 last January and it was just goose bumps both arms legs be prepared my last session turned into therapy I cried a little bit I'm gonna cry this hour for a very different reason because it's just gonna be amazing so here's how it's gonna work Steve is gonna show us some things that he's got going on on the piano then we're gonna do some Q&A but I don't even need to introduce you just please welcome basically what we're gonna do today or what I've been asked to do is to talk a bit about writing for musical theater and specifically writing songs for musical theater and some thoughts that that I have about that this I do want to say I don't know if any I I did this sort of talk or whatever presentation at the Guild in New York about six months or so ago so to anybody who happened to be there then I apologize for the repetition but but otherwise yeah here we go and I I'm gonna try to barrel through a little bit because I want to try to get to have sufficient time for questions and answers I thought both in my session yesterday and the wonderful session that I attended with Emily Mann and Doug Wright the questions are so provocative and inspiring and intelligent that I want to leave as much time as possible for them because you guys ask things in a thoughtful and articulate way that that we may not have thought of but it opens up you know ideas and thoughts to talk about so I want to I want to make sure we have enough time for that so yes I'm gonna barrel a little bit can everybody hear me I don't need to use the mic do I are you guys all right in the back of the room yeah okay if you start not being able to hear me and you want me to pick up the mic I will but I won't unless I see little hands go up in the back all right so I thought I would talk a little bit about what really what is a musical theater song and how does it how why is it different from pop song or an art song or a standalone song and a lot of this will be stuff that you already know but I think it never hurts to sort of articulate these things I found when I actually tried to write things down and make a little list about what qualities to consider for a musical theater song it was it's always good to just sort of think about these things and articulate them so apologies if some of this seems too rudimentary to some of you so theater songs as of what really differentiates a theater song from a pop song or an art song and and what really what are some of the functions of theater songs what can they do we talked about this a little bit yesterday and one of the questions and I have a few things that I thought of and one of them was something we mentioned yesterday which is that they can tell the story that you're telling itself faster and more stylishly than a succession of scenes that that they're you they can be useful in terms of taking a big hunk of storytelling that needs to be done and organizing it in a way that that speeds through it and hurdles the plot forward and makes it more entertaining a very good example of this is weekend in the country from a little night music if you think about how much information is contained in that song how much is being set up how many relationships mean basically what you're looking at is getting a whole bunch of characters to gather together for the second act basically if you thought about how that would be in just a scene not so interesting but it's done so stylishly and with such verve and wit in in the number that basically this huge amount of exposition is accomplished in in an extremely entertaining way and and I've tried to select in a lot of these examples examples of my own work on you know which I we won't characterize it whether it's done well or not so in in wicked the whole dancing through life sequence which began in the in the early stages of working on that show that was four separate scenes and at times three separate numbers and it was this great big clumsy mass in the middle of the first act where we have to introduce characters and set up relationships and it was just taking forever and slogging down the whole show and when I finally was able to organize it in in my head under the rubric of one number dancing through life it just hurtled the show forward so that's a good thing to think about you know if you if you have a section of story in your show that is taking a long time and you you want to try and push through it and and and energize it you might think about how you might organize it as a musical number I mean so the other ways are are obvious and maybe more obvious obviously we use theater songs to illuminate character to tell us who who the people are what's what's driving them and and I've heard it said and I and I agree with this that a character in musical doesn't really live until he or she sings that if they're just existing as a character who only speaks they're not an important they're not that important to character an obvious exact I mean there are there are tons of examples of songs which eliminate character but you know the one that came first of mine for me was and Henry Higgins song why can't a woman be more like a man you know once he does that song you know so much about that guy and it helps to drive him through the rest of the show and there are tons of other examples like that obviously music contains its own energy and sometimes in a show you just want to kick up the energy and if you think about it virtually every num every choreographed number in every musical is basically doing that sometimes it's telling story but it has the corollary responsibility of kicking up the energy I mean an example from from wicked is one short day which which was written pretty much for that purpose just to have a joyous moment and and kick the energy up before we went into some more serious stuff at towards the end of the first act and yes there's an event I think it's important to have an event which is the bonding of the