ASK JRB 2006

ASK JRB, AND HE EVENTUALLY ANSWERS.

Posted on March 22, 2006 at 4:22 pm

Hey y’all! Eventually, we’ll be able to post these directly to the “ASK JRB!” page, but while we’re busy setting up the rest of the site, I thought I’d just send these out now! You asked some really great questions, and I had a lot of fun writing subtly evasive answers.
Rick Piper asks:
Is Last Five Years being performed anywhere in US in next few months? I saw it in Philadelphia two years ago–I saw it 3 times–it was brilliant!
JRB responds:
There seems to be some production of “The Last Five Years” happening everywhere, for which my accountant is supremely grateful. That Philadelphia production was pretty awesome, directed by the amazing Joe Calarco and starring Nicole van Giesen and Wayne Wilcox. It was a great production! It’s hard for me to know about all of them, and the best place to look to find out where performances are happening is on the MTI website. Just click on the title of the show you’re interested in and at the bottom will be a partial list of upcoming productions. As far as “Last Five Years” goes, the most exciting production I know of coming up is at the Pasadena Playhouse this summer, in rep (!) with “I Do, I Do!,” another two-character musical about marriage. When I know more about that production, I’ll let you all know!
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Josefien Kleverlaan asks:
I’ve got a question about the song ‘Christmas Lullaby’. I really love this song and I’ve chosen to sing this song for a few upcoming auditions. The only problem is: the show “Songs for a new world” has never been staged here, so I have no idea what the thought behind this song is. Could you please tell me what happened with the woman who sings this and why she sings it?
JRB responds:
One of these days, I’ll have to do a guide to the whole script of “Songs for a New World.” I always thought these songs were fairly self-explanatory, but in the last eleven years, I’ve had enough questions about “What does this mean?” to prove me wrong. As far as “Christmas Lullaby,” it’s a song about a young girl who’s just discovered she’s pregnant. I imagine her to be alone in the world, probably broke, and generally hopeless. Having this child is the scariest, bravest, happiest, weirdest thing that she could possibly do, and she decides at the end of the song that no matter what the consequences, her whole life has led her to the moment when she could have this child.
UPDATE: I just found this, which is something I wrote last year in response to another e-mail about “Christmas Lullaby.”
It’s about a girl who feels completely powerless and alone in the world, but decides to have a baby so she can change those things. But she’s not “scheming”, she has just made a decision (which she’s also scared about) to bring this other life into the world because she thinks it will make her life better. The key is to not play the song dark at any point – even the line “I’ll suffer any pains” has to be proud and honest; she’ll make whatever sacrifices she has to make to bring something beautiful into the world. Someone asked me if it was supposed to be the Virgin Mary singing. Up to you.
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Mindy Cimini asks:
Any advice for aspiring pianists? I know that’s not entirely what you do for a living, and I’ll probably head in a classical direction if I pursue piano in college (I’m a HS sophomore right now)…but it would still be interesting to hear your opinions.
JRB responds:
Hey, Mindy. Here’s the thing that I think is the most important advice I can pass on to you: nobody ever teaches young pianists about time and feel. I think the reason I was able to get work in the theater early on was because I knew how to play in time and in tempo and with the appropriate feels. (I also had a couple of great conductors tell me where I was screwing up.) Playing “in time” means being able to keep every sixteenth-note at exactly the same length, to place every quarter-note the same distance from the one before. You’d be amazed how few pianists can do it consistently over the course of a three-minute or four-minute song without speeding up and slowing down all over the place. And “feel” is knowing that you play a swing number differently than a classical piece, that you play a rock song with different energy than you play a show tune. Again, it’s really rare to find pianists who can not only play the notes on the page but play them the way they’re supposed to sound. Start listening to different pianists, not just me but Dave Frishberg, Michel Petrucciani, Billy Preston, Stevie Wonder, Oscar Peterson. If you really want a trippy experience, dig this: Marc-Andre Hamelin (who can play anything) did an album on Hyperion of music by a crazy Russian jazz-classical composer named Kapustin. To hear a “legit” guy play such style-heavy music so beautifully is really unbelievable. It completely sets a new standard. Here’s the album on Amazon.com.
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Pete Howland asks:
At present I’m working on Shiksa Goddess, one of my favorite songs from the show. I should say first that I have somewhat of a higher Tenor voice, and my lowest comfortable note is a B flat. When I try to reach for the held out A in Shiksa Goddess, I end up in glottal fry. My voice teacher and I tried several different things to try to get the note out of me, but it seems that my low range has reached a limit. She suggested that I speak with you, to come up with an alternate note, or way to speak it so the meaning of the line isn’t lost. I am so close to being ready to perform the show, this one note is the only thing that I can’t seem to sing. I would love to hear any suggestions you might have.
JRB responds:
This is a dangerous response, but I think it’s true: glottal fry is, in your case, probably exactly what that particular note demands. It’s supposed to be funny; if you can really commit to it, you’ll get a laugh. Work with the instrument that you have and make the most of it. I don’t recommend that choice for everyone; if you can hit the note, then hit it good and strong and spooky and have a party with it. But for you, make the best of the limitation you’ve got, croak that thing out and enjoy it. However, if you really can’t produce any sound at all down there, then I would honestly suggest just transposing the song up a half step or a step until it all fits in your range. Keys in musicals are not always writ in stone; if Norbert hadn’t been able to hit that low A, I would have modulated the song up a step for him.
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Kathy Stein asks:
I have a question about Shiksa Goddess that I can’t figure out even in discussing it with my best friend, James. The song always confused me, since Cathy is not Jewish, which makes sense for the breaking Jamie’s mother’s heart, JCC crumbling in the ground, grandfather rolling in the grave, etc. However, at that point, Jamie talks about all the things that Cathy COULD be as long as she’s NOT from Hebrew school. Which, clearly, she’s not. So I guess I’m missing something about the song somewhere. The standing for days with the phone in his hand like an idiot scared to death and not caring about his people suffering for thousands of years is all cool, but it seems like he’s saying he thinks she IS from Hebrew school. Is it just that this early in the relationship he doesn’t know if she’s Jewish or not? I’m dying to know!
JRB responds:
Kathy, I’ve read your question over five different times and I can’t tell what you’re asking me. Jamie is telling us that his perfect woman could be any number of things as long as she’s not Jewish, therefore Hey Hey Shiksa Goddess, I’ve been waiting for someone like you. My wife read your question too and she doesn’t see what your problem is. Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but you can at least rest assured that you are as confounding to me as I am to you.
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Sungpil Kim asks:
I decided to perform “The New World” and “River Won’t Flow” with my friends – they are great singers who are willing to go on Broadway later in their lives. I was just going to perform “The New World” with the piano accompaniment in the songbook, but I think it will be nicer if you don’t mind to allow me to use the full score of that song, and “The River Won’t Flow” (I couldn’t find the music of this song).
JRB responds:
Apparently, a lot of my colleagues will send out copies of their unpublished material to anyone who asks. I can’t, I really can’t. Honestly and truly, the amount of time that would take out of my day is just unbelievable. (The expense adds up, too, I promise.) I’ve only got one assistant, and he’s got his hands full dealing with everything else in my life. I try to make a blanket rule of not sending anything to anyone, and hopefully that way it’s at least fair even if everyone hates me. The fact is, this is why I have a publisher, and if Hal Leonard decides that “The River Won’t Flow” isn’t going to sell enough copies to make it worthwhile to publish, that’s their business decision to make and I’m bound to listen to them. They do listen very carefully to what people are looking for, and all the requests I had over the years for “Just One Step” inspired them to include it in a couple of anthologies last year. So for all of you who wish I could make an unpublished song available to you, keep asking and I’ll keep forwarding the requests to Hal Leonard, and please accept my apologies for not being able to give you all the individual attention that Stephen Schwartz apparently can give you.
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Lucy Downing asks:
I’m very anxiously awaiting information on the April 17 concert in Springfield, MO and keep checking the site regularly. Is there any information in regards to that show that you haven’t had a chance to post yet that you could share?
JRB responds:
I’m waiting for the contract! They keep promising me that it’s coming and then they don’t deliver! All I know is that on April 16, I’m supposed to be doing a masterclass somewhere at MSU, and then on April 17, the extraordinary Nicole van Giesen will be joining me for a concert somewhere at MSU. I wish I could tell you more, but at the moment, that’s all I know. Go ask Chris Leavy what’s taking so long.
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Erin Koch asks:
I was on the amazing Sara Ramirez’s website and listened to a few sound clips where she was singing demos from HOME, a new musical. Your name was associated with this material I believe, and you were also featured on other parts of her website…so, is HOME yours? I was absolutely crazy about it! After much searching, however, I couldn’t find any information about a new musical called HOME!
JRB responds:
After I read your e-mail, I went to look at Sara’s website. Turns out to be pretty cool, especially since it has some songs from “The Capeman” that I hadn’t heard since I saw the show. Then I saw that Sara posted a recording of her singing “And I Will Follow” from a concert we did together a couple of years ago, and she sings her ass off, as always. (The fiddle soloist is Christian Hebel, if anyone was wondering.) So thank you for sending me there and letting me see that and reminding me that I was, for one night at least, associated with that incredibly talented woman. (I’m really enjoying watching her on “Grey’s Anatomy.”) Then, at the bottom of the page I saw the demos for “Home,” but my name isn’t anywhere on those demos, I’ve never written a show called “Home,” and I don’t know what the heck those are. Maybe you should ask sararamirez@sararamirez.com!
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Jochem Morbeck asks:
I have a question about “Last five years”. Will it ever be performed again? The soundtrack has made a great impression on me… But I discovered it about five years too late. I would love to see it in a theatre.
JRB responds:
See my response to Rick Piper above. Since you live in the Netherlands, it might be harder to get to a production any time soon, but if you do hear of a Dutch production, please let me know!
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Sameer Kapadia asks:
As an Indian/Pakistani-American performer, its inspiring to see the market for ethnic actors is increasing due the direction that you and other prominent composers are taking musical theatre. Still, It would really help me out if you could write a piece about Indians/Pakistanis!
JRB responds:
Well, Sameer, if the right idea comes along, I’d write it in a second. I think, like most writers, I gravitate to stories that resonate with my experience of the world, and I therefore find it easiest to write about straight Jewish writers from New York; but with “Parade” and with another project I’m currently working on with Charlayne Woodard, I’ve been able to start getting under the skin of people whose experiences and worldviews are substantially different from my own, and I find that to be a thrilling and powerful challenge. So who knows? Perhaps a Pakistani musical is on its way soon!
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Heather Watson asks:
Will Songs for a New World come back to NYC in the near future? I missed it the first time around, yet the soundtrack is an absolute favorite of mine. I would love to see a production of it.
JRB responds:
I’d love to have a production of “Songs for a New World” in New York again, I just want to make sure it’s the right one. Daisy Prince did a magnificent job of bringing that show to life in 1995, with a beautiful set and a magnificent cast, but not very many people saw that production – it only ran for 28 performances! I still think the show works best with a cast of four people and a band of five, without any additional dialogue or story, on a unit set, with only the songs we put in it eleven years ago. So if anyone wants to do a production of “Songs for a New World” in New York, they have to trust what we did and respect it. Admit it, nothing would make you grumpier than paying $70 (or more!) to see “Songs for a New World” and having it turn out to be a mediocre cast, or a terrible director who imposed some awful “vision” on the show. So I have rejected some applications to do the show in NYC because I’m just trying to keep that from happening. We’ll get another production of the show in New York eventually, I’m certain of it, and it will be one that makes me as proud as the one we did at the WPA Theater all those years ago.
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Philip King asks:
I was wondering if you could tell me how to get a copy of the song “A Miracle Would Happen” from THE LAST FIVE YEARS. I have the vocal selections book, but it’s not in there.
JRB responds:
See my response to Sungpil Kim above. The fact is that we deliberately left some things out of the vocal selections book for “Last Five Years” because we didn’t want a rash of “pirate” productions all over the country. So my stance on “A Miracle Would Happen” is that if you want to do the song, you’ll have to rent the materials for the show from MTI. Sorry about that!
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Keith Johnson asks:
I was wondering if the printed music to “Someone to Fall Back On” was or will be available.
and then Chris Drew asks:
One song that has really moved me is “Someone To Fall Back On.” I would love to learn this song. Is there any plan to release sheet music for this?
and then Marshman21 asks:
Does sheet music for “Someone To Fall Back On” exist? Or, will it exist? I’d love to try singing it!
at which point Rob Goren asks:
I was wondering when your song book will be released. We are having a family party on April 1 and I would love to sing the song Someone to Fall Back On.
and the great Lee Lessack asks:
What are the chances of getting a lead sheet for “Someone To Fall Back On?”
and finally Michael Betteridge asks:
I really would love to learn “I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You,” it was a shame it couldn’t be included in L5Y. Is there any way of getting hold of piano/vocal music?
JRB responds:
Yes! “The Jason Robert Brown Collection” from Hal Leonard should be out in April from Hal Leonard. If you want to see what the cover looks like, check this out.
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Jennifer Bowler asks:
I am a music teacher for a middle school. Do you write any choral arrangements for kids? I know there are the songs in your musicals that include a chorus, but I didn’t know if there were published arrangements specifically for chorus. (SAB voicing is best but SATB is manageable depending on how low the Bass part is) I would love to introduce your music to my students.
JRB responds:
I don’t have anything specifically for a middle school chorus. “Coming Together,” available in the “JRB Collection” songbook, includes the full choral score, but that may be a bit advanced for a middle school group. My other choral piece is “Chanukah Suite,” which will have its own page in the Music section of this website soon, but again, that’s very difficult choral singing. You’ve got me thinking about what I can do, so perhaps I’ll come up with something. The good news is that the entire score of my next show, “13,” was designed to be performed by middle schoolers, so perhaps there’ll be something in there that you can easily adapt for your students!
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Logan Stein asks:
You wrote Last Five Years, this we know. Then for the first time you performed in it. How hard was it to memorize it? Was it spooky learning lines that came out of your head? Or did you learn it very quickly and easily due to the fact it was your writing.
JRB responds:
Actually, the performance that you saw with Julia Murney in Los Angeles was the third time I’ve performed in “The Last Five Years”; the other two times (in Adelaide, S. Australia and New York City) were with Lauren Kennedy. Anyway, I didn’t really memorize it – I had the score in front of me all the time. However, conducting AND playing AND singing at the same time meant I really didn’t have a chance to look at the music more than, say, once a page. Learning the words wasn’t all that hard, since I take a long time sculpting lyrics and I generally can remember why I picked one sentence instead of another. (The one thing I never could learn “off book” was Jamie’s monologue, when he reads the short story. Since there was no music, I couldn’t find the internal rhythm of that section unless the words were literally in front of me. Luckily, that works dramatically!) The piano parts were actually much harder to memorize, even though I played them every night in New York – they’re just much more specific than most of my other writing, and because there are a lot of times when one instrument is doubling the piano, I had to make sure I played exactly the right notes. Things like “The Schmuel Song” are brutally difficult to remember, since there are no good page turns in the entire piece!
