Henry is a total cinephile, and Vidiots recently did a screening and Q&A for the movie,” Hanley reflects. “We all went, and he was reasonably excited. He admits that Josie and the Pussycats is cool, and he doesn’t admit to me being cool in many instances. When they introduced me, the crowd went insane, and he was like, ‘What the hell?’ He was trying to be cool, but in the end, he admitted that it was awesome.”
Elfort also makes Josie viewings a family affair. “I watched it with my girls when they were maybe a little too young, so they didn’t get it,” the director says. “But my older daughter recently had a birthday party, and one of her friends from school came over. They were throwing their coats in my home office when she saw the gold record and asked, ‘Why do you have a gold record for Josie and the Pussycats?’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s me.’
“This girl lost her mind because her Dad had shown her the movie, and they bonded over it,” Elfort marvels. “Suddenly, my daughter realized there were actual fans.”