friendship of the two girls it's where the end of the number of one short days they declare that they are best friends but that's something that really could have happened in a line or a very brief scene basically the purpose of that number is is about providing energy and also of course if you're doing musical where would you have an important theme or or an idea that you want to express then that's also well expressed in musical numbers an obvious example would be tradition from fiddle on the roof and often these numbers are in fact the opening number on the Jerry Robbins way of of structuring the musical but they can happen late if you think of South Pacific there's you've got to be carefully taught you know we're sort of the message of the show or thematic content and it's a way of delivering it without being as heavy-handed as if somebody made a speech or as dry as if somebody came out and sort of told you this again the music makes it go down more easily and and and gives it so what are some other characteristics about a theater song what does it mean well in it as in a scene or a monologue it's good if it has an action somebody is trying to do something to someone else or to him or or herself they're trying to convince or to persuade or to comfort or to galvanize or to charm or it's good it as an acting if there can be an active verb in the number that helps drive it because and and you know obviously so many obvious examples but the two that I wrote down quickly are some people from gypsy if you think about how that is set up basically it's a number that illuminates character it's telling you who this person is it's telling you what kind of a person she is but it's set within the context of she's trying to get her father to give her eighty eight dollars and the fact that that's how it's set up as opposed to her just coming out and declaring gives it a kind of dramatic drive another example that I thought of it it's and it's one that might not come to mind so much but actually if you think about like musical the night in Phantom of the Opera rather than just this character coming out and you know singing of this lush ballad he has a goal which is to persuade the girl to let him be her mentor and the fact that it that it's framed within that motivation gives it a gives it a drive and even when a character is on stage singing by him or herself it's good if you can find some kind of drive so it's not just declarative not just a declaration of a state of being and sometimes that's tricky to find but I think it's a good thing to think about for theater songs I remember that Larry O'Keefe when he was working on Batboy told me that he sort of had a policy that that he would never write a song for someone to sing by him or herself alone on stage he always insisted on them singing to somebody else in order to to want to do something you know that's obviously a rule that I've broken on many an occasion and I'm not sure I agree with him but I reported to you because it was very provocative to be when he said that and I understood the theatrical motivation that that led him to say that and I thought I think it's a useful thing to think about even if you're dealing with solos because theater songs therefore have to move forward they finish in a different place than where they start and that's I think really the chief differentiation of them between pop songs which are essentially a declaration and and they make their entire declaration more or less at the beginning of the song and then they stay there you know I use my friend Dean's song fame as an example if you think about that song you get to the first chorus not really listening too much to the to the opening lyrics and then you get to the first chorus and it says fame I'm gonna live forever that's the whole song and and meant to be that way and and everything that follows that is that idea and you don't learn anything more at the end of the song than it's been declared right there and that's a pop song and deliberately structured to be that way that doesn't work so well for theater songs even if you're staying in the same place if you're doing a verse in chorus on this as I often have done such as corner of the sky you still want to at least in those verses be moving forward and and maybe in the final chorus take another step forward if you can and it's I think this requirement is why pop writers so frequently have trouble writing for the theater even the greatest pop writers because they just don't think in these terms they don't think about forward motion in a song and songs in a musical therefore they exist in time in many senses of that word time and that I think also differentiates them for one thing if they're functioning at their best they need to be sung right now at the moment they are some something has happened to spur that character right at that moment to sing that song that couldn't have been sung an hour ago can't be sung tomorrow now and there are there are so many examples again I mean if you think of a love song like Maria from West Side Story still that is a song that's a response to something that's just happened and if you sang the song the event hadn't happened yesterday so he couldn't sing it then and if he sang it tomorrow it wouldn't have the same heat and energy I just met a girl named Maria it just happened the mistresses song in a Vita song that has absolutely no business working it makes every single rule it's one of my favorite songs it's a character that you don't care about you're never going to see again but it's so compelling about being in the moment that you you want to spend time with that character and there's a thing about the lyric of the mistresses song that that I admire very much and it's sort of what I call the Tim Rice trick and it's something that I admire about Tim Rice's lyric writing and I kind of tried to steal it since I noticed it which is characters where you're