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Brett Epstein asks:
Jason, how can I attend the seminar on the 22nd in L.A.? Is there a charge? Do I have to be in a club or something? I saw you speak at the Disney ASCAP panel on compostion, great work!
JRB responds:
As I noted in my mailing list, I’m holding a couple of spots open, you should e-mail me if you want one of the spots. No charge. I’m glad you liked the ASCAP panel, I really enjoyed getting to talk to Stephen Schwartz about our respective processes.
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Brian Michael Hoffman asks:
Any plans on releasing an “Urban Cowboy” cd?
JRB responds:
Not that I know of. The cast didn’t go in to the studio to record the show, so there’s no definitive document of the score as it was performed on Broadway. (I only wrote five of the songs in the show.) Because the show was such a big flop, the score was dispersed and now ownership of the songs has reverted to the original publishers and no one has any control over the entity as a whole. So trying to do a recording of the show would be a publishing nightmare. Like I said, I recorded my songs, though some of them have me singing instead of the original cast members, but I don’t think those will be released any time soon – who’d sell a record with five songs on it? Hopefully, I’ll be able to broadcast them over time through my sound blog. I think Jeff Blumenkrantz has released some of his contributions to “Urban Cowboy” through his very entertaining podcast. Check it out here.
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Rose Stephens-Booker asks:
I have bought everything composed by you that one can buy on iTunes. However, there is one downfall — No lyrics. Maybe in the future could you put up the lyrics to your work, preferably your solo album “Wearing Someone’s Clothes” and even “Songs of Jason Robert Brown.” Or maybe direct your fans to a website that lists them.
JRB responds:
They’re here! Right on this website!
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Carole Silvoy wants to know:
On Lauren’s CD, that arrangement of “When You Come Home To Me” is a knock out. Is that going to be available for us Cabaret types?
JRB responds:
Hm, I’m thrilled you like that one, but I can’t see that we’ll be publishing it commercially. While Larry Hochman did a delicious job on that chart, it really isn’t miles different harmonically from what’s already in the vocal selections for “The Last Five Years.” I suspect a musical director with good ears could easily adapt it by listening to the CD.
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Sunaddict asks:
I heard JRB is playing the role of Jamie in a production of L5Y in Pasadena CA, is this true?
JRB responds:
No, absolutely not. I’m really not interested in doing a run of the show, and I’m certainly not interested in doing it away from the piano. Trust me, no one wants to see me “act” like that, particularly since Jamie has to take his shirt off at one point in the show. My mother would die. But I’m looking forward to the Pasadena production very much, and they’ve asked me to help out as much as I can, so I think it’ll be a good one.
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James Strauss asks:
I saw in Breakdown you’re composing the score/music for the State Farm conventions this summer. In the event you’re in town seeing/hearing ANY new people, please call me or my manager.
JRB responds:
Thanks for your interest, James. The casting director for the State Farm show is Mark Simon; your agent should feel free to get in touch with him. For those of you wondering what this is all about, every couple of years the State Farm insurance company produces a Broadway-style musical for its big sales convention, and they’ve hired me to write the score for the last three of these. We’re currently in pre-production on my fourth, which will be performed in Chicago this summer and Las Vegas this fall. But these productions aren’t open to the general public, they’re for State Farm agents and their employees only.
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Megan Rocks asks:
My name is Megan Rocks (yes…that is my real last name) and I live in Athens, Georgia. I have the complete honor of playing “Cathy” in an upcoming production of your show, The Last Five Years. I have continuously listened to the music over and over for a few years now and never tire of it. So I guess I am being a cheeseball in saying thank you. 🙂
JRB responds:
Well, that wasn’t really a question, but I love compliments! Thanks for writing, and let us know how your production goes in Athens!
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Michael Perez asks:
I heard that you are a teacher at the University of Southern California. Do you teach all semester long? I am very interested in composing for musical theatre, but I would still like to learn how to choral arrange and orchestrate better also.
JRB responds:
I do indeed teach at USC, though I teach in the theater school and not the music school, which means that I’m obligated to concentrate more on dramatic work than musical ideas. I teach a course in Acting The Song for performers, and I teach a course called Creating Music Theater for aspiring composers and librettists. But I don’t teach them consistently every semester, and I have limited my enrollment very strictly. Many high school students have asked me if they should apply to USC to study with me, and I tell them this: apply to USC because you want to go to USC. They have a great theater school and a great music school, and it’s a beautiful place to get a great education. But I can’t guarantee that I’ll be teaching when you get there, and if I am, I can’t guarantee you’ll get into my class. I may end up having a more regular schedule there sometime in a couple of years, but for now, we really aren’t planning ahead more than semester to semester.
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Chris Littlefield asks:
I could use some advice. I’m relocating to New York in July, where I have lots of friends and a few contacts. My most valuable skill at the moment is probably sightreading. I music direct very successfully here, and, ultimately, that’s what I want to do in the future (amongst other things: writing, recording an album, etc.). Any thoughts on how to get a reputation established and get work? I’d REALLY appreciate any thoughts you have.
JRB responds:
Hey, Chris, great to hear from you! I enjoyed hearing you play at UTSA. My advice to you is use the skills that set you apart. If you’re a great sightreader, that makes you very valuable as an audition pianist. You should call all the casting directors in town and announce your availability for their auditions; they always need people for that. But beyond that, New York is about persistence. Sub on every single show you can, play for every single cabaret singer you can find, just be out there pushing hard. Meet every pianist, let them know you’re looking for work, it’s a good network. It’s a grueling transition, but if you’re good, you’ll work; everyone is always looking for talented, versatile pianists, and the best ones are always busy. Let me know how it goes!
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Carolyn Miller asks:
More info on the Temecula concert in May, please. I live in San Diego, and would gladly drive the short hour to see you!
JRB responds:
I’m working on it, I promise! Just keep checking the website. All I know right now is that it will be on May 21, a Sunday, probably in the evening, and will feature me and the Caucasian Rhythm Kings!
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Michael Kaplan asks:
I heard a rumor that a JRB concert was coming to either the New York or New Jersey area. I was wondering if it was true because if it is I have to start saving for my ticket. Thank you.
JRB responds:
Weirdly, you wrote and asked this before I even planned to do the concert in New York in April. But now I am, so you must be a prophet! I’ll be at Birdland on Tuesday April 4 at 8 pm with the Caucasian Rhythm Kings and the dazzling Jenn Colella! Start saving now!
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Nick Spina asks:
I am a little confused about “I Can Do Better Than That”. Cathy refers to “a guy she met in a class she was taking who you might say looked like Tom Cruise,” is that Jamie or is that a different boyfriend? And if it’s a different boyfriend, did he blow her off with a letter, like Jamie did at the beginning of the show?
JRB responds:
The guy she meets in class is not Jamie; she’s telling the story TO Jamie as they drive to meet her parents. And yes, this ex-boyfriend blew her off with a letter, but it never occurred to me until your note that Cathy was doomed to be dumped via letter over and over again throughout her life, poor thing. Anyway, here’s a fun fact: When Lauren and I did a concert this summer, it was right when Tom Cruise sort of jumped the shark and basically began acting like he wore a tin-foil hat all day long to better contact the aliens. So we decided that the Tom Cruise line in the song would get the wrong kind of laugh. It’s supposed to suggest that the guy is sexy, not that he’s a poster child for The Crazy Club. So we changed the lyric, and anyone doing the song has my blessing to make this substitution henceforth: “Met a guy in a class I was taking WITH SOME VERY WELL-PLACED TATTOOS.” Enjoy. But don’t get confused and use this line, as Julia Murney did in rehearsal: “Met a guy in a class I was taking with some very expensive shoes.” He’s supposed to be sexy, not metrosexual.
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Brian Fenty asks:
What is the intended relationship/theme in “River Won’t Flow” in your eyes? I am having trouble placing a situation to the text in a meaningful way and I was just wondering, in a word or two, where you saw this song.
JRB responds:
When I originally conceived “The River Won’t Flow,” it was sung by a newly homeless guy and a guy who’d been homeless for a long time, fighting in an alleyway. (Sensitive, right?) The first guy just got there, he feels like he deserves some sympathy for his situation, but the second guy thinks the first guy is a spoiled brat who should get acquainted with the realities of life. Then there are the two girls singing backup, I have no idea what they’re doing. Daisy staged this beautifully, basically turning it into a fight about a stool – Brooks entered, aimed for the stool, but Billy snatched it away from him at the last minute in a gesture of supreme droit du seigneur, so Brooks then began singing the first verse of the song. The two women came out to separate them when the fight got heated.
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Corey Castle asks:
My question is about “Someone to Fall Back On” on your album “Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes.” It seems to be written around the time of “The Last Five Years” and could possibly be a song cut from the show. What is the history of this song?
JRB responds:
I can tell you that this song had nothing whatsoever to do with “The Last Five Years,” it was written before any of that show was in place. I actually wrote “Someone To Fall Back On” in the basement of Lincoln Center Theater one night after a performance of “Parade.” I think the song works better if you don’t know what I was thinking about. I guess I can say that the project I was planning it for never came to fruition, which is probably just as well. There was a point in writing “The Last Five Years” where Daisy suggested I use “Someone To Fall Back On,” but that was just because it took me three months to write the wedding sequence in the show and she was tired of waiting!
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Rick Rea asks:
What advice would you give to musical theatre songwriters?
JRB responds:
WRITE SONGS! Learn how to write a thirty-two bar AABA song before you go off trying to write eleven-minute quasi-operatic sequences. The problem I see most often in younger writers is a complete lack of understanding of structure. Songs are based on structure, and if your audience intuitively grasps your structure, you can get away with almost anything, but if you don’t have a clear understanding of song structure, your audience will just be baffled and frustrated. It doesn’t matter these days if you have songs in your show that could be on the radio or MTV, but why not set that up as a challenge for yourself? Why not make every song in the show as clean and clear and accessible as possible? I know there are some people who’ll read this and yell out, “Nice glass house, Chico,” and I don’t have a response to that except to say that I think all my work, regardless of whether it’s good or not, is solidly, fiercely grounded in clear comprehensible structures. Maybe you think it works, maybe you think it doesn’t, but I think it’s how you can tell the pros from the wannabes.
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Becky Nevin asks:
At the end of LFY, why is Goodbye Until Tomorrow sung by both Jamie and Kathy whereas all the other songs with the exception of Next Ten Minutes are solos? I like the overlapping effect, but was just wondering why you choose to do it that way.
JRB responds:
I just thought it was the logical way to wrap up the show. “The Last Five Years” is a very dense piece textually, and I thought the best way to sum it up was to have the two characters be in complete reversal of their positions at the top of the show simultaneously.
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Liz Adams asks:
I am curious, how does it feels to know that the music that you’ve written has affected so many people?
JRB responds:
That’s a tough question. I’m obviously very pleased, honored that the work I do touches people and inspires them, and I’m moved all the time by the kind of response my work gets when I do concerts or see productions of my shows or just get fan mail. I feel very lucky to have the fans that I have. But. I also have a very keen sense of how limited that audience is. The popular culture of the day really doesn’t embrace the work that I do in any grand sense, and that’s frustrating; no one’s going to be singing my songs on “American Idol.” I’m okay with that, but it’s complicated. I never meant to be a “cult” writer, and it’s a weird thing to write songs and know, before the ink is dry on the page, that only a certain number of people will hear them. You should hear what record company people tell me about the work I do, how it’s too smart, it’s too complicated, it’s not perky enough, it’s all very “Broadway”, whatever that means. I always want to say, “But look at my fans! They’re everything, they’re young and old and black and white and Asian and Hispanic and in the city and on the farm and they’re hip and they’re square and they’re gay and straight and everything else! Why do you have to limit what I do?” But I know that those record company guys are right, as far as mainstream America goes. It’s facile to say that pop culture is trash or that I’m better than that; there’s a lot of really good stuff in the mainstream and a lot of the time I wish I were a part of it. But I’m very proud of the work that I’ve done, and I value my independence as an artist intensely, so I understand that I may have to give up a spot on the A-team to have those things. Ultimately, I really do think of my ability to write and communicate as a gift, a blessing, and I am profoundly grateful for that, and I know how rare and special it is for me to have the forum to share my work with people who love it.
—
Kyle McAuley writes:
I have a question about your writing process. Obviously there’s a ton of historical background information, but vocally did you write the part of Leo Frank specifically for Brent Carver’s voice? The other day my iTunes was on shuffle and “Dressing Them Up” (from Kiss of the Spider Woman) came on just after “How Can I Call this Home?” I know that Harold Prince worked with him in Spider Woman and it dawned on me that he might have had Brent Carver in mind for the part from the beginning. Just a fanciful notion that popped into my head. A similar question about The Last Five Years: Did you write the part of Jamie with Norbert Leo Butz in mind?
JRB responds:
Sort of no, and sort of yes. Hal did want Brent to play Leo almost from the very beginning of the process, but I thought he was too old and too goyishe for the part, so I didn’t write it with him in mind. It was only after two readings with other actors in the leading role that Hal insisted we at least let Brent audition, and when he did, it was astonishing. I’ve never seen my work transformed so much by an actor as when Brent did “Come Up To My Office” and “All The Wasted Time” in that audition. After that, I adjusted a couple of things to fit Brent’s voice better, and “This Is Not Over Yet” was definitely written with the knowledge that a singer as powerful as Brent was going to do it. With “The Last Five Years,” I wouldn’t say I wrote it with Norbert in mind, but I had been a huge fan of his for a number of years, and there really is a very small population of actors in New York who are truly capable of holding a stage and creating a character and singing their asses off, and Norbert is right at the head of that population. There are chunks of the score that are higher than I can sing because I knew Norbert had those notes. We did audition a lot of people for the Chicago production, but before we even sat down Norbert was the front-runner, and while a lot of wonderful performers came in, no one really understood the material like Norbert did. Once he was cast, there were still three numbers to be written, so I definitely had his instrument in my head at that point. But the weirder thing is that Norbert is a great mimic, and he ended up basing a lot of his vocal performance on my demos, which I took as a huge compliment. Now people think I sound like him on the “Last Five Years” songs, but I swear, it’s the other way around!
Okay, that’s it for this round, but keep those questions comin’!
J.

