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k-l · 6 years

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Two Strangers: Behind the Lyrics

I was probably 25.

I went to Brooklyn for a house party with my first pair of married friends. I had this infuriating crush on the guy who was having the party and took the epic train ride from Washington Heights. He was as baffling as ever that night.

I once read that you’re never confused when someone likes you. You’re confused when someone doesn’t, and you use that confusion to allow yourself to get invested in relationships that have no shot. I think that’s true. But that confusion is so romantic, isn’t it? My friends were going to a second house party and I decided to crash it with them.

It was one of those warm spring nights. People were sitting out on the stoop. I remember because they got ticketed for drinking beers. And that night, I met this beguilingly smart boy. His reputation preceded him. We had several mutual friends - as is often the case in this tiny terrible theater world. He lived in one of those old Brooklyn brownstones with maybe four guys, which made it feel more like a frat (or at least a Columbia frat) than the beautiful homes I’d stare into the windows of when I moved to Brooklyn years later. The kitchen had more beer than food, the yard had a weird assortment of street curb furniture, and unlike every other party I’d ever been to in New York City, there was an entire first floor with no bedrooms.

I don’t remember how or why we ended up exchanging info. I might have been more entranced with him than he was with me. I should ask him; we’re still friends.

More than anything though, I see now that we were deeply wrong for each other. And that’s the genesis of “Two Strangers”. Typically (you know me), he’s a writer. A very good one.

Somewhere in a quiet little nook of this city, Slipping into something That’s a little less like a disguise. You are not alone here. Open up your eyes. We cannot sleep. We’ll just hold our breath tonight. Two strangers. Hope don’t matter. It don’t matter. Time will pulse on And tomorrow will come and go. Or at least I’ve been told so. Two strangers. Lost and lonely, Only nightcap strange strangers. Letting go of a dream, Waking up from a dream, Waking up from a half-remembered mid-November dream.

There’s a lot I don’t remember about the several months where we were in some kind of something. I don’t actually know how long it went on. Obviously something was still going on in November, but I think it was dying down then.

I don’t remember if I was dating other people. I’m sure I was for some of it. I remember there were a lot of emails back and forth before anything actually happened. I considered going back to my journal from the period but blanched at diving down that rabbit hole.

I know that while we were more or less together, I was mesmerized by the fact of our intellectual rigor. I was obsessed with what would be our downfall: we didn’t really talk. When you date someone who is incredibly adept at subtext - as he was - and you are able to speak that language too, you run the risk of never really saying anything you mean. I’m pretty confident that we understood each other, but we were too clever for our own good.

It was almost like we both had a shared fluent native language but we only spoke in our common second language for the challenge. All of the nuances, the subtexts from the translation back to our native language went unspoken, but they were there, layered into everything we said. It was exhilarating and exhausting.

And somewhere out in Brooklyn You’re alone and you’re drinking, Soaking up the feeling That you never felt nothing at all. Whiskey makes you brood, But that’s your kind of mood.

He wasn’t broody, exactly, but he did deflect emotion. He joked and the jokes were dark, like doubted the possibility of true connection, like this was as deep as it could get. It kept everything we might have been able to feel at bay. I was so intrigued and young and, frankly, emotionally distant myself that I tripped over my own feet to keep pace, and I mostly did. I think - looking back at this little piece of art that I made out of our beautiful mess - that I sometimes lapped us both in my imagination’s access to depth.

Oh, we cannot sleep. We’ll just hold our breath tonight. Two strangers. Hope don’t matter. It don’t matter. Time will pulse on And tomorrow will come and go. We’ll be trudging through the snow. Two strangers. Lost and lonely, Only nightcap strange strangers.

Letting go of a dream. Waking up from a dream.

Because what are we if not deeply lonely in our twenties? We’ve gained such freedom from the generations who precede us. We assert ourselves, we are sexually liberated, we find ourselves in our twenties rather than committing to any of the slew of disastrous relationships we entangle ourselves in. But finding yourself is a lonely process and along the way, sometimes you wish you could skip over that and actually just love someone. I don’t think there was a single moment in our entire short story where I didn’t both feel the that we could have fallen in love and know that we never would.

I wrote the chorus to this song first and I wrote it while we continued to see each other on a long ride from Brooklyn to Washington Heights one morning. The distance between us was as wide as our two cities in the same city, but there was something about this person standing across the gulf that felt so familiar. Too familiar. Someone needs to lay bare first. It wasn’t going to be me and it wasn’t going to be him.

La da da da da da. And then it’s over. Just another mistake done over. There’s no evidence here, No mark or picture frame Just a name In a cell phone, Stuck in my head, Smelling boy in my empty twin bed. Or maybe I’m just conjuring some romance I read.

