Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dwayne Johnson lead Disney’s 13-track Vaiana live-action score

The soundtrack for Disney‘s live-action Vaiana arrives with Lin-Manuel Miranda as composer and Dwayne Johnson alongside Catherine Laga’aia, the film’s Polynesian debut lead actress, performing all 13 tracks on screen rather than in a separate recording booth. That structural choice — to anchor the songs to the same performers carrying the dramatic roles — is the album’s central proposition and its most interesting risk.

Miranda’s compositional instinct in the original animated version was to build songs that do character work rather than spectacle work. Each number in that film advanced an emotional argument, the way the best Broadway writing does, rather than pausing the action for a set piece. Returning to the same franchise for the live-action iteration, he brings that same architecture. What changes is who inhabits it. Johnson’s craft is built on presence and physicality at scale, the kind that fills arenas and anchors franchise films, not the intimate technical command that studio voice recording rewards. Laga’aia, whose theatrical training sits closer to Miranda’s own compositional sensibility, represents the other axis of this tension.

That asymmetry between the two leads is not a flaw in the casting logic. It is the production’s argument. Miranda’s score here is doing what good musical theater writing has always done with performers of different vocal registers: using the gap between what a song demands and what a voice can give as an expressive tool, not a problem to be engineered around.

The early streaming picture complicates that argument, though. Last.fm shows listener and playcount data near zero in the period following the album’s release, which suggests the audiences who might be expected to converge on this soundtrack — Miranda’s existing fanbase and the listeners loyal to the original animated material — have not yet done so in measurable numbers. Part of that may be structural: the film and album operate under the title Vaiana in European markets and Moana in the United States, splitting playlist discovery and algorithm surface area across two naming conventions. Whether that market fragmentation, the timing gap between theatrical and streaming release, or genuine audience ambivalence about familiar songs in unfamiliar voices explains the early data is not a question this window can answer.

MusicBrainz confirms 13 tracks under the Soundtrack classification, and Spotify verifies global availability.

The complete Vaiana: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack — all 13 tracks — is available now on Spotify and MusicBrainz-listed streaming platforms. The live-action film is in wide release, and the album’s streaming footprint will build as the theatrical window closes and the home audience arrives.

Tags: Disney, Dwayne Johnson, Soundtrack, Catherine Laga'aia, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Vaiana