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ASK JRB SOMETHING ELSE!

Posted on April 23, 2006 at 12:27 am

More Q & A with everyone’s favorite cranky composer! I think my responses are a little snippy this time out, I’m sorry about that; I really do appreciate all of your questions, keep ’em coming!
Thomas Hodges writes:
I was curious about your advice composing in today’s world and the road to making it in “The Business.” When you were much younger did you have many trepidations? And if so how did you surpass them? Is there any overall advice you would give to a composer?
JRB responds:
Wow, that’s a heavy question. I think I had fewer trepidations when I was younger than I do now; I didn’t care when I started out about how “the business” worked or how to keep the weekly nut down or who the contractor was, I just wrote the things I loved and assumed that someone would produce them. Now I have to make sure that I’m going to be able to make a living, and that’s terrifying. I was passionate about composing for the musical theater, and I was fiercely ambitious and tenacious and proactive about getting my stuff in people’s ears. I will say this: I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t lived in New York. That’s where the professional theater is, and if you want to get into the professional theater, that’s where you have to be. There’s no getting around that, there’s no finessing it, there’s no halfway. You want to be on Broadway? Go to Broadway. Other than that, overall advice? Write something interesting, for Christ’s sake, I’m so bored of I-IV-V progressions and rolling sixteenth notes and everything being in 4/4. Make the music worth paying attention to.
Mat McPherson asks:
Will you be performing again in the UK any time soon?
JRB responds:
I certainly hope so. We’re right now in the midst of trying to get “The Last Five Years” on in London, and if we do, I’ll definitely come over to supervise that and undoubtedly do a night somewhere.
Rico Sego asks:
I was fascinated by the structure of your musical “The Last Five Years,” and couldn’t stop myself from analyzing the story arch when told both forwards and backwards. I noticed that the crux, or climax of the work comes when the two “see” each other onstage and are briefly “at the same time,” which happens to be in the 8th number of 13. My question is: Are you familiar with the golden mean (golden proportion, section, ratio etc.)?
If not, a quick synopsis: it’s the ratio or proportion that we, as humans, find beautiful or perfect. It’s approximately 1.618 (or .618 depending on the comparison), and is often referred to in literature as the greek letter phi. It can be found by comparing one number of the Fibonnaci Sequence to the next (this is a summative sequence, whereby the next number is found by adding the previous two: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc.)
ANYWAY, there’s been a ton of study done on all the different ways this relationship manifests itself in nature, art, architecture, etc. and how the man-made things that are most admired/found beautiful are the ones that mimic the harmony and perfection of nature in this way. We studied how composers used this concept in my music history classes during my master’s, and found that many intentionally structured their works so that the climaxes came at “golden section” points. I couldn’t help wondering if you had done so in your work, or if it was simply intuitively the “right” place. Any thoughts you’d care to share on this, and your process in general, would be appreciated!
JRB responds:
That question wins the prize for most esoteric so far. The fact is, I don’t really honor the Fibonacci sequence, there are fourteen songs in the show, not thirteen. Furthermore, the fourteenth song actually comprises two songs, which I think of as #14 and #15. Therefore, the reason they sing together at #8 is simply because it is the mathematical center of the piece. (It also happens, strangely enough, to be the chronological center of the piece, but I didn’t plan that, I was just pleasantly surprised to discover it during the run of the show.) So I actually violated the golden mean, but to answer your question directly: no, I really wasn’t thinking of that stuff during the writing of the show. I feel like I’m letting you down by admitting that. Sorry, I AM a geek, I AM, I promise.
Jennifer Poles writes:
Your music reminds me of all the passion I’ve had since day one. Thank you for inspiration. The passion in your music is amazing and has kept me pulling through some times when I didn’t think I had it in me. I hope that one day I am privileged and lucky enough to perform some of your own works. You are truly an inspiring artist, above the rest. Keep on making amazing and beautiful music, because we all need it in our lives. Thank you for being an amazing artist.
JRB responds:
I often wonder, if I had had the Internet when I was a young’un, whether I would have written a letter like that to Steve Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber (I don’t know why I’m acknowledging that I used to be an Andrew Lloyd Webber fanatic, but I was, right up until I heard “Starlight Express”). I hope that if I had, it would have meant as much to them as your letter means to me. Thank you for listening and singing and sharing.
Chris Hall writes:
I live in the UK and saw you in London last December (I was the one all alone on the front row!!) so I was really excited to read on Playbill that Last 5 Years would be coming to the Menier. Please could you confirm that this is correct and say if you yourself might be coming over to see it.
JRB responds:
Well, I can’t confirm anything yet because I don’t know anything for sure. We’re trying! Keep checking the website, you’ll know as soon as I do!
Raj Bowers-Racine writes:
A few years back I was perusing your site and found what seemed to be an MP3 of you singing “Moving Too Fast” while accompanying yourself on the piano. Computers being what they are the file got erased somewhere and I was sad. “Fear not,” thought I. “In the wide expanse of the internet I’m sure that thing is kicking around somewhere.” Well, for all my searching I can’t find it anyplace and I’m asking if you might know where it’s available. I’m willing to bribe you as high as 1 (one) dirty joke which proceeds as follows: What did the leper say to the prostitute? Give up? “Keep the tip.” I guess “mohel” could also be substituted in there. Your call as to which version is dirtier.
JRB responds:
Yeah, we had the demo up on the official “Last Five Years” site for a while, but I don’t think that site even exists anymore. Anyway, I hope the version I just uploaded to the Sound Blog will suffice! As for which version of your joke is dirtier, I’m gonna go with the mohel, but that’s a personal preference.
Beth Alison writes:
I am 16 years old, and an aspiring singer/actress/dancer/pianist….*phew* and I was wondering what your advice to a teen who loves this business more than life itself would be? My friends really think I’m crazy, what with practicing voice about 2 – 4 hours a day, piano 3 hours a day, and of course auditioning for anything I can get my hands on. I’m also working as often as possible – I’m spending this summer in the beautiful state of Utah, as an artist with the Utah Festival Opera Company. I am currently a homeschooled sophomore, and I would also like to know what you suggest by way of college, and if you think that taking that time and training in NYC or even here in LA instead of commiting myself to school for 4 years could be more beneficial? Also, which art form do you think I should be concentrating on at this point? Musical theatre? Film/TV? Piano? Dance? I will say again, I do what I do because I can’t help it. I really don’t have a choice. Hey, put me on a stage and throw me food, I’m a happy camper. But how do you think I could best advance my career at my age, and which area should I concentrate on to do so?
JRB responds:
All right, look, here’s the thing: if you love this business more than life itself, then go do it! That’s my advice! Follow your passion! Passion is such a rare thing in this world, most people, the overwhelming majority of people, never feel it and have no idea what to do with it. You’ve got it, you’re passionate about something, so do it. Will you be successful? No idea, and not entirely in your control. Go do it, and be as good as you can possibly be. You’re young, you’ve got nothing to lose. As far as college training, I think it’s a good idea to try it and see how it feels. There are lots of great college musical theater programs out there, and I’m not really qualified to discuss one over the others, but I think you owe it to yourself to get into a really rigorous training program and see how you like it. I know some people who get in that situation and blossom, and some people get in that situation and hate all the cliquey competition. You’ll feel it. I wish you the best of luck, but even more so, have fun, enjoy it, enjoy every second of it, because if you don’t, there’s really no good reason to do it.
Brianne McGill writes:
My friends and I are doing a community concert of musical theatre from the last fifteen years and we’re using several of your songs in it, including “When You Come Home to Me.” The problem is that we’re doing it at a church and our community is rather conservative, and we have to take out curse words… Do you have a suggestion for the f-bomb in “When You Come Home to Me”? And is substituting words in songs even ethical? I don’t want to disrespect your work.
JRB responds:
I have so many conflicting responses to this. First of all, I’m practical. I want you guys to sing my songs, and I know that people can get very sensitive to language, particularly when it’s young people singing. In fact, people got cranky about all the fucks and shits in “The Last Five Years” even when we did it in New York, which amazed me since those same people have no problem with it when it’s in a David Mamet play. Musical theater brings out the puritan side of some folks, I guess. The point is, I get it, you shouldn’t sing “fuck” in a church unless you’re trying to get people crazy, so of course you should try and come up with something more appropriate to the venue.
But here’s the other thing: what’s the big fucking deal? It’s just “fuck”! I never understood why it was unacceptable to say “shit” on television but okay to say “crap.” They refer to the exact same thing! They both are one-syllable, four-letter words! If you mean “shit,” why not say “shit”? Oh, it makes me insane! There are words that are calculated and designed to offend, I’m aware of that, and I understand that people are sensitive to the various colorations that language can acquire. But who’s offended by “fuck”? Unless maybe you yourself are a fuck, in which case, you and your whole tribe of fucks can write a fucking petition to unfuck the English language. Why is “fuck” a bad word? Who decided this? It’s ridiculous! Cunt, sure, I see where cunt makes some people upset, I don’t agree but I get it. But “cocksucker”? What’s wrong with that? It is what it is! Sorry, I could go on for days with this.
Scott Smith writes:
I’ve seen three productions of “The Last Five Years” – including a flawless one in Sydney, Australia. What vexes me every time I see the show is the part in “The Next Ten Minutes” where Jamie is pointing out the buildings to Cathy. In every instance, the actor playing Jamie points to two different locations when mentioning “John Lennon” and “the Dakota.” I thought it was just common knowledge among most people that John Lennon lived in the Dakota – and never even been to New York City! Ever considered including a bit of context for the show when you send out permission to perform it?
JRB responds:
It’s interesting, I’m really on the fence about this. With both “Songs For A New World” and “The Last Five Years,” I made a deliberate decision not to include anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary in the stage directions. I just think it’s classier to say to the director of a production: “Here’s the information you need, now do whatever you want with it.” But it turns out that a lot of directors feel confused by all that freedom, and a lot of productions that I’ve seen or heard about don’t seem particularly well-researched or thought out. Which suggests that I should include considerably more detail in the script. But I just think that if I were directing something and I saw all that detail there (he enters here, she’s wearing this, the set looks like this), I’d feel vaguely insulted by it. As far as context goes, I don’t think it’s my job to tell anyone that John Lennon lived in the Dakota or that Crate and Barrel sells furniture. If there’s a reference in the show you don’t understand, go find a computer and Google it. I get questions from foreign countries a lot (latest one: “Who’s Daisy Mae?”) and I understand where people outside of the US would be overwhelmed by the specific references in “The Last Five Years,” but I can’t really imagine myself putting together a Lonely Planet Guide to the show. Maybe you can do it for me and I’ll put it up on the site. Start with John Gotti and a good definition of “Shiksa,” you’ll probably be doing a great service!
An extraordinarily talented young man writes:
I’m sixteen years old and currently in the precollege jazz program at Manhattan School of Music, but I’m also studying composition. Three of my original compositions are on my myspace. If you ever have the time, would it be possible for you to click on it and listen to them? I wrote them; and that is me playing and singing. They are definitely contemporary and theater style.
JRB responds:
It would be a lot of fun if I could listen to all the stuff people send me, but I really don’t have the time, and from a legal standpoint, it makes me uncomfortable. All I need is you writing me after you see one of my shows and saying “Hey, you stole that from me!” I’ve also found that people don’t really want my advice or suggestions. What people want to hear is, “Wow, that’s amazing! Let me call my record company right now and get you signed!” I’ve never said that, or anything like it, and when I do give advice, no matter how gently or positively I spin it, the person who asked invariably feels hurt and unappreciated. So just keep writing, keep putting it out there, eventually I’m going to hear it if you’re any good. And honestly, I wish you all the luck in the world.
Okay, that’s it for now. Gotta get some rest before my concert tomorrow. More soon!
J.

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YOU KEEP ASKING, JRB KEEPS ANSWERING

Posted on April 26, 2006 at 11:02 am

In today’s installment, marketing advice, queries from the UK, wonky piano questions, and the story of “Music of Heaven.” (I really will get to the business of blogging one of these days, but there are so many questions sitting in the “ASK JRB!” pile on my desktop that I just want to push through them so I can clear my desk!)

Jason Rasmussen writes:
You talked about how you were a “cult” composer. Well, I have a couple marketing ideas for you (and hey, I have a Bachelors in music management, so I think they’re somewhat credible). First of all, congratulations on your new website, that’s definitely the way to go in today’s digital marketplace. However, I would HIGHLY recommend a Myspace Music page. My second suggestion is a little more intensive and would require assistance from your marketing/PR team/manager. Starbucks, as much of a large “evil” corporation as they are viewed, is doing EXTREMELY well selling music through the Hear Music™ brand. I guarantee if you got your solo album into Starbucks stores, you would triple whatever your current Soundscan rating is in two months.

JRB responds:
Thank you so much for all of your suggestions, believe me, I need all the help I can get.  Let me answer one thing, though: I know everyone is supposed to have a MySpace page, I see how people connect through it and music gets around and it’s so groovy and cool and viral and it doesn’t take any time at all to put it together and then BAM! you’re selling records, and it’s the new way to market and make yourself visible and … I really hate MySpace.  I spent some time on the site (and still occasionally do) looking at friends’ profiles, and the whole thing is just chaotic and ugly, ugly, ugly, and it feels like seven million girls all having their Sweet 16 at the same time, and while I know it makes me tragically unhip and uncool, I just don’t want to be a part of it.  I’m not a teenager, I don’t want my presence on the Web to be in that context.  I may change my mind about it eventually, but right now, the whole thing just feels icky and unclassy to me, and I really don’t want to play in that particular sandbox.  So now you all know.  (And there is a “Jason Robert Brown” MySpace profile, but I didn’t create it and I don’t endorse it.  I am, however, on Friendster, if that sort of thing turns you on.)

And now, the British portion of our blog:

Rachel Thomas writes:
I live in England and was wondering if you know of any professional perfomances of ‘Songs For A New World’ or ‘The Last Five Years’ which are coming to UK?

Lucy Wade writes:
I just wanted to ask whether you can tell us anything about the upcoming premiere of ‘The Last Five Years’ in London?  Any dates/cast news/production team news, etc?  Will you be attending to watch or be involved in the production?

Adam Lenson writes:
I want to direct “The Last Five Years” more than anything but due to a lack of a professional production there are no rights available to the UK.  Do you have any idea when the show will come to the UK and when us eager students could perform it?  Also would it be possible for you to come and speak, sing or teach (or all of the above) in Cambridge when you are next in England?

Stephen Watt writes:
When are you coming back to the UK?  I hope it’s soon.  We need some real music laced with true emotions.

Chris Jenkins writes:
Just wondering if any of your masterful shows are going to make to the UK? I’m dying over here without some of a professional JRB show.

Stuart Price writes:
Just wondering when you are next in the UK and also whether it’s possible to get the sheet music for ‘Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes’. I’m currently training at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London and would love to add some of your latest material to my audition REP folder.

JRB responds:
Apparently, I should move to England.  That idea actually occurred to me when I left New York two years ago, but London is so unbelievably expensive these days that I couldn’t figure out how to make it work.  Ergo, Los Angeles.  Anyway, to answer the questions at hand: as noted in my previous blog entry, the Menier Chocolate Factory people and I are trying to get a production of “The Last Five Years” going, and I will update you all as soon as I know anything specific about it.  Right now, we’re wooing directors, but a lot of the best directors in the UK are attached to very large, lucrative projects and can’t make the time for a very small show at a very small theater, so we’re playing the waiting game.  “Songs for a New World” was done several years ago at the Bridewell, and I know it gets done in universities over there all the time, but I’m not aware of anyone planning a professional production.  “Parade” is a tough one; there are very few venues in London that are appropriate for a show that is as large and difficult as “Parade,” and Nick Hytner has made it clear in a number of different ways that he is not going to present our show at the National, so we’re all just hoping for a Golden Ticket.  We have one very exciting possibility on the table, and I hope that works out, but I can’t say anything about it right now.  As for myself, I’m sure I’ll be coming over again, either at the end of this year or the beginning of 2007, since I always have a wonderful time doing concerts in London and I always get such great audiences.  (Also, my best friend is getting married and moving to London in July, so I’ll have to visit frequently!)  As far as coming to Cambridge, sure, why not?  Have someone who’s in charge of bringing in guest artists drop me a line and we’ll figure out how to make it happen!
And now, pianists with grievances, first in a continuing series:

Paul Tate writes:
A quick question about a note in “I’d Give It All For You.”  In the intro section, in bar 2 on the last beat in the RH, there’s a ‘B’ there.  I could swear that on your recording you play a ‘D’ a third higher (as it is in bar 4).  I checked my copy of the vocal selections book and sure enough it tells me to play B, but I’m just wondering if that’s what you really want.  The D seems to make more sense with the musical motif that runs through the show (F#-G-F#-D-A), so I thought I’d ask… maybe you chose the B there for a specific reason.  If so, I’d love to know!
One other question — any ideas about how to learn/master the opening of “King Of The World”?  While I’m great at theory, and have success in finding patterns of chords or scales in most of your music, the intro to that song mystifies me.  It’s aggressive and masculine and hard as HELL.  🙂  Please help.

Carson Schutze writes:
My question is about the piano solo in the opening four bars of King of the World. First, why didn’t you put it in the Vocal Selections version? People could just leave it out if it was too hard for them, couldn’t they? Second, while it seems to me that in the rental score the first three bars are very close to what you play on the cast recording (not so easy to tell when notes are flying by that fast!), the fourth bar seems to be entirely different. Why is that? I find what you did on the CD much cooler, so if you have a transcription of that bar kicking around somewhere, would you consider posting it?

JRB responds:
I have a horrible confession to make.  Please don’t be mad at me.
When I play the first four measures of “King of the World,” they are completely and totally improvised and the pitches and rhythms are absolutely arbitrary.  I basically just treat the bottom two octaves of the piano like a set of bongos.  I tried to write down some version of something in the score so that other people could have some guidelines, but you’re both right, the final measure is not so good.  However, a transcription of my version of it?  Not likely, unless you’re planning to do it.  (If you are crazy enough to do it, I’ll happily post it here for posterity.)  And to address your point about the Vocal Selections, here’s an interesting thing: you’d think people would just leave it out if they couldn’t play it, but that’s not often how it works.  What often happens is some sweet 14-year-old boy brings that song in to an audition, and the pianist (who is really the junior high school choir director) just looks at the music and assumes that little Josh wants her to play it, so she begins, and nine hours later, the whole room is dissolved in tears and recriminations.  Especially given what I’ve just confessed about how arbitrary the first four bars are, it seemed silly to include them in the vocal selections when they would be of no use to practically anyone.  (They are “vocal” selections, after all, and I take that part seriously; those books really are geared to singers.)

As for Paul’s question about “I’d Give It All For You,” you caught a typo; everyone please get out your pencils and correct the last note in the second measure in the right hand, it should be a “D”, not a “B.”  Thank you, sir.

Darryn deSouza asks:
I own a lot of your music in book form, and as a pianist, I am curious: A lot of your upbeat songs possess either very dense, complex chords, or lightning fast, seemingly unfathomable runs for the right hand — having seen you live twice, I remember you blowing through the majority of this stuff with your eyes closed or not even looking!  My question is, are those chords and runs 4 or 8-bar creations you mould and compose, or is your playing style such that you can just pull those runs out from your skill and experience as a long time jazz lounge-style pianist?

JRB responds:
Generally a little of both.  If I just played what comes naturally, I’d end up playing the same six riffs all night (and there have been nights where “I’m In Bizness” feels exactly like that to me), so I do shape the licks as things get closer to public performance.  For an example, let’s take “Moving Too Fast.”  There’s a riff after “The light’s turning red!” in measure 19, that’s a typical unadulterated JRB run.  I do that sort of thing in my sleep, basic barrelhouse blues and gospel stuff.  (You see some variations on that in “Real Big News” in “Parade” as well.)  Now look at the riff after “I found a woman I love” in measure 35 – that one emerged because I wanted to do a lick that went up since most of my licks start at the top of the keyboard and descend, so I just tried to find some new thing to do and that’s what I came up with (I don’t always play it accurately, incidentally, which is the price I pay for writing something that’s foreign to my fingers).  And then the crazy thing at the end in measure 120 (the triplets in wacky keys) was really worked out, note-by-note, after I improvised something that sounded sort of cool like that.  Again, I don’t play that the exact same way every time, but the basic structure of it is in place.

Kevin deYoe writes:
I am a composer myself, and I’m curious about certain aspects of your writing process.  First, do you use notation software?  If so, what software?  (I’m a Sibelius guy myself.)

Second, I was wondering how you write.  It definitely seems like for most of your stuff you come up with a riff first, and build the song off of that (She Cries and The Next Ten Minutes come to mind).  But then, how do write your melodies?  Is there any specific thing you do?  Do you play the riff and then vocally improvise on top of it?  If so, do you already have lyrics in mind, or do you just scat?  Or are you improvising lyrics too?
Or are you insane like Mozart and have the entire piece mapped out with complete harmonies and lyrics in your head before you even sit down at a piano?