in the characters head and they're hearing their own thoughts and sometimes amending them for instance in the mistresses song she says I think it's in a month or two we're in it I forget what the exact week or two but even if I miss slightly misquoting it she says in a week or two I'll be fine I know well maybe not that fine but I'll survive anyhow that moment is thrilling to me that's what I mean about being right in the moment so much in the moment that she's correcting her own thought she's responding to her own ideas and I find that's very theatrical and again not something that we hear very much in pop songs other example I've grown accustomed to her face about a song that's happening right now and is sort of tracking the characters thoughts which are all over the place and kind of spilling in on themselves you know such a brilliantly constructed theater song and even though it became very popular it's clearly a theater song not a pop song and also I mean this is an obvious thing to say but I think it's good to think about a song a theater song is received by the listener in real time it's coming by your ear and you have to get it so even if you're not and sometimes you can't hear every word and sometimes you know the character turns up stage and you miss a little bit so as writers we have to be aware of that that is that it has to deliver itself right then and and no one's gonna go back and listen to it again and get it again like you know I know with some of my favorite pop writers like like Johnny Mitchell for instance or in fact the new Paul Simon album and you listen to the first time you're like hmm okay and then sort of like three days later you start to think oh that song I want to hear it again and then you listen to it a few more times and it grows on you and you kind of get that's not a theater song and that can't be having that happen in the theater and so you have to think about you know the uses of repetition the uses of simplicity the uses of where you give the ear time to rest before it has to hear again if you look at how you know Susan is thought of as somebody who with a lot of words and a lot of lyrics and you have to keep up and all of that is true but what he's very skillful at is repetition and giving the audience chance to rest before it has to hear something else and I think it's it's helpful to take a look at his work in in that regard and see how artfully he does that you don't want the audience to either feel left behind but you also don't want to be ahead of the song and some of that has to do with how things are structured I saw a show recently in New York and I found that I was constantly ahead of the songs and I started to think well why is that and I realized that the structure the lyric structure of every song was exactly the same it was all ABCD it was all da da da da da da da da da da da da tree da da da da da da da da da da da da and me you know and so what started to happen for me was that when I got to tree my mind was already thinking oh that's where it's gonna go you don't want your audience to be doing that so you want to think about yes you want the satisfaction that a rhyme scheme can deliver the ability to land things that rhymes can deliver particularly jokes are always better if they're delivered in the true rhyme but you but you have to be able to stay ahead of the audience and some some of that has to do with how you how you structure your lyrics music as we said yesterday it it tends to stretch time except in the cases where of a thing like Wigan in the country where you're trying to speed up time but mostly what you're doing is you're taking a moment and you're stretching it out and sitting in that moment and delving into it that songs take just take longer than a conversation or a scene so you want to make sure that it's worth that moment is worth stretching the time for because by making it a song you're announcing that this is a moment that we want that that we want to look at we want to spend more time with yes you have to be make sure it's a moment the moment is worth stretching and then the other thing which again is obvious to say but but I think well to say out loud theater songs are of course affected by what's come before them and what comes after them so that you know you want a sense of your overall structure you want to know in fact if you need to kick up the energy if you can do a ballad in this spot or or whether or if this is a moment to a poor introspection when to build to a big hand and so on these are things you know you want to consider as you're dealing with each individual song that that it's a piece within within a bigger frame within within a longer form and again I've seen a lot of things founder because they're perfectly good songs but they're they're not working well enough based on what's come before or they're undercutting what what comes afterwards speaking of building to a hand that's another thing big difference with the other songs have an awareness of a finish and there's something and more obviously more often than not they build to hand and in my ASCAP workshops that I do that's I think the thing that I notice more than anything as as a failing of writers less experienced writers is they don't know how to finish their songs and a lot of times I hear a terrific song and you can sit there with the audience at the reading or the workshop hearing the song and they get through 99% of the song and it's terrific and then at the very end they lose it and it and and you can just feel the air go out of the room a little bit and so instead of getting a great big hand it gets a mild hand sometimes it's as simple as the person's holding the last note too long or or it sort of stops abruptly or or there isn't that little extra kick at the end that announces it's coming to an end so you want to be aware of a building to the end for the most part and if you don't you want to you want