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Why Musical Theatre? 

Why is the new album, The End Of It All, a musical?  f you know my songwriting, you’ll know that I haven’t done storytelling, focusing more on lyric, memoir, or social commentary. (Links to albums in the comments)

For example, my first album of original music, Unspoken (2023), eight of the ten songs come from a lyrical poetry tradition, meaning they capture emotional responses to events from my past, and recall events as disparate as rejection, emotional distance, the deaths of friends, and depression. I found the emotions from those memories to come easily once I began putting in the work to reflect on those moments. It was quite cathartic as I began finding words and musical themes to express those memories, along with my decades-long perspective on looking back on the events and the emotional maturity to process them.

After this catharsis, I found most of my subject matter for my second album, Fools (2024) in social commentary. I looked at various types of fools and foolish behavior, some still coming from my past experiences, but many from current experiences as a professor, university administrator, and officer in a tech start-up – all within the bizarre era in which we live. All but one of the tracks deals with current attitudes and people, “Cliché” about jargon, “Peter” about institutional incompetence, “Stigma” about the perpetually aggrieved, “Free” about the know-nothings shouting so loudly these days, “Easy” about simply withdrawing from current events. The second track, “The Jilted Lover Responds,” takes a different approach, giving voice and perspective of the jilted lover in pop music, specifically “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day,” “Angie,” and “Free Bird.” She kicks out the guy as soon as he says it's over, rather than giving him the space to try to soothe things over.

My third album, Transit (2025), feels like a memoir in that nearly every song is personal. Some recall my youth (“Swimming Hole”), some current struggles and joys (“Drifting” and “Attitude”), and many with identity (“Dusty Rainbow,” “Second Skin,” “Chimera,” and “Mirror World”). Only “Country” deals with current events as I compare the so-called country values I was raised with to today’s propaganda around country values. I think my songwriting and production is pretty solid, building on the lessons from my previous recordings.

I began working on this current musical in 2023 as the second project to tell stories in musical theatre form (I’m still working on the other one, called All the Secrets In The World, which I’ve been working on for quite a while). The End Of It All emerged from our current partisan divide of echo chambers and polarization in the world. I was very much inspired by stories you’ve probably all seen about someone spending time with someone in another camp, and they eventually come to respect each other. I’m thinking, for example, of Daryl Davis, an African-American man who set out to befriend Klansmen, or of the “Contact Hypothesis,” which holds that you can hate/fear a category of people, but after you get to know something like three of them, your bias either falls apart or is greatly mitigated. I initially wanted to put a Red American and a Blue American into an elevator or other trapped space and see what they say to each other. But I realized pretty early in the process that we’d just have back-and-forth accusations, and that it might be good to have a third person trapped. So I created a world where three radically different people (Red, Azula, and Lennie) must interact for their common good, and I destroyed the world in order to destroy tribes and affiliations, forcing them to simply engage with each other as people.

Red started out in my mind as a MAGA stereotype, but as I began giving him words to sing, he quickly evolved into a competent, conservative, annoying middle-aged guy. Azula started out in my mind as what many right-wingers might call a Lib-Tard (meaning, I guess, an automatic leftist response to any issue), but I found she evolved quickly into an independent, caring, family-oriented protagonist. Zeleny (Lennie) started out as a naïve earth-first advocate, completely detached from practical concerns, but I found his thoughtfulness and intellect comforting and useful to keep the story from being about Red-Blue politics. Lennie helps triangulate tension, so that you might have a Lennie-Azula alliance around one topic, but a Red-Azula alliance around another topic, and a Lennie-Red alliance on yet a third topic.

I made the decision early on that the songs of the musical, comprising the current album soundtrack, should deal mostly with emotional moments and thoughts, as well as character development. Plot would be dealt with mostly in dialog in between songs. And I think I held mostly to that aesthetic with a couple of exceptions. Notably, the first song “No Escape” sets the stage, and “Discovery” (21st track) narrates the plot in real time. Otherwise, most tracks lay out ideological differences between characters, arguments about how the world came to this awful place, accusations about who/what is to blame, and debates about what should be done about it.

It’s a lot harder to write this story than to put a single thought into a single song, and you can be the judge of whether any of this makes sense. I’m finishing the libretto currently, and hope to actually put singers/actors into this project and see what it looks/sounds like as a staged production. Being sparse, it will probably feel more like Beckett than a Broadway musical. But that’s ok, as it’s a story about people’s attitudes with each other rather than something external. I’ll keep you posted, and will share the libretto when it’s finished.

