Bradley Cooper is not a natural born singer. There are no tales of a childhood band or lost hours spent learning how to scream just right in a garage. He was not a member of a college a cappella act, and when people refer to him as a triple threat, its because he now has credits as an actor, director, and screenwriter—not a singer.
And yet in 2018, he became one of our favorite rockstars: Jackson Maine, a country drifter who can’t shake his addictions. Cooper, 44, starred in the fourth iteration of A Star Is Born, and following the release of the film’s killer soundtrack, he found himself atop the Billboard 200 albums chart. In the time since, he has performed in Las Vegas, joining his costar Lady Gaga onstage during one of her concerts. And on Sunday night, he’ll perform “Shallow” at the Oscars.
How did he do it?
According to his A Star Is Born co-musical director, Lukas Nelson, through a whole heck of a lot of research and practice. Nelson, who fronts The Promise of the Real, first met Cooper after the star caught a set he played with Neil Young, a hero of Cooper’s, at Desert Trip music festival in 2016. “We connected over our love of good music,” Nelson told Esquire.com last year.
The two would hole up in Cooper’s L.A. home as often as possible over the next year as Cooper was prepping the Maine persona. “We’d sit down and play songs we knew he’d have to sing,” Nelson says of their process. “I’d play them back for him to show him where his voice could do better, where it could do worse. It was a matter of practicing to get to the point where not only could he carry a tune, but he could do it on cue, whenever.”
Together, they channeled a list of greats that included Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson (who starred in the 1976 A Star Is Born film), Jim Morrison, Young, and, of course, Nelson’s father, Willie. “We’d talk about the soul of performance,” Nelson recalled, “and what it really means to connect to an audience; how to connect the way the heroes he was trying to emulate did.”
Cooper also worked with a dialect coach, Tim Monich, to lower his singing voice a full octave. He wanted Maine to have a deep, raspy delivery, one not unlike his on-screen brother in the movie, Sam Elliott. They worked together five days a week, for four hours a day, for about six months to get Cooper ready, and, reportedly, it took every bit of it. As he told NPR, at first, he could only find his desired range hunched over, head down. “And at night,” he said, “I would go to sleep and I felt like my esophagus was lowering into my chest.”
Managing his breath was particularly difficult, he explained, also to NPR. “I had no idea how to breathe,” he said. “I knew nothing about singing—nothing. It’s such a different art form to sing in front of people, because you lose your breath right away when you’re nervous.” He credits his teachers for crossing the hurdle. “Lukas Nelson [is] an incredible musician … it’s because I was a good student and listened to great teachers [that] I was able to do it.”
But Jackson Maine isn’t actually coming to the Sunday evening ceremony. Instead, Cooper-as-Cooper will take that stage, he said when he stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this month. “[Jackson Maine]’s gone,” he said. “I’m not gonna try to get him back. But I will be me singing. I hope to be present and enjoy it. And hopefully people love the song sung that night.”
Whether he's dropping the cowboy drip along with the voice, we’ll have to wait and see.
