I don't know if Alan was throwing shade at Disney or not, but I was also surprised by how honest he was in this interview. I'm glad he was, though; especially regarding the unnecessary lyric changes. I also agree with
Sotiris he should have a say in selecting a collaborator and Disney shouldn't have called Miranda without asking him first.
Regarding the lyric changes, I'm not surprised by that. At least they didn't cut "Kiss the Girl" altogether. If I remember correctly, some people here thought at first that might happen. I wonder how they're going to "fix" it.
As for the new songs, I thought "For the First Time" would probably be the one they plan to submit for the Oscars, but after hearing more about Eric's song, I now think that sounds like an even more likely candidate. I'm surprised Sebastian and Scuttle's song takes place so late in the movie. And that doesn't seem like a good or important enough moment for a song. It sounds like another "The Morning Report" to me. I hope I'm wrong, though, and the song is good.
By the way, I was reading the interview again, and I have a doubt. Does the phrase "for the first time" (in bold below) have a literal meaning here or is it referring to the title of Ariel's new song and they just forgot to add the quotation marks?
Each of the songs were a different formula of the two of us together. “Wild Unchartered Waters” was very much in my wheelhouse as a composer with lyrics set to the music. I think it was probably the most intimidating for Lin because he felt like it was really stepping into Howard [Ashman’s] shoes. For the first time, I took the essence of a piece of music that had been in the underscore of the original Little Mermaid. It was a very lilting feel to the moment. Lin asked to make it more edgy and more a two against three tempo-wise, if you know what that means. So we gave it a lot more edge and then wrote to that which took on this incredible excitement. It's a real combo of the two but he had really influenced the musical field. On “Scuttlebutt,” I wrote a piece of music with an implied melody line. Lin took that piece of music and brilliantly rapped over it musically. So there's this whole new creation.