to do it on purpose you know you want so the audience feels that they were in good hands and you meant that I mean an example of us I mean there were many examples of songs that that built to just at the end they have a little extra kick you know I thought of Adelaide's lament this whole wonderful long song it's so delightful but lesser was you know enough of a theater guy that he didn't just be like okay I didn't I told my jokes and now she'll just say a person can develop a cold done hand at the very end he just puts a little coat on you know from a lack of community property and a feeling she's getting too old a person can develop a bad bad cold but to be aware of it you know I try to do this you know I try to be very aware of this I use triple rhymes a lot probably too much I'm actually trying to wean myself right at the very end you know when I sort of wrote down you know like the end of popular again very very long number which stops in the middle for a whole comedy routine etc but then at the very end just kicking up the ending you know so that so that after this whole five minute or however long it is thing that the hand supports you know that that you know when when she sings you know at the very end you know you'll be popular just not quite as popular as me and there's this whole big rhyme that's built up before it and that little twist at the end helps to keep it keep it up there's you just want to deliver a little something new at the very end and let the audience know and we're finishing here and it makes a huge difference and as I say also be very aware of you don't want that you don't want the singer to run out of air you know before the end of the note you don't and so on you really want to pay attention to you know what's called the button of the number it makes it makes a big difference a couple of other quick things to talk about the use of motifs which is something I'm very fond of and I think it's very helpful in in theater songs because again you're talking about a big form so repetition is very helpful motifs and reprises you know I obvious example and I remember when I saw gypsy for the first time and the use of I had a dream and how extraordinarily effective I felt that was it's the very first thing you hear when the overture before you even know what that is and the way it's repeated in the way it means something different each time was so influential on me that I just do it over and over again and I'm going to do a little presentation in a minute about the writing of a wizard and I which I apologize to those of you who already heard me do this but one of the things about that was that the very first thing that I had was the unlimited motif before I had anything else in fact almost before I had anything in that in the show you know I had that it sort of come to me I knew I wanted something where where the character started in a place and at the end because she's come to a different place there's something different about the motif which we'll talk about a little bit in a minute subtext very I think really important in theater songs much more so than in pop songs pop songs tend to be to wear their their hearts and their thoughts on their sleeve exactly what they're saying is exactly what they're feeling there's no secret that the character has that that we don't know that's not declared in the song but musically or or lyrically and so many great theater songs that's not true up that that the audience either knows more than the character does or the characters keeping something they think but but we see through it I'm going all the way back to songs thinking that songs like people will say we're in love or if I loved you you know which we tend to think it was like flat-out love songs but really think about how clever that was that they're they're declare it's obvious that they're crazy about one another and all they're doing is saying I'm not you know and that's a very bold and obvious example of subtext you know again if you you know you you think of a song like like the ladies who launch you know which appears to be a woman celebrating people and and and the song is so underneath it it's so full of rage and self-loathing this is a character who hates herself and the more she mocks other people the more it's clear that really what she does is hate herself and it's that subtext that gives it it's it's enormous power and it's charge and at the end she's saying something so celebratory she's saying everybody rise and he gets angrier and angrier and angrier until it's really ugly because she's so angry and it's the anger that that the subtext of that anger that makes that thrilling theatrically you know I was trying to think of a quick example for my own work and you know I was thinking of the song from wicked I couldn't be happier where a character's just telling everybody how happy she is and how her whole life has worked out and the more she talks about it the more heartbroken she is and the more devastated she is and and but the words are saying something completely different and the music and there's a there's a sort of disconnect between what the music is telling you and what the words are saying that at least my intention was that's very theatrical so I urge you to consider that to consider about subtext and about what is something that the audience knows that the character doesn't or that the character is trying to hide but comes through anyway sometimes in the music but not in the words because that's that's a useful tool to think about and then one other thing that I want to quickly talk about is how the music tells a story with that can tell the story without the words and I think in a lot of great songs theater songs that that is true and it's something that I didn't used to think about so much and then my good friend Craig Carnelia here wrote a song for the show working called Joe and it's about a guy who is retired and the