As we move further into the song, we head further into the year in which it was written. The original relationship was probably gone by the time I wrote the lines above. I was thinking back not just on that relationship, but also probably about the boy who’s house party I went to, who didn’t disappear but surprised me by resurfacing a few times over the next years, also about a few other people who lingered, whose memory wouldn’t scrub away with last night’s mascara. Your twenties are long, y’all. And mostly, I didn’t take pictures of them and I certainly didn’t print any.

How many random cell phone numbers do you have in your phone? The little black book of days of yore is stored in the cloud now. It doesn’t get thrown away when you find yourself not needing it anymore.

This was not so magical. You didn’t impress me. Not at all. No.No. Not even a little bit. You were something I wanted to try, And we were happy, For a while.

Obviously, the above lines are about the way we protest too much, the way we diminish the feelings that we have at the moment when we have them. It’s embarrassing to revisit your mistakes. You feel young and foolish. You don’t believe in magic after all, right? But then there’s little sliver of you that - especially in the loneliness of the thereafter - remembers a feeling of happiness, of new beginnings.

The sense that maybe something would snowball out of nothing:

Just like in a dream one late night, Tumbling toward winter In a perfect autumn luminescent light, You held me tight. That was all I ever could have asked for.

And so this is a weird song structurally. It doesn’t telescope back. It telescopes forward. It doesn’t care about the beginning because there’s no mythology to chronicle. All it knows is where it’s headed, which is to say nowhere.

We’ll just hold our breath tonight. Two strangers. Two strangers. We cannot sleep. We’ll just hold our breath tonight. Two strangers. Hope don’t matter.

Does hope matter? Sometimes. Depends. When it comes to being held in the middle of the night, in the loneliness of your own thoughts, by someone who you know you’ll never love but you love the idea of loving? No, hope doesn’t matter. It’s not about tomorrow or yesterday. It’s about the holy here and now.

It don’t matter. It don’t matter. Oh, oh… Lost and lonely, Only nightcap strangers, Lost and lonely, Only nightcap strange strangers.

And so there are no words. There’s nothing left for you to say. You just need a lullaby in your head to put yourself to sleep tonight, and tomorrow you’ll face the hard reality of your impossibility.

La da da di da da. La da da di da da. La da da di da da da da da da da da da da…

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k-l · 7 years

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HOW TO RETURN HOME - The Millennial Problem

I really pushed myself into a corner this weekend when I promised a teacher that I’d write about “How to Return Home”. Most of you don’t know the history of this song, which is a pandora’s box.

I’ve long been planning to write a post about THE FRESHMAN EXPERIMENT. At the time of conception, this is how we defined it:

living musical [‘liv[ng] 'myü-zi-k&l]

a musical based on the lives of living people

a musical existing in real time

a musical created on the internet by the award-winning writing team Kerrigan and Lowdermilk based on the lives of two young bloggers as they share the story of their freshman years of college

I’ll leave it at that for now and come back to this in depth in another post.

ChristineCoke, the handle of one of the freshman writers, was an incredible voice. She wrote these earnest and beautiful posts that flowed into some of my favorite songs that we’ve ever written: Last Week’s Alcohol My Heart Is Split (and you guessed it) How to Return Home.

It’s funny how memory works. I had created a fiction about exactly what we got from ChristineCoke when she first wrote about going back to her home for Thanksgiving break, but I just went back to our website archive and found this (and everything else you’re about to dig into):

I pulled my luggage into a house that is exactly how I’d left it - dirty and empty with a silence that gently hummed in my ears. There was no one to greet me so I ran up the stairs calling out the names of my siblings and mothers. More silence and peeling wallpaper.

And this is how I wanted to return home. My barefeet sliding along the wood floors as my cat criss crosses her way through my legs. To sit on my bed and wrap myself up in the thin blanket that could barely warm me during the winter months. Slowly, I came back into a place that I hadn’t truly thought about until I was five minutes away.

Eventually my brothers and sisters came filtering in and our home had a pulse again. Then Mamajay came and I ran to her before she had time to open the door.

I had a three minute fight with my brother today. It feels great to be here.

A couple weeks after this first post, Brian posted this - with audio that I can’t find:

hey it’s brian. so i wrote this thing while i was home for thanksgiving and didn’t have a chance to post it until now. i played it for kait at some point and she was pretty underwhemed - possibly for good reason. the lyrics aren’t great, and they depart a lot from what CC was talking about. but this is emotionally what spoke to me, and i think the music might be interesting. (sidebar: lots of time kait and i start out with a song that i write music and lyrics to and then she swoops in and redoes the lyric) So these may be dummy lyric, and i may also just start from scratch musically on something else. Particularly because while I was home for t-giving my sister and i listened to a lot of dashboard confessional. so in addition to a) being a song fragment and b) not very good, this is also potentially c) a little too much like a dashboard song. wow. yea. but i definitely think there’s something to be done w/ the phrase “How To Return Home.” And this is certainly something…

“I’m pulling my luggage into a house that is dirty and empty A house that is just how I’d left it Dirty and empty and silent. A silence that’s gently humming in my ears. And I’m waiting for you to come rush down the stairs. I’m calling, I’m waiting, I’m watching the driveway. Hoping that something is still the same. I’m calling, I’m calling your name.