JRB responds:
I’m a Finale guy, I have been since the day they introduced it back during the Pleistocene era.  (I remember sitting in David Pogue’s apartment on the Upper West Side in 1989 while he showed me this cool new software he found for notation.) Sibelius is fine, it’s just not as nuanced for me.  That having been said, I only use Finale for final copies, I still do all my drafts in pencil, and I actually hire copyists to do most of my Finale work (and then I tweak it myself).

I’m sure the answer of “how I write” is in one of the forty thousand interviews on the site, but to a certain extent, you’ve got it right.  I start with a title, I sit at the piano and yell the title while I play a million different things, and gradually a melodic shape starts to emerge, and then I get up from the piano and start working on lyrics, and three decades later, a song is born!  But I’ve changed up my method a lot recently, I now try to write completely away from the piano at first, just let the melodies come to me and then figure out what goes underneath them.  I’m sure I’ll keep changing the way I write for the rest of my career, it’s the only way to make sure I don’t just write the same thing over and over again.  And no, I am not insane like Mozart.  Someone please back me up on this.

Brian Falgoust writes:
Do you have any plans of releasing the piano/vocal book of your CD Wearing Somone Else’s Clothes?

JRB responds:
Sorry, for the time being, the six songs we included in “The Jason Robert Brown Collection” are all that we’re planning to release from the CD.

Jennifer Maddux asks:
I’ve enjoyed your new CD and I was wondering what inspired the song “Music of Heaven?”  It’s so different than most of your songs and the content seems different too.

JRB responds:
It’s a good story, actually.  For three or four years, I was one of the accompanists for the Broadway Gospel Choir (they’re now known as the Broadway Inspirational Voices), a tremendously gifted group of Broadway singers under Michael McElroy’s expert direction.  (You can check out their album here.) I loved playing for their concerts (particularly because I got to play with Joseph Joubert, one of the finest gospel pianists and organists I’ve ever heard), and I felt very special to be the one Jewish boy on stage.  Anyway, in 1997 I had to give up that gig because we were doing a workshop of “Parade” in Toronto, but I did make it back to New York in time to see the actual concert.  Watching it was a very different experience than being in it.  As someone who has only the most distant relationship to religious faith, I started the evening very skeptically, watching all these actors onstage emoting madly about their connection to God.  But the longer I watched, the more my skepticism turned to admiration, even envy: they were really experiencing something up there, they were really connecting.  Sure, some of it was showbiz, but I could see past that to the place where there was something sincere, something very powerful happening on stage.  And ultimately, I felt more than a little tinge of regret that I was unable to connect the same way they did, even though I loved making that music more than almost anything else I played.  Being a professional cynic has its downsides, and I never felt that more keenly than that night at that concert.  So that’s what inspired the song.  Interestingly, I saw Jessica Molaskey the next day and told her about it, and she reported having had a very similar experience the previous year when she had seen the Broadway Gospel Choir show.  And so when I premiered the song later that year in a concert, it was Jessica who sang the lead vocal, and she did it gorgeously.  I don’t think anyone else has sung it since then other than me, but I’ll never forget the incredible bravery and openness she brought to the song that night.

Ryan wants to know:
Hey, what did you think of “The Last Five Years” in Baltimore?

JRB responds:
I thought it kicked ass, dude.  Seriously, I had a personal investment in it because one of my former students from Emerson was playing Cathy, and I wanted to be able to say, “Hey, look, she’s one of mine!”  Fortunately, she was magnificent; her name is Betsy Morgan, and you’ll all have plenty of opportunities to see and hear her soon, I have no doubt about that.
More to come soon!

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MOM! JRB’S ANSWERING QUESTIONS AGAIN!

Posted on May 5, 2006 at 12:43 am

In this week’s ridiculously long entry: What is “King Of The World” really about? Can I translate your show into Farsi? Plus: orchestrating, writing lyrics, being a rock star, teaching, and much more!
Geoff Cook writes:
You are obviously influenced by popular musicians and have spoken highly about people such as Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder etc. To what extent is success outside of the theatre world a priority for you? It would be great to see you as a special guest to say Ben Folds or Randy Newman, or maybe even someone who plays a different instrument.
Also: “I’m in Bizness” is winning the popularity contest on my Ipod. Any recommendations for similar music I might enjoy?
JRB responds:
Success outside of the theater isn’t really a “priority,” it’s just part of the game. I’m not solely a theater bug, especially since I think most musicals have crappy music. I like making music happen, and I enjoy the fact that I can do that in a variety of different contexts. Clearly, I’m most successful as a theater writer, I know that, I love that, I’m happy about it. But I also have lots of things to say that don’t fit in that world, including the pop stuff I do on “Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes” and the more legit stuff I do in “Mr. Broadway” or the string quartet I’m (theoretically) working on.
If you dig “I’m In Bizness,” you should definitely dig the guys who really know how to do that stuff: Michel Petrucciani, Steve Gadd and Anthony Jackson, Live in Tokyo. This is the real deal. One of the highlights of my concert-going career was seeing this trio at Birdland twice in the year before Petrucciani passed. They are masters.
Fredrik Fischer writes:
What is most important to you – melody or lyric? You wrote earlier that music is all about structure, and I, as an aspiring lyricist/librettist totally agree with this, but I’d like to know what, in your work, is the shaping factor: the music or the lyric? In other words, what comes first?
On spare time, I’m working on a Swedish translation of “The Last Five Years”. What is your policy on translations? Is all of that handled by MTI, or do you have any say in the matters?
JRB responds:
Not to be clichéd about it, but what’s most important to me is the story. I can tell that story with music or with words, but it’s best when I need both. In terms of what comes first, it’s always the story: what’s happening, who’s doing it, who wants it to happen, and when do we figure all of that out? And that all determines the structure. Everything moves forth from there.
As far as translations go, MTI handles the licenses for all foreign productions, and I have to approve every translation into another language. Contact Richard Salfas at MTI: richards@mtishows.com. (That having been said, it was recently translated it into Japanese for a production there, and they changed almost everything – and not for the better, but by the time I got the re-translated version, they had already closed! Those wily Japanese!)
Caline Berlureau and Cyril Fargues ont écrit:
We send this e-mail from France & have a question: we would like to do a French adaptation of “The last five years.” We would like to have your agreement to make our project. This project is within the framework of an association which use to perform shows.
JRB répond:
I’d be thrilled to have a French adaptation of the show! All translations must be approved through Music Theater International or the appropriate affiliate in France. You can get more information by writing to Richard Salfas, the director of International Licensing. His e-mail is richards@mtishows.com. Bonne chance!
Kory Danielson writes:
I was wondering if there was a chance I could get an autograph? I would treasure it forever!
JRB responds:
Yeah, sure, send me something, I’ll sign it. Send it to: Jason Robert Brown c/o Sendroff & Associates, 1500 Broadway, Suite 2001, NY NY 10036, and include a postage-paid return envelope and I’ll get that to you as fast as I can.
Danny Abosch writes:
I noticed that both “Shiksa Goddess” and “I Can Do Better Than That” start out with the same chord, and even in the same inversion. (A in the left hand, B and E in the right) Both of the intros continue similarly in the sense that the B and E remain constant over a changing bass note. Did you do this purposely to suggest a similarity behind the meanings of the songs (both songs are about holding out for the right lover to come along), or was this coincidence? I know many other composers use such devices, and I’m wondering if you use them often as well.
JRB responds:
It’s somewhere between deliberate and coincidence. The reason I use that chord figuration in “I Can Do Better Than That” is because it mirrors “See I’m Smiling,” which as you can see is the same voicing. I probably used it in “Shiksa Goddess” because I wrote that song last of anything in the show and I needed it to bridge seamlessly into “See I’m Smiling.” But I wrote “Shiksa Goddess” so fast that I can’t be sure what I was thinking; it just slipped right out of me. Here’s the part that makes the entire rest of this paragraph sound like bullshit: Look at the vamp for “It’s Hard To Speak My Heart.” Clearly, regardless of my academic discussions above, I just happen to like that fourth in the middle of the piano.
Leon Sabarsky writes:
I really liked your comment about “feel” playing and gave examples like Dave Frishberg’s work. That comment led me to a question, “Do you miss New York?”
JRB responds:
Nah, not much. I’m there all the time anyway, having meetings, doing auditions, seeing my family, so I get plenty of New York City in my life, but I moved because I was Burned Out On New York, and I had been for a long time. Some people can live there forever, some people can’t take it for five minutes, but I did okay, and I had a great time while I was there. I knew, however, that it was time for me to move on. I also suspect that eventually it will be time to move back, if not to the city, then to the Northeast. But I’m liking Los Angeles now a whole lot more than I expected to, and my family is very happy and comfortable here.
Leslie Vincent asks:
I’m sure you get asked about the story behind the songs in “Songs For A New World,” but I am dying to know what “King of the World” is about. It’s one of my favorites, and my friend and I have discussed possibilities, but asking the source seems like the best idea. What is the song about in context?
Laura Radel asks:
What is the story behind “King of The World” in Songs For A New World? Does it have anything to do with the Doctor in “Tale of Two Cities”?
Peter Romberg asks:
What is the story behind “King Of The World”? I would like to perform it for the thespian competitions, and would like to know the backstory to this character.
JRB responds:
This is probably the number one question I get asked, and I’m not sure I understand why. I guess people think that “King of the World” came from a show or something and that it was sung by a specific character in that show. It wasn’t, it was always intended as a more allegorical (or at least metaphorical) number. Here’s where I was at when I wrote “King of the World”: I was living in a tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village, I had no money, I couldn’t get a job, and I saw a lot of people who I thought were extremely talented getting nowhere. I was terrified that I would never have the chance to have my voice heard, that I would just spend the rest of my life stuck in a tiny apartment, never getting to share my music with the world. The song comes out of that, I guess, as much as anything. But what’s the story? It’s a guy in prison who genuinely believes he was the king of the world. I wasn’t thinking about O.J. Simpson or Jesus or the Doctor in “Tale of Two Cities” (?) or anybody else specifically, but if that makes the song work for you, go for it. Just make it consistent. (I’m literally destroying one of my last good secrets for you people. Now what will anyone ask me?)
Rob Tokarz asks:
I was wondering if you had a favorite photo of yourself, or something that catches a good glimpse of you as an artist that I could possibly paint a portrait from. Odd request, but I feel I’ve learned a lot about you creatively from your work (which is as good a source as any) and am intrigued to do a painting.
JRB responds:
That’s very flattering and a little weird. I don’t like any of my photos much because I think they all look like one large nose and then the rest of my face trailing in the distance, but I think the photo of me in the traycard for “Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes” looks like I think I look as a performer (it’s the shot of me playing the piano with my eyes closed). But if you just want to grab one off the site, Nigel Dicker took some great shots of me in London a couple of years ago, and here’s one that you might enjoy drawing from. Let me know how it turns out!
Dana Frick asks:
I am a senior in college and am working on a Theatre Performance Project with one of my friends next year, and we were looking at the Funeral Scene from Parade (There is a Fountain/It Don’t Make Sense). Problem is, I don’t know that this section of the production was ever published. However, if it was, is there any way to gain access to this material?
JRB responds:
Well, sort of. Any of the individual selections from my shows can be licensed for Concert Performance from MTI. The Funeral Sequence actually was cleaned up and edited for a concert with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, so that one’s in really good shape. So you could contact MTI and ask them how that works. Other than that, I’m not much help.
Sally Bishop asks:
I have never seen “The Last 5 Years” but have the CD, which is wonderful. Is there dialogue to go with it? Has the script been published?
JRB responds:
There’s not much dialogue, a couple of monologues here and there and then Jamie’s big story (which is printed in the CD booklet). The script hasn’t ever been published, and it’s so short that I can’t imagine it would be worthwhile for any company to do it.
Adam Kern writes:
I was wondering if you had any advice on writing musicals, specifically when not using your own music? I’ve written a show around the music of Simon and Garfunkel, and connected them with a great story line. I obviously don’t want to offend them or get myself into trouble without having their permission; but am not sure how to do that.
JRB responds:
I could be wrong here, Adam, but I’m fairly certain there’s no way on God’s green Earth that you’ll ever get permission to do a musical with the songs of Simon and Garfunkel. Also, I don’t have any advice about how to write a show like that. For me, the songs have to come out of the story, not the other way around. It’s not that I don’t enjoy “Mamma Mia” (well, actually, I don’t enjoy “Mamma Mia,” but the point is I think it’s a perfectly valid evening in the theater), but it’s not the kind of musical that I would know how to write. The one “jukebox musical” I loved was “Our House,” which I saw in London and thought was just magical.
Natalie Copeland asks:
I auditioned for the “13” workshop. I was just wondering if “13” is going to be done again soon. Because I absolutely LOVED the show. I still can’t stop singing the Kendra song we learned at the audition.
JRB responds:
Hey Natalie! Check the news section and you’ll find out about the world premiere of “13” this winter!
Karen Mallory writes:
Any chance that “Thirteen” will be going to Broadway/Off Broadway, or is it just something you are doing in L.A.?
JRB responds:
Look, if it’s up to me, it’s going to Broadway and then touring around the planet Earth for the next thousand years. It’s not up to me. We’ll see how it goes in L.A. Keep your fingers crossed.
Paul Peglar writes:
I was just wondering if you saw Billy Joel. I know you’re a fan, so I assumed you’d see him if you could. I went, and he was AMAZING! I can really see his influence in your work – a contributing factor to why I like your music as well.
JRB responds:
I’m sort of shocked about this, but the answer is no, I didn’t see Billy Joel this past month in L.A., and in fact, I’ve never seen him in concert. I met him once, but that’s hardly the same thing. I would love to see him, and if any of you have a spare ticket, I’ll go with you. Really.
Sean Bala writes:
I’m directing “Songs for a New World” for my hometown’s community theatre. I’ve been thinking about the production since we were approved in August and it seems very clear to me that there are a number of things that connect the show together. For example, I think that each of the characters’ songs taken together have a unified vein (all of Woman 1’s songs have a similar theme, etc…). I know that you are probably very busy but I would like to know if there is anything that you feel is important for a production of this show. Is there anything that you think must be brought out by the cast?
JRB responds:
There are probably a million answers to that question, but here’s the one that I’m thinking of right off the top of my head: it’s not just that Woman 1’s songs are all connected (they are, though it’s subtle and you shouldn’t hit the audience over the head with a baseball bat to point it out), it’s that Woman 1 is connected to Woman 2 and Man 1 and Man 2. Those four people are not just distinct individuals, they’re also a sort of family, and they all relate to each other very specifically over the course of the piece. Let those relationships come through, let the audience see how Woman 2 protects Woman 1, how Man 2 and Woman 1 yearn for each other, how Man 1 stands outside of this group and judges them, how Man 2 looks up to Woman 2; the cast should find those relationships and the audience should feel them, without you as the director ever stepping in to say “Look! It’s a story!”
Mike Cob writes:
Hi, I was looking at the Parade Section of the Internet Broadway Database, and their songlist has some songs on it that are not on the CD. Namely: Watson’s Lullaby, Something Ain’t Right, Newt Lee’s Testimony and It Goes On and On. Have these songs ever been recorded? If so will they ever be posted on JRB.com? Lastly, are they included in the P/C score that MTI sends out and therefore usable by people looking to perform the show?
JRB responds:
All four of those songs were in the original Broadway production of the show, but “It Goes On and On” was deleted when we did the tour and I decided the show worked better without it, so you’ll never get to hear that one again unless you watch the video at Lincoln Center Library. “Something Ain’t Right” was definitely recorded, and I think “Watson’s Lullaby” might have been, but we knew they wouldn’t make it on to the cast album. (I might post those one day, we’ll see.) “Newt Lee’s Testimony” is really not particularly interesting music, so we didn’t bother recording it. But all three of those are indeed part of the show and everyone who does “Parade” is required to perform those songs.
Cris Frisco writes:
I had some questions about the song “When You Come Home To Me/Climbing Uphill” from “The Last Five Years.” How did you decide on the structure for this song? Was “When You Come Home To Me” a piece original to this show or was it a previous sketch?
JRB responds:
“When You Come Home To Me” was original to the show. I really wanted to write a Jerome Kern-style song for Cathy to sing at her audition, and I remember writing it one night in Denver on the “Parade” tour. Deciding the structure was, I guess, really a matter of making sure that the joke landed; the audience needs to hear the real song at least once, and then a couple of false starts so they understand what’s going on, and then I can finally do the crazy voices-in-my-head version. Then I just had to fit in the rest of the story around that joke.
BeachBlondie writes:
Which character do you feel connected to the most? How come?
JRB responds:
Wow, I don’t know. Mary Phagan?
Lauren Troxel writes:
Is there a recording of Lauren Kennedy and Norbert Leo Butz performing “The Last Five Years”? For some reason, I seem to remember at one point seeing a CD with Lauren on it instead of Sherie, but since that rather hazy time in my memory, I haven’t seen anything even remotely resembling that. Am I going insane?
JRB responds:
Yes. You are going insane. There was never any commercially released recording of Norbert and Lauren doing the show. Lauren does, of course, sing several of the songs on her album, “Songs of Jason Robert Brown,” but other than that, nope, nothing. Give my regards to your therapist.
Michael Malarkey writes:
I’ve been trying my hand at musicals except my biggest problem is lyrics. I try and make an effort to write lyrics for someone at least once a night just for practice but I have a lot of trouble. Any advice?
JRB responds:
How long have you got? Look, short answer: Tell the story, tell it well, don’t use fake rhymes. Lyrics are, just like music, all about structure. Look at the classic songs by Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, see how they do it. Your stuff doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) sound like theirs, but watch how they do it, they know exactly when to give away information and exactly when to hold it back.
Rachel Dugas writes:
One of the things I most admire about your skills as a lyricist is your ability to write touching, accessible lyrics that overflow with raw, honest emotion, that fit so perfectly with the music, while remaining original and sophisticated. I was wondering where you get your inspiration and, once you find it, advice on conveying these inspired ideas and emotions honestly, yet with sophistication and technical skill.
JRB responds:
It’s such a hard thing to articulate. I find it’s the thing I’m least equipped to bring out in my students at USC, that real ability to get down beyond the words and mean something. Maybe my emotions are just closer to the surface than other folks’. Listen to Shawn Colvin, listen to Joni Mitchell; they get it right out there, they say the thing that scares them the most and hurts them the most and it draws us in, pulls us closer to them. Bravery is the hallmark of a great lyricist, not amazing rhymes or clever jokes. What’s astonishing about Sondheim is not that he can pile sixteen rhymes up in one verse, it’s that “Finishing The Hat” is the most honest thing any artist has ever admitted to.
Zoom Kunnuwong writes:
I’m an exchange student from Thailand. I heard nothing about Broadway before I came here, but I did a lot of shows, singing contests and school concerts over there. I just discovered Broadway musicals seven months ago from your musical, The Last 5 Years. It really blew me away. After that I started learning about Broadway. I loved your music so much and I’m going to sing Schmuel Song in at the Talent Competition. Now, I’m spending most of my money to buy cast recordings. (It was a lot of money but it was good though.) I’m just wondering if you have any plan to write an Asian character or any character that fits with Asian people.
JRB responds:
Hey, Zoom, it was great to meet you in Chicago! There’s a Korean guy in “Honeymoon In Vegas”, does that count? I answered this in an earlier blog, but it’s worth trying to say again: I can’t honestly claim to speak for anyone else’s experience, and I’m generally embarrassed when I try. That’s not to say I won’t write an Asian character or a Hispanic character, it’s just that the stories I most burn to tell are the stories that resonate inside of me personally, and I haven’t yet figured out how to make some other cultural identity a conduit for those stories. Keep a look out for what I write in the next ten years, I think I’ll start shifting away from neurotic Jews more and more. (Or I won’t: it seems to work just fine for Philip Roth.)
Jonathan Skovron writes:
In regards to the wonderful orchestrations of L5Y: where did you come up with that awesome combination of piano, fretless bass, guitar, violin and 2 celli? I love the way that works as a concept, but the actual arrangements themselves are so fantastic… Did you formally learn how to orchestrate or are you “self-taught”?
JRB responds:
The orchestral concept of “The Last Five Years” was all strings, no drums. I vacillated for a while between two violins or two celli, but ultimately the celli won. The fretless bass/acoustic guitar thing comes from all those Joni Mitchell records that Jaco Pastorius played on. That combination of fiercely rhythmic guitar with fluid and melodic bass really felt right to me for that show, and it’s also what I travel around with for my band. I did some formal orchestration lessons when I was at Eastman, but to be honest, I really learned “on the job,” just pulling out the staff paper and trying to figure it out. The best education I got was watching (and hearing) Sebesky bring my work to life on “Parade,” it was such an extraordinary lesson in how to make piano-based music breathe orchestrally. I will forever be grateful to Don for that, he is the best in my book.
Andy Peterson writes:
How is the best way to enter the “musical theatre composing” world of things and stage your own show? Do you need heaps of money? Is it about who you know and who you have studied under?
JRB responds:
Yes, you need heaps of money, and yes, it’s about who you know, and I guess it can’t hurt to study under someone powerful and successful. But more than that, it’s about talent. The theater world is very small, really, and everybody’s always looking for the new thing, for the exciting breakthrough, for the person who’s going to make everyone a shitload of cash right now, today. If you can prove that you’re that guy, you don’t need money or connections at all. The best way to enter the “musical theater composing world”? Be commercial, be funny, be smart but not obscure. Get lots of applause at the end of your song. Make singers desperate to do your material. Don’t be a crazy stalker. Have a life other than musicals. Don’t write just for yourself, write because you love hearing applause. That may or may not be the way to do your best work (I go back and forth on it myself), but it’s what you’re going to need if you want anyone to put up the money to do your show.
Marken Greenwood writes:
My graduation from Palos Verdes Peninsula High is approaching at incredible speed, and two friends and I have created our own three-person rendition of “Long Long Road” to perform at commencement. (You’re probably cringing right now. But, yay for team effort!) Would it be possible to get our hands on the sheet music?
JRB responds:
Ack! I never wrote down the piano part! Just have some guitarist play the chords while you guys sing it; it’s not that hard to figure it out if you’re used to copping songs from records.
Nolan wants to know:
Is there any chance of getting sheet music for “Mr. Broadway”?
JRB responds:
Yes! Hal Leonard will be releasing the sheet music later this year! Watch this space, I’ll give you more information when it’s available!
Tamara Woolrych asks:
I was wondering if there was any possible way for me to get the music to ‘See I’m Smiling’ and the full duet version of ‘Goodbye Until Tomorrow’? I also have a question about the lyrics that Jamie sings in ‘Goodbye Until Tomorrow,’ he says “I’m not the only one who’s hurting here…” I just don’t get it, because obviously she would be hurting more than he is, so why would he say that?
JRB responds:
“See I’m Smiling” is in “The Jason Robert Brown Collection,” now available at all fine music stores (and Amazon.com). The duet version of “Goodbye Until Tomorrow” is unfortunately not available for purchase, sorry. As far as Jamie’s lyric, he’s making a very important point: don’t get mad at me for leaving you, you’re just as miserable in this relationship as I am, I’m not the only one who’s hurting here.
Sarah Browne writes:
I am a Senior Manager in a college of further education in Dudley, West Midlands, UK. I am responsible for Performing Arts, Music, Film and Media. In September of this year, I will be delivering a new course for the department – BTEC National Diploma in Musical Theatre (predominantly attracting 16 to 19 year old students) This is the only course of its kind in the UK Midlands area. As part of this course, students must take part in a final major production. As we already perform one major musical a year, my intention is to use this project to showcase practitioners of Musical Theatre and as I am a big fan of your work, I would like to use the first showcase as a vehicle to perform some of your music and allow my students to share in my enthusiasm. We aim to do this within a concert setting rather than a dramatic context.
Ideally, some form of patronage from you for this venture would be fantastic and would mean a great deal to both myself and my students. However, any help, advice or acknowledgement you can give would be gratefully received.
JRB responds:
Congratulations to you and your students on establishing such an exciting program. It’s hard to offer a whole lot of advice, especially from across the ocean, and even more especially on a blog entry that I’m writing because my daughter won’t stay asleep, but the most important thing I would say to anyone doing the kind of work you’re doing is: it’s about them. It’s about your students, and not just because they’re up there performing, but it has to be about them in a real way: how do they connect to every line, every note, every story? What makes it worthwhile for them to stand on that stage and share their heart with an audience? Most of your students aren’t going to be professional performers, that’s just the odds of the business, so it has to be about their lives, not just their work. If I could share one thing with every student of mine, it would be: don’t sing because it will make you famous, don’t sing because you’re amazing, don’t sing because you have to – sing because it makes you complete, and because without your voice, you wouldn’t know who you were.
Is anyone still reading this? Go to bed!