entire again this is the use of music subtext everything he's saying is about how happy his life is and how busy his life is but when you hear this music it's it's extremely simple and repetitive and the repetition of this little phrase they are probably play it wrong but but it's just keeps going just that over and over again and then he's talking about how full his life is but the repetition of that is heartbreaking and when I heard that and I thought oh he's telling a whole story in the music he's giving me the if I didn't speak English I would know so much about this character from what the music is telling me and I think a lot of times as composers we don't really think about that we don't think of our job as being tell the emotional story of the character in his deepest sense as I think Craig did in the song Joe and it's just a good thing to think about you know I wrote down some some other songs you know again like not getting married in company you don't have to speak English to hear how to see to hear that this character is hysterical in both senses or or wheels of a dream from from ragtime you know you don't have to understand the words to that music is so inspiring and and tear inducing and everything you can just hear the aspiration in that music so yeah I just think that that when we're approaching us a theater song as composers you want to think about what if what if the what if one day the audience is full of people who don't speak English or speak whatever language the show is in how much of the story the emotional story can I can I tell just with music as opposed to you know what we sometimes do is like oh that's a good tune or that's a cool riff or whatever okay so these were a bunch of things that I sort of wanted to throw at you and then I'm gonna do a little Dalton Pony show here because as advertised but then but then you know we'll try and leave time for questions so so this is something that I've done a few times and my apologies to people who've heard me do this before but I wanted I wanted to share how a specific number got written and a number which has proven for me to be to be very very successful theatrically which is the the first song that the character devil the sings in wicked which is the wizard and I and I just want to share with you because you know we go to see shows and if things are working we just assume oh that's what was always there and we don't really think we we may not be aware of the of the painful process and and how often one makes you know goes down cul-de-sacs and makes missteps etc and and just in the spirit of misery loves company I thought I would share so okay so as you guys know because it's become so well-known that everybody now knows about the I want songs has now become you know so publicly available that we have to hide it we can't just write an I want song anymore because everyone knows we're gonna do it as you guys know most musicals the vast majority of musicals a particularly story oriented musicals have with as one of their first three numbers a song which has come to be known as the I want song because the leading character comes out and basically here she tells you what here she wants and then we spend the rest of the show watching them try to get it and and come up against obstacles and there's a real use for this song there's a reason why it's become so familiar that it's a cliche because it helps to drive the entire show and a lot of times you see a show and and and if that's not there it's not clear you you're kind of lost you're like well who's this show about and who do I care about and what am I rooting for and the I want song helps to answer those questions in a way that allows the audience to take the journey so when I was working on wicked and I was thinking about the I want song for Elphaba I had an idea to do a song called making good and I like to start with a title if I can find one it's very helpful for me in organizing the song if I know what it's called and so I have this notion about doing a song called making good and I I like that title for many reasons well for two reasons I like it because I like times that mean more than one thing like the title for good you know making good obviously it means both succeeding and literally making good and so I found the title attractive and I like the idea that a character that we know is going to become the most wicked person in her world starts out by having the desire to make good so starting with that a couple of things first of all as I said I wanted to I wanted to have a motif that changed and and so from the very beginning and in every incarnation of the song this motif occurred and I'll tell you I tell you about it because when I actually illustrate I'm not going to play it all three times because that would just be so tedious so I can't go to the idea that when she starts she's so full of hope and conviction that things are going to work out for herself that things are going to be unlimited and so I thought of that the word unlimited and she's always saying in every version of the song my future is one of the very first things that that I wrote for the show and and you most of people know by now that you know it's somewhere of the rainbow but it just changes that that was just like you know I was so thrilled when people started to mine so anyway but anyway to go back to making good so we have this idea that Winnie Holtzman my brother and myself the idea was that there was going to be the scene like the second scene in the show and the character of Elphaba was going to get on a train to go to school now full of and there was a little scene beforehand where people sort of made fun of her and she yelled at them and then she sang the song and this was going to be her I want song and I'm gonna play I won't play the whole thing for you but I'll play you a little bit so it went like this incredibly helpful as you guys know just at a