I guess I’m learning How long I’ve been gone I guess I’d forgotten I miss these walls Now I’m relearning everything All about silence And how to return home”

Brian says I was underwhelmed but it was a long time ago, so I don’t actually remember. Isn’t it weird to imagine the songs that never were? I bet that my response was more to the music than to the lyric. As he said, I often would change the lyrics anyway. I do remember both of us really struggling over how to use the hook. How do you put “how to return home” into a sentence. It sounds like a recipe title, not a song hook. I remember really arguing over how it could function in the song.

Anyway, the next significant step was Brian again and this wasn’t until February (so I bet we had some off-line conversations):

Okay, so here’s a new version of How To Return Home I’m trying, music first. There’s a PDF and a terrible scratch vocal of me singing. Not sure how much this will mean to anyone, but hopefully Kait will write some lyrics - and then the whole thing will mean a bit more!Happy February everybody…

He posted music that is EXACTLY the music that makes up the verse and chorus of the song now. That is magic to me. It’s one thing to piece together the perfect words, but to somehow knit together the language of a melody into something iconic and memorable - and in one go? How do you do that???

Then the writing started to pick up speed. A week later also in February I posted this:

Here are the lyrics to at least the first draft of the beginning of “How to Return Home”:

Your bare feet sliding on the old wooden floorboards, Home at last and silent but still you’re shaken, like walking into a museum, somehow out of time. It’s all the same except the girl in the hallway, Where she’s been and who she will ripen into, Your childhood’s on the other side of a gulf to damn wide to climb.

Take silent breath. Hold in the change. Tell yourself you still live here. It’s the only way you’ll get through this holiday. Count the hours. Pick some flowers. Make a nice bouquet.

Clearly, the dumby lyrics come at the end, but I’m still not sure about the entire chorus. I’m kind of thinking that it probably changes based on whatever happens at the end of the chorus. Plus, it has to work throughout the song, right Bri? This probably doesn’t change each time since it’s such a pop chorus. Perhaps 2 lines change - the “it’s the only way to get through…” which I would assume will change too. And I’m pretty sold that we want something more like “get through this day” with the three notes on day.

Anyway, this is where the song is at currently. Updates to arrive throughout the weekend. I think I’ll have the whole thing done by Sunday or Monday at the latest.

You guys, this is where you get to see our baby pictures - or my baby pictures. I vlogged this lyric in 2008, so quite literally ten years ago. Kudos for me for not giving a good goddamn about my hair or anything. This was before the days of vloggers really. We were early adopters to be sure and so I had little awareness of the idea that looking presentable might be, er, helpful to our cause.

youtube

Oh my god, did you watch it? Those pre-mac days were rough, let me tell you. We definitely hadn’t figured out how to use the hook yet. A week or two off-line, where we inevitably went back and forth on that hook (and the occasional pop-misaccent of “how to REturn home” which gave me agitas). But here comes another draft on March 1st in a post called “HOW TO REVISE”:

I feel pretty good about this one. I’m not going to sing it for you today - unless I miraculously learn how to play the guitar (doubtful). My changed lines are in italics.

Before you read on, I feel like I need to say something about perfect rhymes. I’ve been thinking about them a lot because this song both begs for them and also eschews them if they aren’t precisely what you mean. So I’ve definitely struck a bit of a deal with them - borrowing from pop, country, folk, and musical theater to figure out what to do where. But as I thought about these things and did my research, I’ve come to the conclusion that perfect rhymes are having a resurgence. Surprising, I know. Nothing ever seemed more lame or unlikely until lyrics became virtually unmemorizable and rap reclaimed rhyme’s significance. In addition to the rappers (too many to mention but Eminem and Blackalicious still being among some of my favorites for clever - without sacrificing meaning for the sake of - rhyme), the popularity of Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, and new to my itunes line up Vampire Weekend (thanks Rachel Lowdermilk!) all mark a significant upswing in real rhyming’s trendiness. Of course, none of these writers act like hall monitors on the subject. We musical theater writers still have that all to ourselves - remarkably we act like narcs about it whether pro or con.

Now, back to the previously scheduled reveal of new lyrics! I think this is really fun to sing Brian’s melody. We will, of course, test drive sometime this week.

How to Return Home

Your bare feet sliding on the old wooden floorboards, Home just as you left it but still you’re shaken, like walking into a museum somehow out of time. It’s all the same except the girl in the hallway, Where she’s been and who she will ripen into, Your childhood’s on the other side of a sprawling divide… too wide.