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A NEW ROUND OF ASKING JRB

Posted on May 29, 2006 at 11:21 am

Who knew you all had so many questions? I’m going to try to get to a couple a day, just so I can whip through the backlog (there are about eighty questions sitting in my Ask JRB box, just mocking me and teasing me every day).
So, first up, Ryan DeFoe:
1. In the new songbook, why are certain arrangements slightly altered from what is heard on the albums? Specifically the stuff from your album and Lauren’s. There seem to be slight differences in the piano line (i.e., the downward lick on “voices that tell me to stand my ground,” etc.). And again in “Nothing in Common,” I know you cut certain chunks out of the piano solos, but if I remember there was more changed in that as well. The most different to me is “If I Told You Now.” I know it’s in a different key, so that sounds different, but I don’t know, maybe it is me, but the piano line seems radically different. So I just wondered why that was? The reason I ask, is because one of the things I love about playing your stuff is mastering all the little “licks” and intricacies.
2. On my “Parade” showcard, it states orchestrations by Sebesky AND Coughlin. I checked my other literature from the show and Coughlin is not listed as orchestrator and you are. I asked this question on a chat board and someone told me that in “The Art of the American Musical,” you said you were unhappy with certain musical components of “Parade.” So I guess the question is what happened to Coughlin and his orchestrations and what are the musical elements you were unhappy with?
Here are my answers:
1. The arrangements are different in the book largely because the recordings were made before I ever sat down to write the piano parts out. Therefore, when it came time to write down the parts for the book, some licks felt more natural than others, some ideas wanted to be more fully fleshed out, and to be frank, I made some lousy choices on the record that I liked having the opportunity to correct. Which is not to say that the piano parts in the book are always better, but they are at least more thought out. And sometimes it was more expedient to just write down “something” than to spend six hours transcribing what I had played at the session. “If I Told You Now” is actually one of the piano parts I’m most proud of in the book; not that the way I played it for Lauren’s album is bad, but when we did that session, I was just learning how to play it in her key and we had never performed it live at that point, so I think in the years since we made the record, I’ve discovered a lot about that song.
2. It’s not fair this many years down the line to discuss specifically what happened with Bruce Coughlin, who I respect enormously as a writer, especially since he isn’t likely to show up to defend himself. Though that could be a fun bloggy thing, maybe Bruce can write in with his version of what happened (please don’t use the phrase “egomaniacal nitwit”), then I can embellish it to make myself look better. Sometimes musicians just aren’t speaking exactly the same language, and that was the case on “Parade.” There is no more perfect orchestration for the musical theater than what Bruce did with “Floyd Collins,” and I will consider myself lucky if we get to work together again.
Now Robert Weiner asks:
Let me first say I am a huge fan of all your works, but especially “Parade.” I bought the CD when it first came out, sound unheard, and was blown away. I have since worn through 2 other copies. I finally had a chance to see it when The University of Michigan did a production of it a few years back, and was astounded yet again.
My question is this: I am part of a the theatrical creative team at a high school in Michigan, and I and our Musical Director (who happens to be the director of the top choir in the State) think that “Parade” would be a difficult, yet challenging and ultimately rewarding selection for our fall Musical. Many naysayers, including the Director, feel that the subject matter is too “dark” for a high school, that we would alienate our audience, and that the show wouldn’t sell. While this may be true for most high schools, we feel that the kids (who love you, btw) are mature enough and talented enough to perform your work (we put on a fantastic rendition of “Urinetown” this year), and we would have an orchestra that is top notch (directed by a former band director at the University of Michigan).
Has a High School ever performed Parade? Do you discourage High Schools from attempting such an “adult” piece of literature? And do you have any advice on how to market it (it’s no “Annie”! Thank God)?
Any response is highly appreciated.
Here’s what I think:
Certainly if your high school director felt comfortable with “Urinetown,” which may be the darkest piece of musical theater I’ve ever seen, he shouldn’t have a problem with “Parade.” I presume one of the other choices might be the school version of “Les Misérables,” for example, which is profoundly political and heavy, but your director probably wouldn’t have a problem with that.
So let’s put aside the question of whether it’s “appropriate,” since we’re looking at a musical that has, on many levels, a lot of very important things to teach students, none of which would be out of place in the most conservative history class.
Let’s move to whether it would alienate your audience – again, I ask: they had no problem with “Urinetown”? I know, I know, “Parade” isn’t a comedy (boy, do I know), but I don’t think it’s an offensive or alienating piece, unless you’re having Robert Wilson direct it in a German translation. It’s really a pretty straight-ahead conventional musical, it’s just about some tough things which it deals with fairly straightforwardly. I would understand the concern if you were in West Virginia or northern Florida, but in Michigan? I’d be surprised to hear that the parents and students were alienated or offended by “Parade.” I think your director is underestimating your audience. They really can deal with dark things, they watch “CSI” every week.
As for whether it’s “marketable,” well, there you’ve got me. No, it’s not. It was a flop musical about a lynching. Your weapon here is your students, who will be passionately, fiercely engaged in this piece and will want their friends and families to see what they’ve done. I’ve seen eight or nine productions of “Parade,” and the students are always, in every production, committed and connected to the material in a way that I don’t see in student productions of, say, “Grease” or “Over Here.” I think especially because the piece is not very well-known, the students think of it as their responsibility to expose their peers to it, to share it and explore it together, which they’ll do on their MySpace pages and while they’re Instant Messaging each other. I think they can build up excitement for the show far beyond what they can do for “Little Shop of Horrors.” I suppose that’s a risk, but the point of doing a show with students is to give those students a learning experience, and sometimes doing that entails risk. It’s not that big a risk, to be frank; I know your students will fight for the show. But if your director isn’t jazzed about it, everyone will pick up on that and that’s a bad thing. I can’t make that judgement call for you, but I encourage you to fight for it, not because I need the royalties (believe me, one high school in Michigan is not going to help with my house payment) but because I believe in the show and I’ve seen what it can do for students and for school drama programs.

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12 NEW QUESTIONS, 12 OLD ANSWERS

