The 2010s File Feature
Try Everything
Try Everything — Shakira "Try Everything" is a pop song written and performed by Shakira as part of the soundtrack to the Walt Disney Animation Studios film …
01 The Story
Try Everything — Shakira
"Try Everything" is a pop song written and performed by Shakira as part of the soundtrack to the Walt Disney Animation Studios film Zootopia, released in February 2016. The song was written by Sia, Tor Erik Hermansen, and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen, the latter two known professionally as Stargate, who also produced the track. It was released through Walt Disney Records as the lead single from the Zootopia soundtrack album. The combination of Shakira's vocal performance, Sia's characteristically anthemic songwriting, and Stargate's polished pop production created a song that transcended its animated film context and became a genuine pop radio success in its own right.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Try Everything" peaked at number 30, a respectable placement for a soundtrack single, particularly for an animated film's opening song in an era when adult pop radio and animated movie tie-ins rarely overlapped this cleanly. The song performed even more strongly on specific format charts: it reached number 15 on the Pop Songs airplay chart and spent an extended period on the Adult Pop Songs chart. Internationally, the song was a significant hit, performing especially well in markets where Shakira has an exceptionally strong following, including much of Latin America, Spain, and parts of Europe.
The film Zootopia was itself a major commercial and critical success. It grossed over one billion dollars at the global box office, making it one of the highest-grossing animated films of 2016 and one of the most commercially successful Disney animated features of the decade. The film's success extended the reach of "Try Everything" to an audience that included both children who encountered it through the movie and adult pop listeners who heard it through radio and streaming. The song appears during the film's opening sequence and is performed in the narrative by Shakira's character, Gazelle, a pop star within the world of the film, a meta-casting choice that allowed Shakira's real-world star power to resonate within the movie's fiction.
The casting of Shakira as Gazelle was both commercially logical and thematically apt. Gazelle is presented as a globally beloved performer and positive cultural force within Zootopia, qualities that mapped naturally onto Shakira's actual public persona as one of the most internationally successful pop artists of her generation. Shakira voiced the character and provided all musical performances, and her involvement was a significant promotional element of the film's marketing campaign.
Sia's songwriting brought her signature style to the track: a focus on resilience, optimism, and the emotional experience of trying and failing without giving up. The lyrical content, which celebrates the willingness to attempt difficult things even at the risk of failure, was perfectly calibrated for a children's film that deals thematically with characters overcoming prejudice and self-doubt. But the emotional universality of those themes meant the song connected with adult listeners entirely outside of the film's context as well.
Stargate's production gave the track a contemporary pop sheen with elements of gospel and arena pop that suited both radio formats and theatrical presentation. The instrumentation builds from a relatively understated verse to a full, emotionally charged chorus that rewards the patience of the build, a structure that works equally well in a film screening room and on a radio broadcast. The production is meticulously balanced for broad commercial appeal without sacrificing the emotional directness that makes the song feel genuine rather than calculated.
The Zootopia soundtrack album, on which "Try Everything" is the centerpiece, also included score compositions by Michael Giacchino, who received an Academy Award nomination for his work on the film. The soundtrack package as a whole performed well commercially, with "Try Everything" serving as its most widely distributed and consumed component. The song received extensive placement on Disney's streaming and playlist channels, giving it visibility in curated contexts that extended its commercial life well beyond the initial theatrical run of the film.
For Shakira, who had been a global pop force since the early 2000s and had achieved American mainstream success with "Hips Don't Lie" in 2006 and subsequent hits, "Try Everything" represented a successful extension into the family entertainment space without abandoning the pop craftsmanship that had defined her career. The song demonstrated that her voice and commercial instincts remained sharp well into the 2010s, and it introduced her music to a younger generation of listeners who might not have been aware of her earlier work. The Grammy Award consideration the song received for Best Song Written for Visual Media further confirmed its status as a genuine creative achievement within the film soundtrack genre.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind "Try Everything" by Shakira
"Try Everything" is organized around one of the most enduring and widely applicable themes in popular music: the relationship between failure and perseverance. The song does not minimize the difficulty of failing or pretend that setbacks are trivial; instead, it makes a case for the value of attempting things even with the full knowledge that the attempt might not succeed. This is a more sophisticated emotional position than simple optimism, because it acknowledges the reality of difficulty while insisting on the worthiness of engagement despite that difficulty.
The song's emotional center is the idea that the willingness to try is itself a form of success, independent of outcome. This reframes the conventional success narrative in a meaningful way: instead of measuring worth by achievement, it locates worth in the courage of the attempt. This is the core philosophical claim of the song, and it is one that resonates particularly strongly with children and young people navigating environments in which failure carries social and emotional consequences, which made it an ideal choice for a film aimed at family audiences dealing with themes of ambition, prejudice, and self-doubt.
Within the context of Zootopia, the song introduces the character of Judy Hopps, a small-town rabbit who dreams of becoming a police officer in a city dominated by larger animals. The song's lyrics about trying and stumbling and getting back up map directly onto Judy's narrative arc, establishing the film's thematic terrain in the opening minutes. But the song was written with enough generality and emotional breadth that it functions entirely independently of that narrative context, which is why it achieved genuine pop radio success rather than remaining simply a beloved movie song.
Sia's writing approach on this track, as on many of her most successful compositions for other artists, prioritizes emotional clarity and directness over lyrical complexity. The verses are specific enough to create vivid images of struggle and determination, while the chorus is universal enough to encompass a vast range of personal experiences. This combination of specificity and universality is a hallmark of effective pop songwriting, and it is particularly evident here in how the song manages to be simultaneously about a cartoon rabbit's career ambitions and about the deepest human experiences of risk, failure, and renewal.
For adult listeners, the song also operates as a meditation on the psychological cost of self-protection. The safest emotional strategy is often to avoid trying anything that might fail, because not attempting means never having to confront inadequacy directly. "Try Everything" pushes back against that protective instinct by suggesting that the emotional cost of not trying, the regret and the stunted potential, is ultimately higher than the cost of visible failure. That message carries genuine weight precisely because it names a temptation that most adults recognize in themselves.
The meta-dimension of Shakira performing the song adds another layer of meaning. As a global pop star voicing a fictional pop star, she brings real-world authority to the song's message of perseverance. Shakira's own career trajectory, from a Colombian teenager making music in Spanish to one of the best-selling recording artists in history with global pop hits in multiple languages, is itself a lived example of the willingness to try everything. Her vocal performance carries the conviction of someone who has genuinely navigated the experience the song describes, which transforms what could have been a polished but impersonal piece of commercial songwriting into something that feels personally committed and emotionally authentic.
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