Take silent breath. Hold in the change. Tell yourself you still live here. Take your bags upstairs. It’s the only way you’ll get through today. Count the hours. Take a shower. Wash yourself away.

The house is pulsing with an alien heartbeat, Was it always here but you never listened? It’s calling you to be the girl that you were way back then… again.

Take a silent breath. Hold in the change. Tell yourself you still live here. Take your bags upstairs. Put away your clothes, take it nice and slow.

Be their daughter. Nothing’s harder when nobody knows

How to return home, and how to survive, There’s no written guidelines. How to go back, How to show up and unpack. How to show up.

How to grow up. How to take a breath. Take a silent breath. Hold in the change. Tell yourself you still live here. Take your bags upstairs. You still share a name

But you’re not the same. You don’t fight now. You don’t hide now. It’s a whole new way of how to return home.* How to return home. How to return home.

Your bare feet sliding on the old wooden floorboards, home just as you left it but still you’re shaken.

*I originally had “It’s a whole new game. How to return home.” Which I’m pretty sure I don’t like but sometimes I get something right and then go straight past it. This adds a pick up before the “how” but I think the meaning is much better and it’s a little less played out / more unexpected and leads to a better conclusion for the song. The only other thing that I tried and rejected is replacing “Take a shower. Wash yourself away.” with “Only hours. Teach yourself to pray.”

Thoughts?

It’s nice and rare when you get a resounding yes to the thing you made. How sweet to have that back and forth captured in the comments:

BRIAN: wow that’s gorgeous. i’ll write more, and probably sing it back to everyone either later tonight or tomorrow morning. amazing work, kait. KAIT: Maybe tomorrow after the cap thing? I’ll bring my camera. Maybe they’ll let us steal a piano for a bit? BRIAN: since we had plans for natalie weiss to make a recording for us anyway, want to ask her to do this? later this week? and yes, let’s record tomorrow. this thing f-ing rocks. KAIT: Maybe. Let’s mull it over as we sing through it today.

Oh, Brian and Kait, you so-n-sos. Always so on brand. Kait ever cautiously low-key, Brian so deeply enthusiastic and raring to go.

Do you care about any of this? All of this is about how a song got written, not about how it landed itself as a center piece of THE BAD YEARS. What is THE BAD YEARS? A song cycle? An immersive house party? Both? What does that have to do with the alien heartbeat of this house and ChristineCoke?

Everything. “How To Return Home” found its way into a song cycle we made called TALES FROM THE BAD YEARS, which was the brainchild of a conversation that we had with a licensing company that wanted us to make something commercial that could go directly to licensing. Would that not have been lovely? It didn’t pan out. But the idea that we hit - to write a show about the people around us - the generation of millennials who would never fulfill their parents’ American Dream, did pan out and evolve.

“How To Return Home” was always one of the songs that felt like a linchpin to these songs and as we built it out, it became something that parents of millennials would hear and grab us by the arm and say “Thank you for telling me what my daughter is going through. She just moved back in after college.” We realized that in writing something a bit broader than just about coming home for Thanksgiving break, we were writing about the larger lack of employment after college, the depression of a generation who didn’t have the opportunities that they assumed they’d have. We leaned into this.

When we had the opportunity to take TALES FROM THE BAD YEARS and turn it into an immersive house party, this song was both beguiling and bewildering. It does not take place at a house party. But the sensation of being at your family’s home in the center of a party can be beautifully transfixing. The song became a centerpiece for Rachel’s arc.

Rachel was an optimistic and ambitious millennial who’s surprised to discover that the world wasn’t waiting for her. She is one of the youngest at the party and she is just beginning to realize that she’s going to have to claw her way into the world rather than have it handed to her. In more recent drafts, the house has actually become more and more of a character. The history of the house is also oppressive. This is a place where some bad things happened and it’s going to be destroyed. But right now, Rachel is facing her own nostalgia smashed up against the glass of her reality.

Ultimately, “How to Return Home” is about the simple sensation of walking into a house after having grown up there and feeling like the whole place is smaller, different. The fun house affect of your reality having outgrown your childhood cocoon. I moved around a lot. I haven’t been back to a single place that I grew up except my grandmother’s house. Every time I walk in, I’m struck by how low the ceilings are, how small the kitchen is, how narrow that backyard that contained my fantasies is. Once upon a time, my whole world could fit inside that kitchen. I remember a graduation party (something that I also can barely believe ever happened - my grandmother entertaining) and sliding past adults through the back door to get to the refrigerator. But even as I say that, my memory is wavering. She remodeled her kitchen a few years ago and moved the back stairs and I have to consciously conjure that old set up. My memory has transformed to adjust to her new layout. I remember a couch that was long and s shaped in her music room. The room is so small. Where exactly did it go? Memory is so slippery but the visceral feelings you have when you return to a site of your childhood - especially the dark looming ones - is not. It’s immediate and pulsing and both familiar and alien at once.