Composition Process 

I thought I might share a few thoughts about composing.  I write songs a lot like I write prose, namely, that I start very loosely and keep iterating/revising until we reach a finished stage. What that means for prose might be an outline or a quick free write or some bibliographic notes and so on. For music, this often means just singing a song in the car or sitting down with my phone microphone with a guitar. Just playing around with some sounds or maybe a few words.  As soon as I no longer have a blank piece of paper, or a blank recording, then I can go back and listen to it and think is this too fast too slow? Do I like the key?  Where do these words take me? etc.
 
Sometimes this iterative process focuses on the words. I know the first line or two, or maybe I sang nonsense first line or two around the house, and liked it, and decided to continue with that thought. Other times the iteration takes a musical form, sometimes with the bass, sometimes with a guitar, and sometimes with a piano.  
 
If you compose anything, art, prose, poetry, or music, you need to have toys lying around. And by toys I mean tools that you can use quickly with no commitment to play around with an idea. So if you're a writer, you should have a notepad and a pencil or a voice recording app on your phone all the time so that when an idea hits you, you get it down as fast as possible. If you're a music composer, spend time sitting at the piano bench playing chords, scales, nonsense. The same thing goes for bass or guitar.  One thing I've learned over the course of my life, whether it be prose or music, is that these things don't write themselves. You have to spend time on the paper or the keyboard or the fretboard or in your head or in your voice, playing with what you want to write and putting in the time to actually write it, and then putting in much longer time to revise it until it is in the form that achieved your goal.
 
And that goal can be as widely varied as human experience. Your goal might be pure emotion, or a rhythm for dance, or a story, or a genre (like punk or folk or rock and roll), or a modality like minor key versus major key, or even simply a sonic experience for the listener.  For me, the composing process is absolutely linked to that goal. They cannot be separated. And it's okay if you don't know the goal initially. For me the goal may be one thing one week. But after some composition I realized the goal is something else. That goal gives me guidance as to how many instruments to lay on top of each other, or whether the song should have a certain rhyme scheme. 
 
For example, on my song "Country," I wanted the music to express a simplicity in the same way the words expressed simplicity, so I knew I didn't want a lot of instruments or percussion. Percussion rather I wanted one guitar playing folk and one voice and in that way I wanted the music to reinforce the feeling of the lyrics.  Conversely, on my song "Seventh Circle," I wanted layer upon layer of complexity and dissonance to reinforce the tension and the struggle that the lyrics were recounting. 
 
So I guess what I am saying is that I know the composition is finished when, holistically, the poetry and the rhyme makes sense with the genre and the complexity of the music.  

 

Inspiration (Unspoken) 

The first spark of creativity on any piece is sometimes a product of hard work, and sometimes a flash of inspiration.  I'm going to try to remember the first spark of composition for as many songs as I can think of. 
 
"Hip" started as an image of a hipster, probably in Brooklyn wearing a fedora and a handlebar mustache. Walking down the street confidently, in the style of the Bee gees in staying alive or of The verve guy and bittersweet memory or of U2 walking down the streets of Reno and wondering what he would say that image guided my composition process.
 
“Let You Down” was a snippet of a nonsense song I was singing as I was getting ready for bed.  I belted out "Looks like I let you down," and added "again," and realized that had a story behind it.  I ran to my notebook and wrote it down.
 
“Direction” started as a modality exercise that took a 6/8 song I had written as ambient music for a video, and converted to 4/4 with a back beat.
 
“Signal” came from testing out a Zoom recorder, and I wanted to test its onboard multi tracking capabilities.  I just sang the first line, then played around.  I then realized it wasn't about where someone was physically, but emotionally. 
 
"Hazy' was a doodle from many years ago.  It always felt like a memory of something, so when I began tinkering with it, I just played with what memories had been lurking without expression. 
 
'Make it Better" started with the line I don't know how to make it better.  After some work, I switched perspective from the fixer to the one being talked to.  I've always been accused of trying to fix things when I should just listen and empathize, so it was a really good exercise getting into the opposite perspective.
 
“Seventh Circle” started with a guitar riff, followed by all the looped, overlaid instruments.  Only after listening to it for quite a few months did I realize that the musical feeling was one of alarm, and the song wrote itself after that realization.
 
Both “Backroads Of My Mind” and “Halfway Home” were written when I was much younger.  Backroads was a poem that an ex sent me that I put to music, and Halfway was a song for a friend who was about to embark on a long student-exchange study-abroad.