Muppets Most Wanted (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Bret McKenzie’s improbable career has gone from New Zealand to Hollywood, and from obscure Kiwi musician/comic to GRAMMY® winner, cable star, and Emmy nominee via his duo (and their TV show) Flight of the Conchords. But it took 2011’s The Muppets to score McKenzie an Oscar (for the song “Man or Muppet”). He admits the added pressure on this follow-up soundtrack only inspired him to lampoon the whole process from the outset, via the Tony Bennett/Lady Gaga/Ricky Gervais–studded “We’re Doing a Sequel.” “It lets the audience know that, first of all, it’s a sequel,” he says with a chuckle. Typically undaunted, Conchords cohort Jemaine Clement makes a cameo: a faithfully loopy cover of Allen Toussaint’s “Working in a Coal Mine.” Another Bret favorite is his Miss Piggy–wooing “I’ll Get You What You Want (Cockatoo in Malibu),” which McKenzie says “kinda comes out of left field and a genre that I really love: that early-’80s Lionel Richie/Michael McDonald/Doobie Brothers sound. It was kind of fun to make a Russian frog sing as Michael might sing.”