The question of how to return home is really a question of how to hold onto your slippery sense of self when you’re just discovering who you are and I think the answer (or at least the answer that we landed on in this song) is mindfulness - mindfully telling yourself to breath, to hold in the things you know to be true about yourself in spite of all of the old neural pathways that are lighting up with triggers.

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k-l · 7 years

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RUN AWAY WITH ME : Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, California

It’s daunting to dive into a song that everyone knows. The “hit”. Will the song survive explication? Will explaining it will make it less good? I channel my inner fangirl, pretend I’m not myself (the person who ran through all of the various options of how the lyrics could play out, who knows all the other forks in the road of the lyric), and I realize the answer is “no”. So as the creator, I take a deep breath and say, ok, my tumbleweeds, you asked for it.

Literally. I conducted a super formal poll this week on Twitter and over 200 people voted and 40% wanted to know more about “Run Away with Me”. Trust me, i was with the “Last Week’s Alcohol” camp. LWAers, I’m coming for you.

I think the reason I feel hesitant about this song is because I feel like I’ve said all of it before. I’ve taught it in master classes. I’ve written countless emails to college seniors who have decided to use it for senior showcases. I’ve watched videos of senior showcase mashups like this pairing with “Prelude to an Angry Young Man” by Billy Joel to showcase a young man’s dancing abilities.

“Run Away with Me” has been around the block. It’s had its fair share of interpretations. What could I possibly say that you don’t already know?

ORIGIN

“Run Away with Me” was a song without a hook when it first appeared. I remember Brian playing a truly relentless melody on my aunt’s piano. The scansion was something like this:

“Let me be your ride, let me be your home, Let me be your favorite place We can make a life, we can find a road, we can drive like life is a race. Texas in a car, Kansas on a bus, long as it’s highway and us. Throw away the key. Run away with me.

I found it exhausting - this relentless energy of someone who is determined to connect. It was catchy as hell but busy and unappealing when you put words on it. I put together some dummy lyrics (we learned about those in “Say the Word”) to prove that the music didn’t work as well with lyrics on it. (These are not those lyrics. I mocked these up from memory. The rhythm really was very catchy.)

Brian cleared it out. He asked if a version that went like this:

“DA da DA da DA da da DA”

felt any better. It did. And that’s how we found the scansion that ultimately became,

“Let me be your ride out of town. Let me be the place that you hide.”

It did feel better. It felt doable. I didn’t have the same instinct that I had towards “Say the Word”. I didn’t hear the music and cry. But Brian knew that he’d hit something sticky and he was determined to find where this song fit in the show. He was determined it was for Adam. He thought it came late in the show - an 11 o’clock number. He knew nothing else.

When we found the phrase “Run away with me” the song clicked in for me. I don’t remember a lot about the process of coming up with the hook but I remember a lot about writing the lyrics.

I discovered Adam’s voice in writing this song, but it also felt like it already existed. There was something I always knew and loved about Adam. It was borne of watching boys in college who were in love with my supremely complicated and high strung female friends. It’s not to say they weren’t smart - some of them were very smart - but they weren’t molded the way my female friends were. I was surrounded by women who had chosen, at 18, to go to an all-women’s college. That requires a certain kind of cognition about the world around you. Many of these women dated men but were loud, proud feminists. They were grappling with their relationship with romance, with being “swept off your feet”, with the uneasy comfort of feeling protected by a boy who can’t protect you because you are too smart to believe that such protection exists.

Writing Adam, and this song in particular, was an act of grieving for the kind of girl I would never be. I would never fall for easy romance like the kind a sweet boy like Adam would offer me.

WHEN IN DOUBT, TAKE A SHOWER

I hit my first real flight of inspiration - a visit from Elizabeth Gilbert’s “genius” (if you haven’t watched her TED Talk, do) - as a lyricist in this song. You can also call it getting lucky.

This song is the reason I believe in taking showers when you’re stuck. It’s a more concentrated formula of my general antidote for “writer’s block”, which is something I refuse to acknowledge. Acknowledging writer’s block is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Its existence is in your mind to begin with, so your conjuring of it confirms its existence. My mom calls it “gathering periods”. Everyone has times when they need take in culture, writing, inspiration. You can’t ONLY write. You won’t have anything to write about. Sometimes you have to breathe and take in other people’s creative output.

That said, deadlines are deadlines and you’ve got to get your work done. Rather than say, “I’m spent / I’ll never write again”, you say, “I need a shower.” Or I need to vacuum. Or I need to go for a run (I should say this - I never say this). I had spent the morning chipping away at the chorus and the second verse of this song, when I stopped to take a shower. While I was washing my hair, I came up with the entire bridge - lyric and music and rhythm and everything. It appeared to me like a glorious all-inclusive vacation to Hawaii.

