Listen (song) - Production and Composition

Production and Composition

Upon reading the script for Dreamgirls, director Bill Condon felt the second half of the film needed a song. The "emotional punch" of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" led him to ask the musical team for Dreamgirls "to create a new and equally moving song to energize the second act". Led by Henry Krieger, the composer of the original 1981 Broadway musical version of Dreamgirls, "Listen" was written with help from Scott Cutler, Preven, and Knowles; it was one of four songs written for the film version of Dreamgirls. "Listen" was produced by the R&B-pop production duo The Underdogs.

"Listen" is an R&B-soul ballad, which is written in the key of B major, and set in common time at a moderately slow groove of 80 beats per minute. Knowles' vocals range from the note of F♯₃ to G₅. The song's music takes its instrumentation from the bass, celli, drums, guitars, keyboards, percussion, violas, and violins. According to Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe, its lyrics make reference to tenacity, love, and the refusal to defer dreams; Knowles, as the female protagonist, sings, "demanding her moment in the sun". Chuck Taylor of Billboard magazine wrote that Knowles shimmers "with evocative emotion", rising to new heights alongside "a golden melody with spellbinding, rafter-raising production". The lyrics are written in the traditional verse-chorus form. The song starts with the lines: "Listen to the song here in my heart, a melody I start but can't complete". A bridge follows after repeating the pattern and ends in another chorus.