certain point you get a bunch of actors together and they read and sing through the show and you invite some friends and you just feel how it's working and it's always horrifying and revelatory because you go in thinking like my show is perfect and then you sit at the reading if you think nothing works and the truth lies somewhere in between there but anyway we did the song and at a few readings and and again I could just feel it was not really landed it was okay got a nice response but other things were landing much better and I just thought but this is a leading character and this is the first time we're hearing from from her this this has to land or we're in trouble and then we we around about this time we cast a dean and so I was thinking about a Dina and that she has this kind of streety yes exactly right edgy personality for what maybe the song needs to be little little tougher etc so I wrote a whole other version of the song called making good and the notion was still she gets on a train she's going off to school and and I'll play just a teeny tiny bit of that for you can you all hear me when I do the lyrics back there great I'm trying to play quite softly but because I I don't have a mic okay so this is a little bit of the second version of making good yeah didn't really feel like it was any better it was just different and my son Scott who's a terrific director and a great dramaturg came to the second reading and so I was talking to him afterwards and I said you know that song making good I just it doesn't really work does it and he was like no it's not working at all well you know I've done two versions and I think they're actually pretty good songs I don't know what's going on he was like the whole idea is wrong he said first of all you just can't do that if you can't have some character get on a train and talk about what she's going to what she wants that feel I feel like I'm so ahead of the story I've seen that a million times I just think you need to cut the whole scene he said what you need to do I think is earn the right for her to say so I would just suggest you start with her at school and she does something that that creates a response and then she sings about that and you know I went to elaborate explanations about why that would work she would sing for 20 minutes into the show and it just was you know what's the way you do amuse but the whole point of of having readings and being a developmental process and this is something I think it's really important to remember is you might as well try it because you could always retreat you know we tend to think we get scared and we think that it's like you know etch a sketch and one time you can never get it back again but you can and that's happened to me frequently on shows where you try something and finally so like you know what we were right the first time let's just go back to that so you can always try something okay so I talked to Winnie about this and we and she said well you know if you really think about it what do we know about us what do we know that everybody in Oz wants they want to see the wizard and they want the wizard to fix whatever is wrong with them so probably that's what she should want and then by then of course it was we knew that what the plot was and so that was clearly the right thing to do and then the other thing that I want to share with you is that you know we can we now had a Dina and I remembered something from a chorus line when I saw a chorus line that that I think is very smart theatrical which is when I saw a chorus line for the first time and I saw it downtown and I didn't know anything about it because it hadn't opened yet and I'm watching this great show and at the end you know they do this really long curtain call where they all come out like their top hats and their Gola May and I remembered that when they came out at first in the Gola May I sort of thought oh now they're all gonna come downstage and do a kick line and I was very smug and you know feeling manipulated in all this and and so I'm watching the curtain call and they're dancing around and they all come down a big straight line but they don't do a kick line and then they dance around some more so now I'm watching it and thinking whoa they're gonna do a kick line and then they dance around some more great choreography come downstage again no kick line then they dance around some more by this time I'm like where's the end this court this this curtain call goes on for like eight minutes or something you know you want to go on for 20 at the very end the lights are coming down they all get in a big line and they kick big kick line I'm the first one out of my chair I thought about this afterwards and I realized that Michael Bennett did something really smart which I share with you which is he took at the obligatory moment and he made you wait for it until you were grateful really smart theatrical and so in thinking about this song I thought well it's a Dina everybody knows there's gonna be a great big belt and whatever what if I just save that for the very very end and so and so it's not till the end that that big belt happens okay so here are all the things that get put together she whole new idea new title and the idea of delaying the the big moment until until late in the game and so as you guys probably know what happens is she goes to school she does an inadvertent act of magic it attracts the attention of the head mistress of the school who says I'm gonna take you under my wing and teach you to magic and if you really work hard someday maybe you'll be able to work in the service of the wizard himself and this is the first time in her life that is a song that must happen now as opposed to a song anytime in her life for the first time in her life someone who's believed in her and offered her something that she has never occurred to her before and she sings in response to that song to that idea all