I wrote it down, dripping water on my bedroom floor. Sometimes you get lucky.

TECHNICAL STUFF

Above is a little cheat sheet. If you ever want to sing this song and you don’t want to screw up the words, I suggest you look at it. Musical Theater singers don’t always think about song structure and that’s a shame. It’s a tool in your tool belt (like learning to read music - or at minimum learn how to fake it - I’ll save that soapbox for another day). Without understanding structure, you’re stuck memorizing a song from start to finish and you’re bound to screw it up. With song structure, you can look at the way it’s built and say, OH, look at the sections that are the same. Look at the ones that are different.

Most importantly, if you ever have to sing this song and you have a music stand - THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE THE MUSIC IN FRONT OF YOU - write down on a piece of paper in massive letters:

TEXAS ALABAMA MISSISSIPPI CALIFORNIA

I cannot tell you the number of top-rate performers I’ve given this advice to. The ones who do it, never go up on lyrics. The ones who don’t ALWAYS DO. Trust me. It’s the least I can offer after not giving you a single bit of help in the lyric itself. It’s not alphabetical or even east-to-west. (My personal way of remembering is that Texas and California are easy to remember and the middle two are in alphabetical order. I’ll give a prize to someone who comes up with a good pneumonic - (Tell Adam M[?] C[?]??). It is just the worst. Don’t be proud. Be smart. WRITE IT DOWN.

It’s not entirely my fault. In my first draft, the lyrics to each chorus were the same. You can thank Joe Church, Brian’s composition teacher (and my de facto composition teacher while Brian was at NYU), for the devilishly hard lyrics in the choruses. He pointed out (and I do think he was right) that the character needed to keep upping his ante over the course of the song. I think it’s one of the song’s great charms.

I went back and looked at the chorus again and it’s a weird one. It’s not like looking at baby pictures. I’m not embarrassed by this song but could I make the decisions I made back then if I were writing lyrics for this now? Look at this crazy rhyme scheme!

By “crazy rhyme scheme”, I mean almost-no-rhyme scheme; I mean barest possible minimum rhyme scheme. Please give me the pleasure of enumerating the rhymes for you:

Kerouac / back and key / me.

FIN.

How is that ok?? Why does that work?? I’ll tell you. It’s two-fold. 1. character. 2. proximity.

1. Character

Here I go again. Broken record. Write in character.

Adam works in his dad’s tire shop. He’s not literary. He’s not “smart”. This doesn’t mean he’s an idiot. Emotionally, he’s swimming in the depths. He’s empathetic. He’s kind. He’s generous. He’s really just about everything a person could ask for but he’s not a brainiac.

If you had the unabashed pleasure of seeing Jay Armstrong Johnson perform Adam in The Mad Ones, you know what a breath of fresh air Adam is. He has a beautiful soul, but he’s the butt of jokes. Sam loves him but she doesn’t take him particularly seriously. When he says “I’m not good with words”, it’s important that you believe him. He’s not. But he’s trying. He’s trying to meet her where she lives. He’s using her references. He’s speaking her language. He’s a foreigner in a foreign land.

Making him a “rhymer” would be all kinds of wrong. He’s not witty. He tries to be. He says things like “Texas in the summer is cool”, which a Tumblr fan from Texas pointed out is just not true. But Adam’s nervous. He’s trying. He’s saying things that are lame. He can’t say “Texas in the summer is cool” four times over the course of the song, because he realizes that it’s not true as soon as it comes out of his mouth. It was a dumb joke. He has to try new tactics. His tactics aren’t working.

In his perfect world, he would have sung “run away with me” once, and Sam would have said, “Ok” and they’d go. In a perfect world, he wouldn’t have to say anything. He would fix her flat tire. He would work hard to make her comfortable. But he’s living in the planet of Sam’s grief. Her empathy is turned off. She hadn’t thought of Adam and what he wanted or needed or how he was trying to connect to her in a long time. She’s whirling in the new information that he would be change what he wants (stability, to run his dad’s business) for her. She doesn’t know how to respond and so he’s left floundering in a sea of his own words.

2. Proximity

Hot tip. If you want to make it ok that you’re not rhyming a lot, rhyme close together. I am getting so much mileage out of “Jack Kerouac, looking back”. After five lines of no rhyme, you get two rhymes 3 syllables apart. Internal rhymes make up for writing a character who isn’t clever. It allows the writer to still exert some control over the lyric, some order in the face of a character’s chaos. In terms of character, it gives a sense of someone gaining momentum. Adam’s finally gaining traction. After five statements that go nowhere -

“Let me be your ride out of town. [new thought] Let me be the place that you hide. [new thought] We can make our lives on the go. [new thought] Run away with me. [new thought] Texas in the summer is cool. [ new thought] We’ll be on the road like Jack Kerouac looking back, Sam, you’re ready, let’s go anywhere. [building on that thought] Get the car packed and throw me the key. Run away with me.”