Posted on May 30, 2006 at 4:22 pm

Today: studying voice, writing musicals, why I’m not a real jazz pianist, why I’m not a novelist, and why I’m not helpful.
Sara Ptak writes:
I am an aspiring singer/actor/etc., mostly singer. For most of my summers as a child I went to arts camps, Interlochen and Northwestern and I “studied” music theatre and did as many shows as I possibly could in every place that I could, and in my senior year of high school, I decided that I needed to study classical music so that I could really understand the voice, and so that I could really understand music and how it works and why the hell it affects me so damn much!  So here I am at DePaul University’s School of Music and I love it most of the time, but there are days (like the day of your concert at Northwestern) that I really question not studying music theatre in college.  Question: Do you think I am making a mistake studying classical voice performance if I really want to be a music theatre performer?
JRB responds:
Technique counts, especially given how difficult most contemporary music theater is to sing.  I don’t think there’s any mistake in getting to know your instrument intimately and to push it to its limits.  The only negative is that many (most?) classical voice teachers look down on belting as though it were the Devil’s Testicles.  If you can’t comfortably, naturally and robustly sing in your chest voice, you won’t be able to do much musical theater.  So I would say the danger is in only developing one part of your voice; I don’t know that you need to drop out of the program at DePaul to do the rest, you just may want to add a musical theater coach or additional voice teacher to your workload.  Opera and musicals are very different animals, performance-wise.  Don’t let your opera coaches fool you into thinking otherwise; if you want to do both, you’ll need two entirely different techniques.  Audra McDonald, for example, has entirely differently approaches to her classical singing and pop singing, as do Kristin Chenoweth and Kelli O’Hara and Andrea Burns.
Kerrie Bond writes:
I was wondering about the process of writing “Parade.” Was it difficult to write a musical about such a heartbreaking and powerful story? How did you go about making sure it was done with care and was done well?
JRB responds:
Luckily, I had the best collaborators in the world.  I think, left to my own devices, “Parade” would have been a much nastier piece, and not in a good way.  I was a very angry guy in my twenties, and I think the show would have reflected that.  The balance and the empathy of the show are really Alfred’s contribution, and the thematic and structural integrity is really Hal’s.
Dan Allan writes:
I am an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, and my music teacher is Jason Titus, who says he knew you during your Eastman days.  He mentioned that you once wrote a musical for the Eastman orientation.  I work with a group that produces student musical revues on campus, and we are big fans of your work.  Is there any chance we could see some of that music?  I know it’s early work, but we’d love to see music written by you about our school.
JRB responds:
Adam Guettel once said to me, “There’s a fine line between juvenilia and crap,” and the Freshman Show that I wrote in 1988 falls very clearly on the “crap” side of the line.  Even my ego is not large enough to imagine that there’s any compelling reason to listen to that work.  But hey, say hi to Jason Titus for me!
Janice Young writes:
I am really writing to see if the rumor that the Last 5 Years is coming to Pasadena is true… I can’t find it on their website.
JRB responds:
Yep.  It’s part of something called “The Marriage Musicals,” which involves “The Last Five Years” and Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones’s “I Do! I Do!” (another two-person musical about marriage) running on alternate nights in rep.
Peter Salomon writes:
As a writer, I was wondering if you’d ever considered taking the plot of “The Last Five Years” (or a wholly different plot you might have lurking within) and writing a novel.  I know in my high school and college days I dabbled with writing musicals and lyrics before realizing very very quickly that, damn, that’s freakishly difficult to do well.
JRB responds:
The way you think about writing musicals is the way I think about writing novels.  Not that I lack for confidence, but for right now, I’d rather concentrate on doing what I know I do well.  I’ll save the novelizing for my retirement.
Lanie Reel writes:
How do you picture the musical in thirty years in America?  What do you feel you have done differently in creating your art than some of your peers?  I am focusing my thesis on your creation of The Last Five Years.  What were some of your musical influences in producing this show?  Who would you name as a mentor and whose musicals would you say are the most different from yours?
JRB responds:
I have no opinion about the American musical in thirty years.  I don’t think the American musical today looks much different than it did in 1976, so I don’t know how to extrapolate forward from that.
I don’t know what I’ve done differently from my peers other than just writing in my own voice; some people are going to respond to that and some people won’t, but the only reliable barometer I have of the quality of my work is whether it feels like it’s mine.  
As far as musical influences in “The Last Five Years,” I think they’re pretty obvious: Joni Mitchell (particularly “Hejira” and “Hissing of Summer Lawns”), Billy Joel, Sondheim, Paul Simon, Shawn Colvin, lots of traditional Irish and Jewish music, a million other things.  
To name a mentor, I’d have to say Hal Prince, who took me under his wing and gave me an opportunity and an education that no one else could have possibly provided.
And whose musicals are the most different from mine?  That’s an odd question.  I like to think I’ve still got some time before my “style” is pinned down, and I think most Broadway writers have written many different kinds of shows.  Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, may be most famous for sung-through melodramas, but he’s written music-hall comedies and thrillers and pageants and all sorts of things, and I hope my career has that same kind of genre fluidity.
Jonathan Skovron writes:
It is obvious from some of your recordings (and also sometimes in your writing) that you have some jazz background. You also have serious jazz chops on piano. I was wondering if you ever devoted a lot of time to practicing that sort of thing, and whether you ever considered going more down the jazz path as a performer.
JRB responds:
Dude, with the shows I’m writing and the baby and the classes at USC and the concerts, I’m lucky if I get to practice anything at all.  Really, I’m not a genuine jazz cat, I don’t have the fingers or the vocabulary to put myself in the same league as Brad Mehldau or Benny Green or Fred Hersch, I’m just my own kind of wacky rock-gospel-jazz-showbiz thing.  I mean, yeah, I’ve played in some jazz bands, but I’ve also played Bach fugues, I’m equally out of place in both arenas.
Adam Katz writes:
I’m a 17-year-old pianist from Australia.  One of the biggest compliments I have been given is that my style of playing is very similar to yours.  I was wondering if it would be possible to get a personalised signed photo sent to me? This would be amazing!
JRB responds:
Sure, just send all photo requests to: Jason Robert Brown c/o Sendroff & Associates, 1500 Broadway, Ste. 2001, NY NY 10036, and please include a postage-paid envelope for return!
Tim Meola writes:
I was wondering if you knew of any good sites and/or reference materials that provide a deeper explanation of “The Last Five Years” and its songs. I would like to do the show justice and would like to get a better idea of what Mr. Brown intended for the songs and characters to show emotionally.
JRB responds:
I’ll throw this one out to the readers; anybody?  I think if you read through the articles, interviews and reviews about “The Last Five Years” on this site, you’ll get a pretty comprehensive picture.
Richard Wolf writes:
Do you have “A Miracle Would Happen/When You Come Home to Me” available for purchase as a single song?  I have a student who would like to sing this song for an upcoming performance.

JRB responds:
Sorry, as explained in another post, I had to keep some things out of the book or else there’d be unauthorized productions going on everywhere.  MTI can license individual songs for concert performance, you should give them a shout.
Angela Cohen writes:
I was wondering what the story/inspiration was behind “Over” from your solo album? I just want to say that I love the album, it’s one of the best cds that I’ve heard in a very long time. Keep doing what you do best.
JRB responds:
I’m very proud of “Over” and I think it’s different from my other songs, so thanks for mentioning it.  It was actually inspired by an article I read in The New Yorker about US Army mortuary workers in Iraq, though that’s not what the song is about.  I had been wanting to write something about the war, but it’s hard for me to write political stuff, I don’t like getting preachy and didactic; my viewpoint on this Presidency is so clear and specific that it doesn’t leave much room for empathy.  But when I put the song in the voice of a soldier, I found some room for ambiguity, some emotional flexibility.
Todd Christopher writes:
I am Choral Music Director for Wapakoneta City Schools. This e-mail is on behalf of me and my senior accompanist Adam Fahncke. We love all of your music. We read that you wrote a piano sonata called “Mr. Broadway” for Anthony DeMare at Carnegie Hall. Is there a way to see this piece of music? Or is there an mp3 of the piece that we can listen to?
JRB responds:
You know, I’m working on that.  I myself can’t play it (really!), so I’m looking to find someone who can do a great recording of it.  Hal Leonard will be publishing the score later this year, so I’ll keep you all up to date on that.  Keep a lookout on this website some time in the Fall.

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ASK ABOUT PIANO BARS AND SFANW

Posted on June 1, 2006 at 7:33 pm

Talking about my first years in New York City. (Also, is anyone reading these? Drop me a comment or something, for Christ’s sake, I feel like I’m howling into a vacuum out here.)
Benjamin Goldstein writes:
I’m moving to Toronto soon to sort of pursue things in a piano bar/first CD sort of way and I was wondering if you had any pearls of wisdom to bestow. I only ask because it’s my understanding that you sort of went that route yourself.
JRB responds:
When I was twenty years old, I came to New York and started playing at all the piano bars in the West Village; there was Eighty-Eight’s and Rose’s Turn and the Duplex (I never played there) and Don’t Tell Mama in midtown, and if I was lucky I could get four or five nights a week of work.  I never got a regular night, I think everyone perceived that I was only in it for the short term, but I subbed in for a lot of the regulars.  It was a lot of fun sometimes, and it was very valuable in these respects: I learned an awful lot of repertoire really fast, to the point where even now I still can play and sing about three hundred songs from memory (which is nothing compared to some of the real stalwarts); I learned how to “read” an audience, and a particularly mercurial one at that – a drunken crowd can go from festive to hostile in sixteen bars – and I learned how to keep them entertained without necessarily doing exactly what they thought they wanted; it was great practice time for me as a pianist, since I never really was the type who could sit at home and do exercises, at the piano bar I had to keep focussed, play the right notes, not jerk around; and I got a lot of very useful experience in accompanying singers (and learned when not to push it: Billy Porter came in once with an arrangement of “God Bless The Child” and it was really cooking, so I modulated up a half-step in the middle, not knowing that he had built the arrangement to ride at the very top of his range already; he got through it, but he wasn’t happy with me).  I also met a lot of wonderful people, some of whom I still count among my collaborators and friends.  (See the next question below.)
The downside: I don’t know what it’s like in Toronto, but back in the 90’s, people could smoke in piano bars in NY, and I came home every night smelling like an ashtray.  The hours are not conducive to having a real life: I got home at four or five in the morning and still had to “wind down,” which meant that I generally couldn’t start the next day until at least noon, and then the whole cycle was in place.  It’s hard for me to be around alcoholics, and even harder for me to be around people who are having an artificially good time because they’re so hammered they don’t remember their names – I don’t drink, not more than a half a glass of wine every month or so, and I found that sort of alcohol-fueled belligerence to be the most hateful part of my job.  The hardcore alkies were a different thing altogether, they were all generally kind of sweet, but it was very sad and depressing coming in every day to see them at their same positions at the bar, where they’d been since four o’clock in the afternoon and where they’d stay until the joint closed.  The biggest downside was that, as a piano bar entertainer, you learn a lot of tricks to keep a room pumped up, and most of these tricks involve being flashy, being (this sounds pretentious) dishonest.  If you’re not careful, you can get addicted to those tricks; after all, they work.  But there’s a reason why a lot of piano bar entertainers never move up to the next level professionally, and it’s because they rely on being crowd-pleasers and rousers instead of being communicators.  I can always tell which singers in a given audition spend too much time waitressing in piano bars.
Ultimately, I lasted for only one year, and then, just as I determined that I didn’t really want to do it anymore, the calls mysteriously stopped coming in.  I could have pushed harder and gotten more work, but I knew, even though I had made pretty good money doing it, that it was time to move on from piano bar work.  The weird thing about it is that I thought piano bars were like magical islands when I first got to the city: oh my God, it’s people who sing show tunes all night!  Nirvana!  And now I can’t really imagine enjoying an evening there: oh my God, it’s people who sing show tunes all night!  Seventh circle of Hell!
Aaron Buitron writes:
What was Surabaya-Santa originally written for? It’s one of the most creative things I’ve ever heard.
JRB responds:
When I worked in piano bar, one of my favorite singers was a woman named Kristine Zbornik, who did the most outrageous parodies and also had an amazing belt in a real Ethel Merman-meets-Eydie Gormé kind of way.  Krissy got asked to be part of this album called “Cabaret Noël,” and she asked me to write a song for her about the long-suffering wife of Santa Claus.  I decided it would be fun if there was a sort of Bluebeard’s Castle aspect to it, and then the whole “Surabaya-Johnny” joke came to me.  I usually advise against writing too many ideas at once, but there are about forty things going on in “Surabaya-Santa” at the same time, and I still think it works largely because Krissy forced me to keep that character focussed on what she wants.  Krissy was a little pissed off when I put “her” song into “Songs for a New World,” but it’s exposed a lot of people to that song (and she gets royalties for it, since the monologue in the middle is all hers), and even though I’ve seen about two hundred people do it, Krissy still does it better than anyone else.
Tom Brady writes:
I am directing and musically directing Songs for a New World in September of this year in Northampton.  I have a good idea about my concept for the show, but I wondered if you could give me a few guiders as to what you orginally intended to communicate when you first wrote and performed the show?
JRB responds:
“Songs for a New World” is about community, and about the mutability of faith.  That’s a pretty heavy thing to say about what is essentially just a pile of songs, but we chose those songs and the order in which they’re sung very carefully.  Each of the characters in the show takes a real journey, from innocence to experience, or from cynicism to hope, or from detached to committed, and I think the show is most powerful when the audience can feel and see those journeys taking place.  There’s a lot of talk about “Songs” on this site, snoop around, let me know if you find what’s helpful.
Laura Poyner writes:
I am organising a production of Songs for a New World, which is in rehearsal period at the moment. I’m playing Woman 2, as well as directing some scenes. Did you write the songs with any attention to running themes between characters? While some characters seem to follow patterns in their songs, others seem not to (a.k.a. woman 2).  I saw a production of Songs at the Edinburgh Festival last year that had a cast of 11 or 12.  (Our production is 4 performers as intended.) Their version was odd. Not at all like I imagine it should be. In light of this, what’s your opinion on productions increasing their cast sizes?
JRB responds:
Check out my answer to Sean Bala here.
Kevin Bell writes:
What’s the story on “Flying Home”?  O.K., obviously someone/something has passed on to another realm… but, the opening lyric?  It is “The angels called you to leave this land; my work is finished, the angels command…”  Who is Man One addressing?
JRB responds:
From the liner notes of Lauren Kennedy’s album:

I had started writing a show called “Flying Home,” about a young clairvoyant girl searching for her father’s murderer, but I got stuck when I realized that the plot I had written would take about nine hours of stage time.  So I bagged it, but this song had already been written – it was meant to be the finale – and I just took it and stuck it into “Songs for a New World.”

More later, kids!

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JOIN THE ASK JRB LOVE BRIGADE!

Posted on June 2, 2006 at 5:43 pm

Thank you all so much for writing back, please keep it up!  I think this website works best when it’s a collaboration between me and the readers, and this blog is the most obvious example of that.  All right, back to the questions!
Mindy Cimini writes:
I had the pleasure of seeing “Wicked” when it was in town and besides being enthralled by the show as a whole, I also noticed they had a travelling rhythm section.  Immediately, I thought, “I want to do that.”  Before that little ephiphany, I’d conducted/played in a little 5 person combo for a show my school did and enjoyed it.  I then got to play lead keyboards for our main stage musical this year and loved every minute.  My question then, is what I should major in if I want to be playing in/directing pits for shows?  Is there a better major besides piano performance to get me there?  What college, in your opinion, would be the best for that area?  I’m only ending my sophomore year, so I have a little time, but as I said, the brochures in my mailbox are easily persuading me otherwise.
JRB responds:
Groove and time, groove and time.  I don’t know a single piano performance major in the country that will teach you how to play contemporary pop styles, and ninety-six percent of Broadway musicals are written in those styles.  Don’t just play your Scriabin and Brahms; if you really want to do this, go play in the jazz band (if they’ll let you in!), play with church choirs, and most importantly, play with drummers and bass players and guitarists.  Learn how to be part of a rhythm section.  Some schools have majors in accompanying (Eastman did, I know) and that couldn’t hurt.  But really, the best way to learn how to play in pits in to go play in pits.  Even when I was in high school I was playing for local theaters, and that experience is not something you can replicate in some other environment.  Just keep it up – it’s not like there are a lot of people who want to play theater music, so if you keep your ears open, you’ll find the opportunities are all around you.
Matthew Masten writes:
This is Matthew Masten, a freshman music theatre major at Elon University and I just wanted to thank you for coming to our school last Friday.  I was wondering what was your inspiration for “Someone To Fall Back On”.  The lyrics and music are both so moving (plus you sound wonderful). Thanks so much for coming to Elon and I hope you come back or at least I get to see you again sometime in the near future.
JRB responds:
I wish I had a good story about it, but it was really just something that I wrote one night in the basement of Lincoln Center after a performance of “Parade.”  But I did want to write and say I had a sensational time working with the students at Elon, and I’d be delighted to come back again soon.
Andrew Fox writes:
In most of your interviews and writings and whatnot, you seem to basically be saying that great songwriting has two sides to it–one is excellent technique, and the other is bare honesty and blood and heart and all that. But so far you seem to only have offered [excellent] advice on the first part–clear structure and interesting changes/rhythms and all that. But what about the second part? I find that when I set out to write “honestly” everything ends up turning into that boring, confessional stuff that so many people seem to be making.
How do you keep the blood flowing through your music? How do you “know” if a funny song, or a dismissive song, or a [insert any adjective other than “confessional”] song, is honest and pumping with life underneath? And when it’s not there, how do you bring it?
JRB responds:
I feel like I sort of answered this one already, but it’s worth elaborating on.  If you don’t feel deeply, feel intensely, then you won’t have much to write about.  No one can teach empathy.  I’m a tortured soul, you know, and I channel that when I write.  A half-assed character is impossible to bring to life through song, and I think a lot of theater songs suffer for not being about anything important enough.  I feel like I’m rambling.  When all else fails, steal – Joni Mitchell’s work resonated for me so deeply that I often just took her phrases and her ideas and appropriated them.  You won’t hear those songs (trust me), but it was by finding what really sang to me in other people’s work that I was able to find what was my own.
Zak Monneyham writes:
Do you have any events planned in or around the Bay Area in the soon or distant Future?  I just moved up here to go to school and now you’re playing in Temecula (half an hour from my mother’s house and I don’t have the money for a vacation).  You should play in SF sometime.
JRB responds:
Man, I’d love to do something in the Bay Area, but I can’t manage to get in there.  Any ideas about where I should try to play?  Some place with a great piano?
Tesla540 writes:
I am singing “A Part of That” for a concert and although I pretty much understand the gist of the song, I’m wondering what the background story is or if there is something specific in the show that explains the song more thoroughly?
JRB responds:
Cathy is at one of Jamie’s book-signing events, probably at a Barnes & Noble in New Jersey or something, and she’s playing the part of the dutiful wife, entertaining the long line of folks who are there to have Jamie sign their copies of “Light Out Of Darkness.”  I’m sure right before the song starts, someone says, “So, what’s it like being married to a genius?” and Cathy responds by singing the song.  The important thing to say is that she’s not supposed to be mad at him in the verses when she talks about his process, she’s supposed to be saying, “Isn’t he wacky?  Isn’t this a crazy life?”  She’s got to keep the ball in the air and keep entertaining the crowd.  The “Aren’t I?” at the end is the only time she slips.
Allison Hersh writes:
I am so excited to hear that you are coming out with another show and I can’t wait to hear it!  How will I know when recordings come out?
JRB responds:
Just keep reading the website!
Lucy Downing writes:
I’m ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until I read the questions and answers on your website that I realized that creating music and lyrics actually has “rules” and “techniques” and “structure”!  My question is … does having these “rules” and “structures” make the creative process less enjoyable for you?  Or do you welcome and embrace them because they give you the tools to express what’s inside you?
JRB responds:
You know, these days, when so much of my writing is for specific assignments and commissions, I love those rules and structures.  The fewer choices I have to make, the happier I am.  And certainly, when I get stuck, it’s great to have a lot of technique to fall back on.  But more importantly, I just wouldn’t know how to write with no rules; I mean, where do you start?  When do you finish?  What’s supposed to happen?
Liz Han rambles:
I music directed (well, attempted to) “The Last Five Years” at our Fringe Festival in Edmonton this past summer.  My two questions for you are these: What’s the deal with the chimes in “The Last Five Years”? They happen at such specific moments is why I ask. And secondly, why IS the accompaniment score so damn difficult?  I’ve seen tough scores in musical theatre, but always felt that considerable shedding is all they ever needed.  Yours are different in that each style of each song is so true to its groove/feel.  Your attention to this kind of detail, if I haven’t read too much into everything, is exactly why this is all worth exploring, and raises the bar for us all. And when you dig music/words of this calibre, and live in Edmonton, Canada as a po’ass pianist playing in a dinner theatre pit…it’s sometimes the only thing joyful in a day. So thanks for that.
JRB responds:
1. The chimes: I think I got hooked on chimes when I was writing “Parade,” and they were so important to the storytelling there.  They’re used twice in “The Last Five Years,” but one was sort of an accident.  (It’s actually just one chime, an Ab.) The one I really wanted is in “Nobody Needs to Know,” I was writing the song and it just kept building and building and I knew when I got to “All that I ask for is one little corner” that I wanted something to push it over the edge.  The chime just seemed like the perfect thing; I especially love it because it’s such a surprise in the texture of the orchestration.  Then there’s the other place I use in the show, which is the transition between “I’m A Part Of That” and “The Schmuel Song,” and the story there is that we needed a little something to work as a transition, and I looked around the orchestra pit, and there was the chime, just staring at me, so I told the cellist to hit it four times.  And now it’s in the score.
2. Why is the accompaniment so difficult?  How’s this for a terrible answer: it’s not that difficult for me.  I can’t make it through one bar of “The Light in the Piazza” or “Floyd Collins,” those are difficult accompaniments.  “Sweeney Todd”?  “On The Town”?  Now that’s some hard shit.  My stuff?  I’m not trying to be coy, I know it drives the best pianists in the world insane, but I guess part of the story is that I’m such a weird and idiosyncratic player that what I write feels very natural to me and feels completely bizarre to other pianists.  I like to think that my stuff looks really hard on the page but falls well under the fingers.  But, as I write often in this blog, groove and time are not standard equipment on most theater pianists, and my music doesn’t really sound like anything unless you have a really solid groove behind it.  I’ll also admit, as my friend Tom Murray points out, a lot of my accompaniments are overwritten, particularly in “Songs for a New World,” you can leave out a lot of the filigree and the songs still sound exactly right.  At any rate, thank you for putting so much energy and attention into getting it right, I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of that.
[A couple of hours later, I had an addendum I wanted to make: Some accompaniments are vastly different than others. I’m completely comfortable playing “Moving Too Fast,” which is exactly the sort of thing that makes most musical directors want to chop off their hands, but I can’t even get through “Dreaming, Wide Awake” or the fugue in “Still Hurting,” neither of which is actually all that difficult for pianists who have a solid classical technique.]
And I appreciate all of you for reading and writing me! Keep it up, and I’ll keep answering! Also, if there are things that you’re looking for on the site but you’re not finding, let me know and we’ll try and get that going. I probably won’t write again this weekend, since I’m off to a big French Woods reunion and I have to polish my Tony Award. Have a great weekend.