right I'm not gonna do the the endless number but I'll I'll do enough so we like finish the dog and Pony show on a satisfying okay so first of all is that train song too because I like the tune and you know just recycling they just happen have I actually understood this weird work I've tried to suppress or hide that could help me if I make good so I'll make good working about it sometimes it takes a long time to figure it out and you know and don't be afraid to try something new and yeah and so on okay I talked longer than I have but we do have some time for some questions so yeah I just wanted you to speak a little bit more about song form we've grown up with the AABA and the AAAC is very prominent in theater and now the first chorus is a whole generation of younger people for whom that's the main way they hear music and I've struggled with my collaborated to write in a more contemporary way and I'm just wondering you have any secrets or do you struggle with trying to include verse chorus and what you write or I think it's a great question yeah I think you know that the biggest issue in theater as I say is to is is to stay ahead of the audience a little bit the problem with verse chorus is that when you return to the chorus you're you haven't moved forward and and you know as I say I have a lot of songs that are that are verse chorus though I do it less and less I have to say but you know back in the Pippin days corner of the sky verse verse chorus verse chorus verse chorus and you know no time at all keep returning to the chorus and there is a satisfaction of returning to the chorus because the audience gives the ear about the chance to rest and they they come to someplace familiar so but the problem is as I said the sense of not moving forward so you really want to therefore take a look at the verses if you're doing that form and you want to trick up the last chorus somehow so there's some you know the kind of thing we talked about but really in terms of form I think you want to try and walk that line of having a form the audience can grasp so they're not like what the hell is this song we want to we want to feel we want to understand what the form is so we can relax in it but you don't want to be to become predictable you so that's the trick and I think if you keep that in mind then whatever form you're working in you know you want you want to apply that to it and in a way I think that will that will take care of itself does that help somewhat yeah I mean yeah contemporary forms sure but you still want to be writing a theater song absolutely absolutely and and yet those songs you know you do constantly feel like like they're for the most part the songs that are intended to move you forward really do yeah yeah yeah you've written so many songs and I'm sure that you can identify a certain bag of tricks that you have how do you get past the bag of tricks when you go up to something new the question was if you have a bag of tricks how do you get past it to come up with something new that's I mean I just told you that I'm trying to wean myself from the triple rhyme at the end of the song because I've just done it so much because it works you know I think it's self-awareness and and trying to understand why you're using that particular what is what are you trying to accomplish with that particular trick and and is there another way to do it and but and it's just being aware that that you're starting to repeat your repeat your tricks yeah yeah I'm wondering before we end today we can have a sing-along with you Colors of the wind make me smile with my art. How does one think of that? you know that's it's that's a really that's that's something that I have admired about other writers and have it's it's actually in reference to the question about you know one way of not repeating your bag of tricks is to seal other people and and it's exactly what you said I you know early on I noticed that a lot of writers that I admired have these sort of paradox titles things that couldn't actually exist but somehow we knew what they meant and I was attracted to that and so yeah so I've tried to do that for consciously and colors of the wind is a conscious attempt corner of the sky is another one a conscious attempt at a title that doesn't actually make any sense but because it's nonsense has it has like an extra layer of meaning that the audience brings to it and that's just being conscious of of trying to do that and searching for it yeah yeah yeah they not so much actually not not so many successful shows by people with music backgrounds and not musical theater backgrounds unless somebody else involved with the show is there is is smart theatrically I mean if you think about Billy Elliot you know you got Stephen Daldry there so he's really smart and he really knows how to tell a story both in terms of the the book storytelling and how to tell a story directorially so the songs it lets the songs up the hook a little bit plus plus they all it also pushes the writer to to think more theatrically but yeah I mean think about you know Paul Simon just one of the most brilliant song writers you know in my lifetime who just you know took on the Cape Man and just couldn't didn't know how to tell a story theatrically and this happens over and over again you know American idiot I mean it's you generally when they work it's because somebody else is really thinking theatrically yes here and then I'll go back and then I'll do a single yes I know that generally we all like to think that I think some things just don't work for musicals and when I was in New York recently Spiderman gee what I said I don't think Spiderman has a musical in it and I guess I also feel that way about come fly with me now I know we can think of counter examples but do you do you come across pieces and go where's the musical or do you feel like anything that you mean the answer to that question is both yes and no I