The first rhyme (Kerouac / back) is an indicator that he’s heading somewhere. He’s finding some textual rhythm. By the end of the chorus, he’s managed to put together a bit of a thesis - a little serve and return (key / me).

It gives him the courage to go on in spite of Sam’s silence. The whole song is about Sam’s silence. It’s about him getting so caught up in it in spite of her lack of response, trying to build a vision for what they could have together. You’ve been there, right? Those moments where it feels like if you just keep talking, you won’t have to face the possibility that you won’t be met halfway?

Time and time again, I read comments on YouTube and elsewhere: “I wish my name was Sam. I’d run away with you.” It’s essential that Adam’s desire for Sam is genuine and romantic and that his enthusiasm is infectious. You have to want her to want to go. But in the context of the show, you have to know that it will never work. She will never be able to say yes to him. She doesn’t know that before the song begins but by the time it ends, his fate is sealed. This isn’t actually a song about romance. Not for Sam. For Sam, who we’ve spent the last 75 minutes examining, this moment is filled with dread. You’re watching someone you love say all the things that make it impossible for you to be together.

I remember - after writing this song - having dinner with a guy I was dating. He wanted to take our relationship to the next stage and I met a simple question he asked me with silence and panic. He said “I just wanted you to say that we’d work out any of the problems.” I didn’t realize until he said it that I was creating hurdles for our relationship because I didn’t want to stay in the relationship but I also didn’t have the heart to tell him that I wasn’t thinking about forever. I was looking for my exit strategy. Just because you’re not right for each other doesn’t mean that you want to hurt the other person.

Of course the irony is that that’s exactly how you hurt someone. Sam is a classic introvert. She keeps everything to herself. She processes in her head (that’s the whole show). The sequel to The Mad Ones would be a whole hell of a lot of uncomfortable silence-filled conversations with the ones she leaves behind.

“ROMEO IS CALLING FOR JULIET”: A NAIL IN A COFFIN

You’re Adam. You’re not a brainiac. You say “Romeo is calling for Juliet” and you mean that you love her. You mean that she’s your soulmate.

Now you’re Sam. You’re analytical and literal and literary. You hear “Romeo is calling for Juliet”. You hear that you’re star-crossed, that you’re doomed.

Adam doesn’t know that when he says it but he feels the failure of his metaphor. All of his metaphors build a case against him. He talks about On the Road because Sam loves that book, because she romanticizes driving across the country, much like Sal does in On the Road. But Sal’s journey is solitary and obsessed not with Mary Lou (or any of the other women Sal sleeps with) but with Dean, his best friend. Sam is the same way.

INGENUE

I think a lot about ingenues in the musicals I write. How could I not? It’s a huge trope in musical theater, more in than in any other genre. There are even vocal registers that feel more “ingenue”. I grew up in high school, college, and community theater playing ingenues. I was the daughter, the wife, the literal ingenue in City of Angels.

I also identified with ingenues in movies. I liked them plucky but I always wanted them to get the guy - or, let’s be honest - I wanted the guy to get them.

Now, I only write ingenues when I can turn the idea on its head. Sam is not an ingenue. The story begins when her naïveté has been lost. If we told this story from the perspective from the beginning of her senior year, she would be the ingenue, but we tell the story from her moment before her rebellion. We are chronicling her journey away from ingenue.

Brian and I joked through the rehearsal process that our ingenue is actually Adam. But by definition #2, it’s pretty accurate. Ingenues are often only in the love plot of a musical. They generally have one great song in a show but someone else (a man traditionally) gets to be involved in the multi-plot of a show. Harold Hill pursues Marion, whose role is contained to her utility to his plot - his moral opposite, but Harold is involved in SEVERAL plots. Sarah has her dogmatic beliefs (also a moral opposite to Sky) but it’s Sky Masterson who transforms through his relationship with her and his connection to the gambling plot. Rosemary literally sings about how she will be happy to keep her husband’s dinner warm, while Finch climbs the ladder to success and falls in love in the most perfunctory way possible. (These are all shows that are structurally genius pieces of theater, by the way, they just suck when it comes feminine stereotypes.)

Adam is really happy with their static relationship. He doesn’t actually want anything else. He makes a big sacrifice by trying to imagine what Sam wants, and in order to pull her out of her grief, tries to give it to her. It’s an act of sacrifice and empathy. And he’s right. She does need to run away. Just not with him. And it takes him naming the idea for her to realize exactly what she needs.

Do you see what I love Adam? I wonder if men who wrote female ingenues felt the same way? You’re creating an idealized version of what the other sex should be so that your flawed (read: interesting) protagonist can grapple with the world around them. The exciting thing about creating this character was the attempt to manipulate the audience enough so that the audience would love him as much as I do but feel how deeply wrong it would be for Sam to say yes.

