Ray Chew Reveals How Songs Are Picked and Music Made for 'Dancing with the Stars'

The celebrities and their pro partners aren’t the only people working hard every week on Dancing with the Stars. Each of the songs that is danced to has to be specifically tailored to the beat of the dance for which it is being performed—and the man that makes that happen is musical director Ray Chew.

Chew, who was the musical director for American Idol when it was on FOX from 2010-2013 and who just completed the 65^th Emmys, took on the gig at DWTS in 2014 without knowing exactly all that was involved.

“The difference [between Idol and DWTS] is that I am tasked with doing some of the songs very specific and particular in terms of what was in the original,” Chew tells Parade. “Then we add different things to the arrangement, accents and different kinds of sounds. By and large, my first task is everything that was done in the original, I have to replicate and have available and make it sound like that, and then add whatever we’re going to do for the dances in the ballroom.”

Chew calls it figuring out the secret sauce. “You go to a fine restaurant, and you enjoy that wonderful meal and you just consume it,” he continues. “But if somebody said, ‘Hey, listen, I’m going to need you to figure out what’s in that sauce,’ well the sauce only took five minutes to make but trying to figure out what’s in that sauce could take you many hours. So, that’s what we have to do.”

And it’s not as if he has a lot of time in which to do it. The songs need to be delivered to the choreographers so they can begin rehearsals on Wednesdays after Tuesday night’s performances and then there is all the other music that’s in the show.

“It’s not like I get weeks in advance,” he says. “We do the show on Tuesday, and I have the email full of stuff Tuesday night. As I watch the show, I’m looking at what we’re doing for the upcoming show knowing that I have to give the teams what they need so they can rehearse. So, we go in right away and we start putting together what they need to rehearse with.”

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How are songs picked on Dancing with the Stars?

Song selection is a committee process with the executive producers, the choreographers and the contestants all having input.

“There’s a lot of different components that go into the design of what we are looking to do,” Chew says. “Once everybody has ratified, then it’s my job to make sure that I deliver that product.”

During our Zoom chat, Chew shared more about what goes into prepping the music for each week’s DWTS, plus his other upcoming projects, including the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

When I first started watching, I thought, ‘Why don’t they use the original recordings?’ But there’s no way that they can do that because it doesn’t necessarily work with the dance.

That’s true. And not only that. There are always different things that they want to have the ability to do. Also, many of those recordings, the original recordings, the artists do not give people the rights to use their music in that space. For instance, going back to an artist like Prince, whose estate is a little bit more liberal with that, he would veto any use of his material. So, there were some artists that we could never do their songs. With that we take the approach of ‘Hey, listen, we’re going to do our rendition of these songs and we never have to deal with having to clear those types of mountains.’

Each week DWTS has a theme. There’s Disney night and there’s Most Memorable Year, which became Dedication Night, there’s Halloween, but this year we had Hair Metal Night and Soul Train night. How much input do you have into the themes that are different every year?

It’s by committee. It’s not just one aspect of the team that decides everything. Ultimately, the executive producers decide what they want to air but there’s a lot of input and it’s my full-blown task to make sure that I deliver.

For Soul Train Night, there were many of my personal ideas in some of the arrangements, like the opening performance. I had a lot of input as to how we were going to do that, what we were going to do..

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Is there a music night in your mind that you’d like the producers to do?

Ooh, well, I think over the years we’ve kind of done everything theme wise that I would say would be really cool. We’ve done Latin night, we’ve done orchestral night, classical night, we’ve done, again Soul Train Night. That was a first where we took a specific brand that represented that genre of music and really exploded that out.

Dancing With the Stars only occupies half of your year. You probably start in August when they start rehearsals. What are your projects the rest of the year?

We have a wonderful project called Two Beats One Soul. It’s a documentary of our musical adventure going to Cuba to coalesce with the Cuban artists and to do a cultural exchange thing.

My mission, along with my wife and partner, Vivian Scott Chew, was to make sure that we didn’t just go down there to extract the art from there and to do something that would negatively impact the people. What we wanted to do was make sure that we got to know the people of the island, what their culture was about and what was the makeup of this wonderful music. And then marry that with artists from the United States and do a wonderful project together that we describe as a stew they have called ajiaco stew. Ajiaco stew has everything. It’s got beef, it’s got pork, it’s got chicken, it’s got fish and it’s a big meal. What happens is that they cook it all day.

What we did is we cooked this wonderful stew with the artists, and we documented their journey, writing through a lot of hardships, dealing with aspects that people are unaware of outside of Cuba. For instance, in Cuba they don’t have the same access to the internet. So, they have to gather in places. I don’t even know if we could really fathom that because everything is so instant right now, everything’s on the phone. They don’t have it like that.

What we do is we come to realize the wonderful people, and that brings out the real human aspect of how much they can do with a lot less. And they can do a lot more. And so, what we did was we made wonderful music together and we documented that. The documentary is out. It is available on The Black Experience on Xfinity and Xumo.

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What other kinds of things are you into?

Also coming up, of course, is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This will be my ninth year as music director. That’s a wonderful, wonderful task that I have. It’s actually a labor of love. People say, “What do you do for a ?” Well, I’m glad you asked that question. For the broadcast of the , there are over 200 musical cues for those three hours. It’s three hours of wall-to-wall music. All that music has to be produced and recorded by me and my teams beforehand so that the artists, some of them who sing live on top of that, you’ll see the balloons and you’ll see the floats and you’ll see the music going in and out of commercial. You’ll have the opening theme. All of which has to be pre-recorded and triggered live as the proceeds.

In addition to that, Vivian and I produce one of the grand nights at Carnegie Hall called A Night of Inspiration. This year we have a wonderful lineup of secular artists and non-secular artists on the great stage of Carnegie Hall on Saturday, Nov. 14. We have a 64-piece orchestra, 150 of a mass choir and we’re doing inspirational music and bringing cultures and genres together.

In addition to that I’m working on my legacy album. It’s called My Journey. Finally in my life, I’m at a point where I really have something that I felt I wanted to say. I’ll release that in the first quarter of 2025. I have a single out right now. It’s called Jam. It’s a party record that features Stephanie Mills, Kid Capri, MC Lyte and Doug E. Fresh.

Dancing with the Stars airs Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and simulcast on Disney+ and then next day on Hulu.

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