You Could Probably Follow The Entire Kissing Booth 2 Plot By Listening To The Soundtrack

The Kissing Booth 2 is super long for a rom-com about teenagers staging a kissing booth at a carnival. It clocks in at two hours and 12 minutes, so you'd be forgiven for not absorbing every little detail, including the ones on The Kissing Booth 2's soundtrack. It has 38 songs, which means that roughly every five minutes, there's a new one. And some of these ever present songs are performed by Elle's new love interest Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez).

Zakhar Perez grew up participating in musical theater and taking voice lessons, so he was a natural to play Marco. His sensitive crooning and slick Dance Dance Mania movies make him an instant threat to the once solid relationship between Elle (Joey King) and Noah (Jacob Elordi). But add Noah being away at college and Elle feeling insecure about his relationship with a woman he met at school, and Marco (and his music) are suddenly quite tempting.

At first, Elle and Marco have a bit of a rivalry, since they're competing team captains at the school's field day. So when Elle hears him singing and playing guitar on the boardwalk by the beach, she's mostly annoyed — especially when he switches into singing a verse in Spanish. He's just so good at everything! The song Marco covers is "What I Like About You" by a band called The Romantics. On the nose much? If it wasn't already obvious that Marco was charming his way into Elle's heart, his song choice is a blaring neon sign.

But next comes their Dance Dance Mania routine. They dance to a song by Walk The Moon called "Lost In The Wild," which literally contains the lyrics "you belong with me." After practicing together for a day, Marco and Elle end up on the beach, where Marco just suddenly happens to have a guitar to strum for Elle. He doesn't sing anything in particular, he just hums a little while campfire light plays across his face.

The Halloween dance is the final musical cue in their budding romance; Elle walks into the party where Marco is performing on stage. He sings a cover of The Diamonds' Halloween themed tune "Batman, Wolfman, Frankenstein, or Dracula" in which a guy romances his gal by dressing up in costume: "It takes the Batman, Wolfman, Frankenstein or Dracula / To put her in the mood for love."

Somehow, the music supervisor found a song that sounds like "The Monster Mash" but is actually about catching feelings (it doesn't necessarily bode all that well though with lines like "It takes a monster from outer space / To make my baby want my embrace"). But still. A Halloween love song at the Halloween dance is a sledgehammer of a metaphor to convince us that Elle and Marco are a thing.

They even slow dance at the party to Will Post's "Wonderlust," which is for some reason being lipsynced by a teenage boy at the dance.

But when the soundtrack isn't pushing Marco and Elle together, it's also making references to the original movie. During the sequel's kissing booth scene, the Best of Friends number "Twist Shake Shout" plays, just like it did during the first kissing booth montage. 

The movie's executive producer Michele Weisler told Radio Times that a lot of thought was put into the soundtrack for pivotal scenes. "My Baby Loves Lovin'" by White Plains can be heard when Elle and Noah reunite in Boston because "it feels nostalgic in contrast to how they're celebrating their reunion in the current day," Weisler said.

From there, the soundtrack moves through music history wildly, with everything from the Beach Boys and Young MC, to The Black Lips and Juice WRLD (twice!).

But while it looks a little all over the place, every time Marco sings a song or Elle's antics are set to a tune by Vampire Weekend, it's the result of a very deliberate decision. Just as deliberate as Marco carrying a guitar around with him everywhere in case he needs to serenade his crush on the beach at dusk.