don't necessarily agree for instance Spiderman I could see I wouldn't I wouldn't know how to musicalize that story because I'm not interested in it but I could see someone who was really interested in that character Peter Parker and what he's struggling with and whatever he's got a lot of stuff to sing about so I could see how it how that idea could be a musical if somebody you know found the way to do it and they and it sang for them and that's my answer if it if it I mean I've talked about 1776 yesterday which is the worst idea for musical I've ever heard and one of my favorite musicals it's just because somehow it sang for the Sherman I'm sorry I forget his last name who Sherman Edwards thank you Craig who wrote the score and had the idea for it and then Peter Stone found wrote this amazing book and suddenly it was a musical that worked because because they heard it but if you came to me and said do you want to do a musical about declaration of independence and writing I just tell you it's a terrible idea and yeah the lyrics themselves the structure of the lyrics influence the way the music is written and whether whether you write the lyrics first is that you write it in mind to drive to a certain result from the composer or is there a lot of back and forth then that's you know that's a great question and and you can and I'm gonna answer it a little teeny bit but that's something you can write an entire book about that's that's such a key question I tend to when I'm working as a lyricist with another composer frankly I tend to work music first partly out of laziness but partly because I think music has its own internal logic and emotional logic that if you start with a lyric and aren't willing to twist it around a little bit you can you can lose the the emotional logic that the music might have that being said counterintuitively I know that all Rodgers and Hammerstein story songs were written lyrics first partly because Roger Oscar Hammerstein knew you know just the very things you're saying I don't know to what extent Richard Rodgers change things and cut things etc. I know if I'm sending lyric I tend to be it's like what we're talking about with adaptation yesterday I tend to say like you know what I have to cut this line and this needs fewer words here and I need something extra here and and go off of it a little bit so you have to be willing I think if you're the lyricist to let the composer run with it a little bit and then rewrite the lyric to fit it I a mistake that I made early in my career when I was working with Leonard Bernstein and I did do some of the lyrics first and after he set and I of course had a little tune in my head to which I was writing those lyrics to give me a rhythmic shape and when he set the lyrics he set them in an entirely different and I will say far more imaginative way than then I had thought of but what I didn't do was go back and rewrite the lyric which is what I should have done and no rewrite the lyric once the music existed I should have gone back and there were places where where I could have made the lyric sit better on the music fit the flow of the music better call less attention to its own rhyme scheme and so on and I just didn't know enough to do it so that's that's what I would say that that it really is a partnership and and in the end you want that you want the marriage of the music and lyrics to feel completely inevitable yeah so so then you want to be willing to go back and forth I'll tell you one one other quick story before I sing along this was very interesting to me too when I was working in the show rags with Charles Strauss and he had written this really I thought beautiful too and and I had written the lyric for it and it was all yet it was fulfilling all the rules I thought about moving the plot forward and all the stuff we talked about and we did it some readings and backwards auditions just landing flat and the tune I don't remember the original lyric but the character said the original lyric was like I will find a way and I did a whole other lyric to that tune also not working at all and finding Charles said I guess we're just gonna throw that out and write a different tune and I just said no no no it's it's not you it's me I just haven't solved this I have to it's a beautiful tune and and it's apropos of what we were talking about find a find a title that doesn't actually mean anything literally but means something more and so I just said I just have to go more and the music is anthemic and poetic and I just need to do that in a lyric way and and so I came up with the title children of the wind and as soon as I accepted I didn't practice this so I'll probably do it wrong but the a little bit of the final lyric was this is a show about immigrants and it was something about weird children and then people would come up afterwards and they said would say oh my god that's the most beautiful tune that I thought like that's the fucking job of the lyric so the tune is is just beautiful you know I'll finish with this famous story that's probably apocryphal about Oscar Hammerstein in Jerome Curran you know the story but oh man River the wife of Oscar Hammerstein at a party I'm sure this didn't really happen and someone and they're having to be standing together and someone comes up to them and she says Mrs. Kern I just have to tell you that I your husband is such a genius and he wrote my favorite song Old Man River and Mrs. Hammerstein says no no dear my husband wrote Old Man River her husband wrote that's the job of the lyric the job of the lyric is as soon as you put the phrase Old Man River to that then the music just just comes to life so you have to be looking for that when you collaborate all right we're doing a single who is there is there a female voice here who can sing game-by-game because I because it'll get all confusing if I play it in my key and then nobody will be able to sing along so great