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JUNE IS FOR ASKING JRB

Posted on June 7, 2006 at 7:55 pm

I’m back from my French Woods reunion, where I learned the somewhat astonishing fact that in twenty years, none of us got fat, none of us went bald, and none of us lost our voices. Also, we all seem to have hooked up with pretty hip people and had absolutely adorable children. There must have been something in the water up there. It was really cool and really weird to be in a room with fifteen people I was in a room with in 1985. I felt simultaneously ancient and very young. Anyway, the point is I’m back to answer more questions.
Chris Jenkins, balls made of brass, asks:
Hey JRB. This is really a request from a friend who doesn’t have access to the internet. She is singing ‘Christmas Lullaby’ at a wedding – not very fitting is it. She is having trouble finding an accompanist and the couple isn’t willing to pay for one. So I was wondering if there was just a backing track available to be sent to me because I cannot find one on any of the karaoke CDs. It would be very much appreciated. I know you are a good man, JRB. Help us out.
JRB responds:
Sorry, I’m apparently not such a good man: no karaoke track for that one.  Truth be told, I find the whole karaoke thing really weird, but I guess I should get over it.  Is an accompanist really that expensive?  That song is at least playable…
Shannen Crane asks:
The piano piece at the beginning of “Still Hurting”, the middle of “The Next Ten Minutes” and in “I Could Never Rescue You”, is absolutely brilliant. I get chills every time I hear it. Did you write that or is it an old piece? It sounds very classical. Is there any way to get music for it? I actually want to use it as my song when I eventually get married (which may be a bad thing considering how Jamie and Cathy ended up).
JRB responds:
What’s weird is that someone else asked me for this music recently and I said, “Well, it’s right there in the vocal selections,” and she said, “Where?” and I went and looked and realized, for the very first time, that that music didn’t make it into the book.  And I had really intended for it to be there! So here it is, print it out and enjoy it.
Hklowy asks:
When you write, do you know in advance what chords and voicings to use, or do you experiment as you write?
JRB responds:
Both.  Sometimes the melody leads me some place so obvious that I just have to use that harmony, sometimes I’ve got a number of options, and sometimes I want to deliberately go someplace unexpected.   Same with voicings, though those can be a lot more arbitrary in my scoring.
Brian Kennedy asks:
MTI offers “study guides” to their shows as an aide to their production staff and directors and what not. I see that there are no guides published for any of your 3 main shows.  Is there a reason for this? Are you too busy? Not settled on what to set in stone, or just wanting to see how others view your music?
JRB responds:
This is a lame answer, but: my shows don’t have study guides because MTI never asked.  If they wanted a study guide, I’d happily put one together.  (Well, I’d actually make Alfred deal with the one for “Parade.”)
Nicole from Australia asks:
I’m really not very religious, but I find myself gravitating towards writing about religion and spirituality.  Can I ask how religious you are, and how you think it affects your work?
JRB responds:
I’m not very religious, and I’m actually more and more of the mindset that organized religion has done far more harm than good in the world, but I do have specific spiritual beliefs that determine how I behave, how I respond to people, how I function in the universe.  The rituals of organized religion have always seemed very theatrical to me, and I think I gravitated toward those rituals in my early work because they helped provide a clear context for songs that otherwise didn’t have a grounding, but perversely I feel that some of those songs have transcended their cynical (or at least arbitrary) origins and come to have a certain spiritual strength of their own.  I wrote “Christmas Lullaby” because someone asked me to write a song for a Christmas concert and I thought it would be a good idea to get on that program, but when I hear that song now, it has a power and a directness that I don’t remember imposing on it and that doesn’t actually reflect me or my life at that time or even now.  It’s as though I didn’t write it.  That sounds completely bogus, I know, that whole “Oh, I just channeled it from the universe” or whatever, but I have to say that in the case of that song and a couple of others over the years, I don’t remember having much control over their creation, I was just open to what they needed to be at that moment.  This all sounds highly metaphysical, you’re all going to think I’m crazy now.
Rick Rea writes:
1) Where can I learn about song structure?  Do you reccomend any books or websites? As an aspiring composer/lyricist, I realize that structure will be one of the most important things to learn and I want to find all that I can on the subject.
2) It seems that most music programs in the country emphasize classical piano.  While I absolutely love classical, my passion is to play jazz, funk, and rock.  From schools that you’ve worked with (Eastman, USC, etc.) and schools that you know of, do you recommend any programs that would emphasize these styles?
JRB responds:
1. While there are probably some textbooks that can guide you in the vagaries of structure, I really recommend a course of study with Professors Gershwin, Kern, Porter and Berlin.  Get the standards under your fingers, you’ll see fairly quickly that there are a very few fairly simple templates upon which almost every song is drafted.  My wife recommended picking up Robert Kimball’s books of the complete lyrics of  Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin and Frank Loesser, and that sounds like very good advice.
2. I’m not really an expert, since my collegiate experience was brief and unhappy.  Everyone would of course mention Berklee in Boston, and they certainly do have a very focussed and thorough program in contemporary pop music, but that’s by no means the only option.  There are several schools that offer a jazz performance major, most of which will also give you experience in pop and rock styles; offhand I can think of Miami and Oberlin, but I think there are probably a great many.  Let’s toss this to the readers: anybody got any suggestions for Rick?
Leisha Anderegg writes:
My daughter has done a lot of regional theatre in the Bay Area and is interested in auditioning for the upcoming LA production of “13.” We recently moved to L.A. and I am not familiar with how some of the theaters conduct auditions.  How are auditions being handled for this production?
and Palmdalefun (really!) writes:
Was wondering if there will be auditions for your new show “13” coming up and if so, where will they be held?
JRB responds:
I tell you what, when I know about auditions, I’ll post that information on this site.  At the moment, I don’t know anything.  Center Theater Group uses an in-house casting director, but they’re in the process of hiring a new person for that position at the moment, so I can’t offer you any information. I hope it’s soon because it’s a hard show to cast and we could use all the time we can get!
Dustin Mitchell writes:
Our school is performing your wonderful musical “Songs For A New World,” and I was wondering what is the theme behind the show.  What was your real motivation to create such a masterpiece?
JRB responds:
My real motivation was to write a show that wouldn’t cost a whole lot of money to produce!  I just wanted to get a show on stage in New York!  But that doesn’t help you out much, I guess.  I’ve said this before, but I think “Songs for a New World” is about community; it’s about our collective need to join together and to overcome our million individual resistances to opening our hearts and souls to each other.  That sounds kind of Pollyanna, but I do think that’s what I had to say with that show.
And finally, Steve Parker wants to know:
Is there any news on The Last Five Years in London? Is it still scheduled for July?
JRB responds:
I deliberately picked this question for last, and I was going to have a whole lot of exciting news to share with you all about the London production of “The Last Five Years,” but in the last forty-eight hours, things got completely fucked up and now I don’t know what’s happening.  So keep checking in; as soon as I know anything, I’ll post it here.
More anon!

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ASK JRB ABOUT THE TONYS! (AND OTHER THINGS)

Posted on June 11, 2006 at 9:29 pm

I have, in my time, been somewhat controversial (by the fairly boring standards of Broadway composers), and so I knew trouble was in the air when Melinda Saber asked:
What do you think of this year’s Tony noms?
but I did watch the show tonight, and I did say I would try to answer whatever you all asked, so rather than just doing my usual pontificating (since I always manage to offend someone I like when I do that), I decided I would respond by making three observations:
1) The awards are set up in such a way that a lot of mediocre work has to be nominated, and that seems like a shame to me; I don’t think we’re really putting the best possible face on what professional theater can be.  The obvious response is that if the mediocre material weren’t nominated, there wouldn’t be any competition in a lot of categories.  Aha.
2) All the advertising on the show tonight was for luxury goods or prescription drugs – the presumption being that the audience for the Tony Awards is an older, wealthier crowd.  I guess I could be wrong, but the sense I get these days is that those old, wealthy people are no longer the interesting audience; this show should be geared towards teenagers.  There are plenty of people in this world who watch a lot of television and would be excited to watch a t.v. show with Michael Cerveris and “The Wedding Singer” and Sutton Foster, and those people are sixteen years old, their parents have plenty of money, and they watch the Tony Awards and get really excited that Rebecca Luker is kissing Danny Burstein.  None of the advertisers targeted that group, and I think that’s a mistake, and it tells you a lot about what CBS thinks of the Broadway audience.  The folks that made “Wicked” a hit were not represented at all on the Tony Awards, and I bet they’re a little confused and pissed off about that.
3) They spend a lot of money putting this thing up at Radio City Music Hall, and they do a whole bunch of advertising and publicity, and all these plays and musicals say their lives depend on looking good on television.  So the question is: why is the Tony Awards telecast always such an embarrassing, cringe-inducing, amateurish, apologetic, under-rehearsed, ill-conceived, boring use of three extremely expensive hours of network television?   Nobody had a better idea to start the show than letting Harry Connick Jr. sing a lounge-act medley while SIXTY people stood behind him trying not to look uncomfortable?  Hal Prince has been involved in more than fifty Broadway productions, and the best tribute was to put a bunch of gypsies in old costumes while Howard McGillin sang for seventeen seconds?  Are you fucking kidding me?  
And that, my friends, is all I have to say about the Tonys this year.
(Well, I have one uncynical addition: I have a lot of friends and colleagues who won or were nominated this year, and it was really lovely to see them get their due, all of my carping above notwithstanding. So many of the people who were nominated are unbelievably talented creative artists, and it’s deeply gratifying to be able to watch them be acknowledged, even if it’s just a four-second shot of them in their chairs.)
Bryan Bird asks:
My question is this: is there something special or inherently musical about the key of B that draws so many Broadway composers to it? You seem to enjoy it as well, even if only for a few measures (e.g. Big News, Summer in Ohio). Is there some basis in music theory for why composers — it seems Broadway composers in particular — gravitate toward B (not to mention C-sharp, G-flat, and other fun keys)?
Or is this giant conspiracy all in my head and I only notice it because the five sharps present more of a challenge when playing the piano? Curse me and my classical training!
JRB responds:
I don’t want to say you’re out of your mind, but there are only three songs in my entire canon that are in the key of B: “Just One Step”, “Goodbye Until Tomorrow” and “Music of Heaven.”  (“Summer in Ohio” was in B in Chicago, but the published score is in Bb.)  I move through a lot of keys in the course of any given song, but as a central tonality, I’m much more drawn to G or C than to B.  (I used to be an E-flat man, but I seem to have let that go over the years.)  There’s a certain amount of G-flat, I guess, especially in “Parade,” but I really don’t think I deliberately gravitate towards keys with a lot of accidentals.  Now, that Sondheim guy, HE likes keys with a lot of flats and sharps.  Not me.  Almost the entire score of “The Last Five Years” is in A, mostly because I knew it was a guitar-heavy score.  But honestly, I generally pick keys by looking at the vocal range – guys have comfortable top notes around F or G, belter girls live around C or D and sopranos are happy on E’s and F’s, so depending on what scale degree that high note comes in on in the song, I’ll base the key around that.
Duane Morrison asks:
Basically just asking if you’re going to be playing any other dates in NYC or that neck of the woods between the 15th and July 1. Don’t know my chances but can’t not ask…
JRB responds:
I don’t think so, I’m pretty much holed up in rehearsal and tech until August.
Ryan Touhey asks:
I’ve noticed in all your works you seem to love dissonance and in Parade especially there are those sequences where there are overlapping themes and melodies that are revisited throughout the show.  For example, at the end of “Come Up To My Office” where Leo’s part of the sequence is ending and the factory girls are coming back in with their earlier theme creates immense dissonance. Why did you use this method of overlap between two contrasting musical sections and what is it about dissonance that turns you on?
JRB responds:
Dissonance has many flavors and colors, and some dissonances are more aggressive than others.  Some dissonances are tonal, concerning themselves with pitch, and some are rhythmic.  I like the whole spectrum of dissonance, and every other composer with ears has a reasonable tolerance for a varying amount of dissonance except for hacks who are trying to impress Celine Dion.  (Even someone as pop-oriented as Frank Wildhorn wouldn’t write a song with no dissonance, since a suspended chord is a dissonance.)  I also happen to like consonance.  I think a better way to consider this is to use a different word: conflict.  All theater is about conflict, unless it’s very boring theater, and I am a theatrical composer, so sometimes I like the music to reflect the conflicts that are happening on stage.  Certainly in “Come Up To My Office,” there is a conflict between what the girls are saying and what Leo actually did, and it seemed like a natural illustration of that conflict to have the music crash into itself (the dissonances here are primarily rhythmic), much as the music crashes around throughout the show to illustrate the conflicts between ways of life, systems of belief, truth and myth.
Joey Lieber asks:
The question is, which is better to start with when composing, music, or lyrics?  Does it depend on the situation / whichever inspires you at the time?  And once you decide, how do you feel about fitting them together / making words line up with rhythms, putting rhymes in strategic places, etc. etc.?
JRB responds:
Every songwriter gets this question all the time.  Here’s an idea for a book proposal for one of you enterprising young authors out there: “Which Comes First?: Songwriters Talk About How They Work.”  Don’t expect a big advance, but I bet Applause Books would take you up on it.  Anyway, Joey, while I’m sure I’ve answered this on this site somewhere, the answer is that for me the situation comes first every time.  There must be story.  And from there, sometimes I’ll come up with a title, and I’ll let that lead me to a musical style, and then everything starts piling up until there’s a song.  But it doesn’t always work that way, sometimes I surprise myself by writing an entire melody before I even know what the song is about (“Nobody Needs To Know” happened that way).  The rest of your question is all about technique, which is a much longer answer than I can really give right now…
Alisa Ledyard asks:
I mean really… you write the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard…. one of them being “In This Room” (which I heard on your weblog). Any chance you’re going to release the sheet music to this? Or, you know, just send me a copy? 🙂  I realize this is a really special song to you, since you said you used it at your wedding, so I completely understand if you want to keep it somewhat private, but I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since I first heard it and I would really like to sing it with my friend next year.
JRB responds:
I’m sure if the demand is there, we’ll release the sheet music eventually, but the doors are not being blown open yet.  Keep your eye on this site over the next couple of years, we’ll see how things go in the music publishing department.
James Dummer asks:
A great big thank you for the new vocal selections. It’s brilliant to see a lot of new material available and not a rehash of what’s already available in your vocal selections. I love ‘Someone To Fall Back On’. A lot of the new material has bass parts written an octave lower, how close are the piano arrangements to what you play and how much influence do you have over the arrangements?
JRB responds:
I have a lot of influence over the arrangements since I wrote them.  I don’t know about putting anything deliberately an octave lower, it just might be that on the day I wrote that arrangement, that’s where I heard it.  I can be very meticulous about my piano parts, but I can also be very loose.  The arrangement I’m most disappointed in is “Nothing In Common,” which is close enough, I guess, but not as interesting or as colorful as what I played at the session.  But I’m very proud of “If I Told You Now,” even though it’s a lot different than the version on Lauren’s album.  Basically, the stuff from the shows is more precise than the stuff from the solo albums, and that’s because other people have had to play the songs from the shows and I’ve gotten to hear it in their hands and make adjustments based on that, whereas the solo songs have really only ever been played by me, so I don’t have a lot of outside perspective on them.
Heather Moss asks:
I am a very big fan of your work and have always wondered if you write pieces for performers who come to you for material. I know that you can commission works from different composers for events and charities and some will just write you a song that fits you for cabaret purposes for a certain dollar amount. I have always been interested in putting together a cabaret of more obscure works from shows that didn’t necessarily get the exposure they deserved, but it would also be wonderful to have a song that was mine. So I guess my question is: is this something you do or no, and if not are you familiar with other good writers who do?
JRB responds:
I think it’s a great idea for all solo performers to have songs that they can call their own, either because they commissioned them or they just found something no one else had found before.  But commissioning me is complicated: first of all, I’m so busy right now that I couldn’t fit in one more song if my mother needed it (all right, for my mother, I would do it); second of all, unless I was an enormous believer in your talent (and I don’t know you at all, obviously), the only reason for me to write a song for you is because it would make me a lot of money, and since you’re not a world-famous artist, the song probably isn’t going to become a big hit single or show up in the end credits of a movie, so now I’m writing a song that only you can sing that proportionately not many people will hear – that’s gonna cost you an awesome amount of money.  Buried in that sentence there is the main point: if I really think you’re astonishing and I feel like I have something amazing to contribute to what you do, then you don’t have to ask me twice, I’ll have the song written before the week is out, and you won’t have to pay me, I’ll be hiding in your closet begging you to sing it.  And I think that’s true of any composer you’d want to commission; we write our best work when we believe in what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with.  So stick around, stay out there, and when you get the opportunity to meet the composers whose work you love, hopefully you’ll be able to inspire them in return. Good luck!
Chelsea Leibow asks:
I’m a 16 year-old who’s hopefully going to be auditioning for “13” in July. I was just wondering, is there any way to get/listen to the music from the show before I audition? I want to be as prepared as possible and I’ve done some research to try to find it, so far no luck. Also is there a complete characters list anywhere? I’d like to know what types of roles are available. Thanks and I hope to see you soon! 🙂
JRB responds:
As soon as I know what’s going on with auditions, I promise I’ll post something here!
Anushka Wikramanayake (now THAT is a name) asks:
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to know if you ever watch any performances of ‘The Last Five Years’ that are performed by theatre groups and schools.
JRB responds:
I’ve seen three productions of “The Last Five Years” other than the original, and I generally enjoy myself, but it’s not something I want to do very often; it’s a very painful show personally for me to sit through, and ironically, the better the production, the worse the experience.  But I do keep tabs on those productions and I collect reviews from all over the world, so I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on with my show.  I used to go see a lot of productions of “Songs for a New World,” and it was a blast seeing what people came up with, but being as busy as I am now (and having an eight-month-old daughter!), it takes a lot to get me on an airplane.
All right, let’s see how much trouble I get in now.  Off to bed, I’ve got to be at Birdland at 7 pm tonight with Missy Errico, which is very exciting but I’m completely unprepared. Catch you guys later this week!  And thanks again for the great questions!

