Let It Go

By the time Frozen came out, I’d decided I was too old for Disney animated musicals, but Idina Menzel’s voice on this song pulled me in anyway. The arrangement builds and the chorus opens up completely—it’s not subtle, but it’s solid enough to stick.

I watched a video Disney released showing the song in 25 different languages and kept waiting for it to fall apart the way most songs do under translation. It didn’t. The German version, the Japanese, the Spanish—they all land the same way, like the same moment. The melody is sturdy enough for that. Menzel’s performance carries it through. You’d expect something like this to lose something, but it just moves across languages without breaking.

It got the Oscar nomination, which feels right. What matters is that it’s genuinely good—the kind of good that doesn’t get tired when you revisit it years later. That’s rarer for a song like this than the numbers suggest.