Singer and songwriter John Hiatt recalls how "The Country Bears" filmmakers pitched the live-action project at their first meeting: "Spinal Tap with paws," relates Hiatt. "That's how they described it to me. That was all I needed to hear."

The songs that Hiatt subsequently wrote for the film's soundtrack (scheduled for July release on Walt Disney Records) have a rootsy feel with a dash of country, a pinch of rock, and a shot of rhythm and blues. And when Ted Bedderhead, the lead singer and real brain of the Bears, opens his mouth to sing, it's often Hiatt's voice that comes out. (In the spirit of full disclosure: None of the bears actually does his or her own singing. Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, and others lend their voices to the soundtrack. Hey, in Hollywood, things are not always as they seem.)

Hiatt songs have been covered by a Who's Who of recording artists, from Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, and Rosanne Cash to Bob Dylan, the Neville Brothers, and Three Dog Night. Remember "Riding with the King," the title track of the Eric Clapton and B. B. King hit collaboration from 2000? Hiatt had written and recorded it nearly 20 years earlier.

Songwriting is usually a solitary process for Hiatt, but writing for the film was different. "It's almost like co-writing," he explains. "When I write a song, typically, I describe it as like building a little ship in a bottle. It's just you and the melody and the lyric, and it's like a little personal adventure. When writing for film, you kind of have to pop out of yourself a bit. For me it's important to get on the beam of the director's vision of what the music is supposed to do."

Hiatt was jazzed by the possibilities that come from writing for different scenes in a film, be it an action sequence or a romantic moment. "There are all kinds of ways you can go. In film you can create tension with the music. [The music] can be so opposite of what you're seeing that it creates another emotion, an addition to the scene. It's a fascinating world."