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ASK ABOUT THE WONDER PETS ETC!

Posted on June 25, 2006 at 7:41 pm

Okay, this officially counts as playing hooky.  I’ve got a song to write for the State Farm show, four vocal arrangements to finish, orchestrations to sketch, a synopsis for another project I’m working on, a new scene for “13” to write, and I’m going to London in a week to work with the “Last Five Years” actors for a couple of days, so I really shouldn’t be taking the time out to do this, but, well… this is so much easier than doing any of those things.
Mark Falconer asks:
First of all, I love your music, but I think I might love reading your Q&As even more. Reading these posts really makes me feel like I’m eating lunch with you and asking everything I’ve ever wanted to ask a Broadway composer.
So here’s my question: you wrote some music for the Nick Jr. animated series Wonder Pets, right? What was that like – adapting your work for very young children, first of all; adapting it into the kind of operetta where the music at points seems to comment on the action, secondly (or did you just create mini-songs and arrangers added those comments based on your themes?); and adapting it to television, lastly? What would you say to an offer of a tv series, akin to something like “Cop Rock”?
JRB responds:
Lots of questions here.  I was just having dinner with, among other people, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who told me he loved the Unicorn episode, which made me very happy.  The show’s done very well, it’s the number one show on Nickelodeon and they just got picked up for a second season.  I probably won’t do any more episodes, though; I’m extremely busy these days, the pay was pretty lousy and I had a rough time dealing with one of the people on the creative staff.  But I love the show, I really do, and I’m very proud of having been a part of it.  I have to take this moment to credit Larry Hochman, who is not being acknowledged enough in the Nickelodeon publicity – he wrote the major themes (as well as several of the best episodes), he set the palette for the whole show, he truly did a remarkable job laying out the template for what the show should be, and the success of “Wonder Pets” is in no small part due to Larry’s work.
I don’t have a lot of trouble adapting my work to different audiences, I enjoy the technical aspect of figuring out exactly what I can and can’t get away with; I generally assume (to my occasional detriment) that people’s ears are more sophisticated than is acknowledged, so I really didn’t “write down” for the Wonder Pets episode (or for “13”, for that matter), I just had to deal with the technical limitations of the performers (and since Wonder Pets is obviously all recorded, they can fudge some things that could never be pulled off live).
The way Wonder Pets worked was that I was given a finished script, including the song lyrics, and told to go off and write the whole episode around it, knowing that the first and last section of the show would be Larry’s music (the beginning and end of every episode are the same from show to show).  The show had to be exactly thirteen minutes long, so I was given timings for pretty much every section of the script.  One of the weirder aspects of the writing is that every episode is apparently done at the exact same tempo, something like Quarter note=120, though I don’t think that was it.  So if I wanted to do any tempo changes or ritards or accelerandi, I had to do the math to figure out how to keep the quarter note consistent.  I’m sure there’s some good technical reason why they did it like that, but it made me crazy.
Anyway, I wrote out a full draft of the piano/vocal score (I remember doing this over two days in the middle of winter while I was in Youngstown, Ohio, because I was there conducting for John Pizzarelli), then I went down to the little studio that they had built at the production house and made a demo with me playing a MIDI piano and singing all the parts (don’t you wish you could hear that?).  Then I presented it and got a series of notes from the writers and producers, which I implemented for a second draft.  I then got more notes, but I had to move on because I was in the middle of another project, so there are about fifteen bars of music which Jeffrey Lesser (the music production supervisor) basically had to write himself.
They used the MIDI demo I had made to teach the singers (three adorable little girls), and meanwhile the animators got to work using the demo as a guide.  Finally, once the animation was finished, the episode went to the orchestrators (who I never met or worked with, though I think they did a great job) and finally the finished orchestra track was laid over the pre-existing vocals.  (The orchestra, by the way, is twelve real live musicians and then a bunch of MIDI tracks supplementing them.)
One of the bummers about my particular episode is there’s not a lot of singing.  The script was done before I got on board, so I didn’t get to say “Hey, I’d rather have more songs for the Wonder Pets,” but I wish I could have done more with that.  I saw one of Michael John’s episodes (“Save The Pigeon,” I think it was) and he got to write a lot more vocal stuff, whereas I feel like my episode is almost entirely underscore.  Oh well.  Like I said, I’m very proud of what I was able to do, I think the episode is a blast, and I’m really thrilled that the show is such a success.  I haven’t often gotten to be associated with a hit, it’s a nice feeling, even if my involvement is somewhat peripheral.
I did try to get a weekly musical sitcom off the ground a couple of years ago, but it never got anywhere.  Now that “High School Musical” is such a hit, I hope the executive I pitched it to feels stupid.
Scott Douglas asks:
In “King of the World”, there are two passages with a repeated pattern of 5 sixteenth notes- obviously, the beats don’t really line up with the same note each time.  Do you have any tips or tricks for a not-as-good-as-you pianist to really nail this without getting lost and playing a mishmash of notes?  I’m assuming that accuracy is important to you in these two sections.
JRB responds:
I wish I could tell you some shortcut, but the truth is I’ve been practicing phasings since I was fourteen years old – playing over the bar line is one of my favorite tricks as a pianist, and it can really mess with your head if you aren’t used to doing it.  The good news is that it will help you immensely with your sense of time and groove once you get comfortable with it.  The bad news?  Slow way down and work with that metronome.  Work with the click until you’re sick.  I’ve always thought I should write a manual for playing my music, teaching impressionable youth all the stupid bad technique things that I do that make regular pianists loathe my music so much.  I have a really funny name for it, but I’ve been forbidden to tell you what it is.
Sarah Davis asks:

There are dozens of internet messageboards that are focused on Broadway. On the whole, I generally despise these boards (one in particular), because I feel they completely destroy the treasure of theatre, creating tension and gossip and rumors that are absolutely unnecessary, not to mention that the most common users tend to be “Wicked”-frenzied preteens who are teeming with dreams of being the next Idina Menzel. I’ve heard stories that you occasionally will read through and give your two cents on certain topics being discussed – is this true? What are YOUR thoughts on the web influence of theatre? I ask because The Last Five Years is one of those “phenomenon” musicals that tends to be brought up time and again in these threads.
JRB responds:
I don’t get as emotional about it as you do.  I do read the message boards, as does every single theatrical professional I know except for maybe Hal Prince, and I basically think they’re kind of ridiculous but fun and they give people who really do love theater a chance to belong to something even when that thing they love is so marginalized in the culture at large.  I remember Lynn Ahrens saying that “Seussical” flopped because of the people reviewing it on the Internet during tryouts and previews, but I just don’t buy it.  Even when the producer comes running into the rehearsal room waving a post from some putz or other and telling us we “have to change the ending!” or whatever, the artists in the room all know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.  There’s a saying that we invoke, which is that no one in the audience knows anything individually, but the audience knows everything collectively.  If we hear the same comment over and over again, or a certain joke never gets a laugh, then that’s when we consider changing it.  If a bitchy old queen on “All That Chat” says he hates something, I can tell you honestly that no one in the rehearsal room takes that seriously at all.  And you’re right, I do occasionally chime in, particularly if there’s some thread going around that’s completely inaccurate or offensive, but most of the time, even if I see a thread with my name on it, I just let the fans have their fun without barging in.
And finally, Mike Betteridge comes back with another question:

I was wondering about why and how you got into music.  Did you come from a musical family?  Or did it just happen?  I’m asking because I come from a musicless family, we just had an old crappy piano lying around and I started thumping it aged 3 and from there sparked my musical journey.  Do you think it makes a difference whether your parents are musical or not?
JRB responds:
If it made a difference whether or not my parents were musical, then I wouldn’t be a musician.  My mother doesn’t really listen to much music at all, and while she’ll occasionally sing along to the radio, it’s not necessarily on pitch; and my Dad is a big fan of music who listens to a lot of different things, but he’ll be the first to tell you he never had any real musical talent.  (He did play the comb-and-tissue-paper sometimes when I was a kid while I would accompany him on the piano.)  And my brother did everything short of setting the piano on fire to stop me from playing.  Maybe there’s a gene for musical talent, maybe there’s not, but I was always encouraged in my family to explore whatever excited me intellectually, and I think that counts for more than anything else.
I have to go find some other ways to procrastinate.  If I’m not back soon, it’s because my producers actually read this and made me go back to work.
J.

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ASK JRB WHY HE DOESN’T ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS

Posted on August 23, 2006 at 11:13 pm

The title of this blog entry is sadly apropos.  I’m way overdue for one of these columns, and even this one will be pathetically truncated, but it’s all I have time for!  Sorry!
Anyway, here goes nothin’. Dayeanne Hutton writes:
I’m looking forward to auditioning for your new musical “13” and I was wondering what rock songs would be appropriate for teenagers. I really want to be prepared but I’m not very familar with a lot of rock music, yes, I am a musical theatre buff, guilty.
JRB says:
It depends on which part you’re auditioning for, to be honest, but a good rule of thumb is to look for the artists who can really sing. The danger with asking most coaches for rock material is that they don’t have any better reference point than you do; most theater voice coaches are “musical theatre buffs”, as you say. (I call them “show tune queens.”) But the point is, there are a lot of contemporary pop and rock singers who really do have voices and they have producers who pick songs that show those voices off. Kelly Clarkson, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Carrie Underwood, Sheryl Crow, Jason Mraz, Edwin McCain, Gavin DeGraw, John Mayer, Paris Hilton, the list goes on and on, please anyone who’s got suggestions put ’em in the comments box. Certainly not all of the songs from all of those artists are good for auditions, but just pick someone and start singing along, find the things you enjoy singing, THEN get to a coach and make a good audition cut out of it.
I’m kidding about Paris Hilton. Please tell me you knew that.
Meredith McCall asks:
I am a actress/singer in Austin, Texas and I am scheduled to record an independent cd in September. I am very interested in recording “Stars and The Moon” from Songs For A New World. I am finding it very difficult to determine whom to contact about obtaining the mechanical rights for this song. I am hoping that you may be able to assist me. Any information you could provide would be appreciated. I plan to do a small pressing of 500 cds.
JRB saith:
I’m amazed I haven’t put the answer to this one up on the website at some point, but I haven’t. Meredith, I’m so thrilled you want to record my song. My stuff isn’t registered with Harry Fox, so the way to get a mechanical license to record my songs is to write a request with the name of the song, the producing entity (which in this case is probably you), and the number of copies you plan to press, and then fax that request for a license to Mark Sendroff at 212 840-6401. You can also e-mail him at MSendroff@sendroffbaruch.com. He has a crack staff (or a staff on crack) that will deal with this quickly for you. And thanks for wanting to put my song on your album!
Brian Falgoust wants to know:
“Dreaming Wide Awake” is one of my favorite music and vocal arrangements ever. And I can’t help but think, when I listen to it, that there is a much deeper meaning that I can’t grasp. That there is actually deep sadness behind the seemingly uplifting lyrics.
My friend and I were discussing the meaning of the song one day, and she had mentioned that it could possibly be about a woman who is in a bad relationship, where there may be abuse, rape, anger, and she is dreaming and waiting for the day when she can be free from all of that pain.
Maybe I’m just looking into it way too much, but I really would like the know what you were thinking when you wrote the song.
To which JRB has this to say:
Hmm. Nope, that’s not where I was going with it, but I guess if that works for you then more power to you. The real story is this: I had, for a time, considered writing a musical about a group of young German university students who formed a resistance network during the last days of World War II, and this song was to be sung by the girl in the group as she watches the leader conduct a meeting. So she’s a young woman, 17 or 18, and she’s stepping into an emotional and political landslide, and she’s thrilled and excited and terrified, and that’s where the song came from.
Oh, I’m done. Yikes, it’s such a lame entry, sorry, I’ll get back to writing these soon, I promise. Meanwhile, wish us luck: we start “13” auditions on Friday. Oh my God