Miscellaneous Questions You Have Asked

Can I (a guy) pretend Sam is a boy and sing this song?

Why not? The “wife” line is a little weirder but I can justify it. There are a couple other pop versions of lyrics that are more generic that might be useful to you if you go that route.

Why are there pop lyrics to this song?

We love this song and we wanted more people to be able to cover it. The use of “Sam” in the lyric feels essential in the show. It makes the lyric feel more insistent. Out of context, it feels a little theatery. I like theater - don’t get me wrong - but the rest of the song doesn’t feel that way so it kind of takes you out of the song if you’re not listening in the context of the show. I like the pop lyrics to the song. You should feel free to use them anytime. Though, in an audition, I’d revert to the original lyrics. Immediacy / theatricality / insistence are your friend there.

Why does Adam say “let me be the place that you hide”? I got this question specifically from someone when I was soliciting questions. It must have been on Twitter because I can’t find it on Tumblr. I hope that the rest of this post helps illuminate the character broadly enough that this already feels clearer. It’s a problematic idea, isn’t it? It comes back to Adam offering comfort, offering protection, offering something that Sam might want but is ultimately wrong for her.

Can I record “Run Away with Me”?

Yes. Because it’s already been professionally recorded by us, by Josh Young, by Aaron Tveit, and Dwayne Britton (maybe others?), anyone can get the mechanical rights to record through Harry Fox. Huzzah!

Why are there so many versions of the final riffs and release of “Run Away with Me”?

When you get the chance to workshop a song as long as we have, you get to really hone what you want out of it. If you’re in doubt about whether or not you’re singing the most updated version, check out Ben Fankhauser’s version on Playbill. This is the one we went into production with in fall 2017.

Can a girl sing “Run Away with Me”?

Hell yeah. Carrie Manolakos covers it on our live album and it’s pretty sick, and here’s a new video of Emma Hunton’s take on it. You didn’t know how much you wanted this.

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k-l · 7 years

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SAY THE WORD - Writing New Lyrics to Old Songs and Writing Music First

You would think this would be a romantic episode of “Behind the Lyrics” but no, this is a funny one, a technical one. But before we get to that, let’s tarry for a little while on the melody of “Say the Word”, which is really the star.

Some songs start with a chorus or a stanza or a lyric. Some start with a hook - a title - a phrase that defines the whole song. A hook isn’t just the lyric. It can be, but generally it’s more than that. It’s a small packet of emotional information: words and music that are the keystone to the rest of the song.

We had that: “Say the word.” And then Brian sent me music - verse music and chorus music. I think the bridge came later. Listen:

http://kaitandbrian.bandcamp.com/track/say-the-word-instrumental

Wait, no, don’t skip this part. Listen:

http://kaitandbrian.bandcamp.com/track/say-the-word-instrumental

It’s important that you listen to it without lyrics, that you don’t know what the lyrics might become for a moment, because that’s what I experienced when I first listened to this melody, the melodic shift to “say the word” from the verse. I remember crying the first time I heard it.

I’m no sap. That doesn’t happen often - especially not before we have worked out the whole song - but it happened here. And I must say, I was intimidated by it. This was one of the first songs I was writing lyrics for in The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown. I was still a freshman lyricist. I hardly knew what I was doing. I couldn’t really write lyric first. I needed the structure of the music to contain me. I still prefer writing music first.

But this music intimidated me. It was good and more than that, it was spare. I struggled. I tried to find something that worked but I couldn’t work out the grammar. Did you know that a lot of lyric writing is about grammar? It’s about knowing what kind of sentence you can write. It’s about whether you’re writing a question, or using a string of participles. I was a born grammarian. It’s been an asset.

Finally, Brian and I decided we’d write a dummy lyric to it together. This is something we’ve often done, but rarely so exactly. I often follow the grammar we find in a dummy lyric. Sometimes Brian will write a lyric along with his music and I’ll replace every word but the grammatical contours will remain. Why? Because sung music implies grammar, especially sentence breaks. Following that phrasing in your lyric often makes you make more interesting and beautiful choices.

I’m stalling. Can you tell? I don’t want you to read our dummy lyric (because of course I remember it. It was good enough that I remember it). Can I just say that the grammar of my real lyric follows the contours of our dummy lyric exactly? I’ll give you one more hint. The dummy lyric is supremely on the nose. Sam wants to have sex with her boyfriend. She’s been having difficulty blurting that out. In our dummy lyric, she really blurted that out. Nothing coy about it.

I can’t tell you the dummy lyric because if I write it here you will ever unsee it and you will never have the pure sweet love for this song that you have now. I’m sparing you. Have I said too much? I’ve said too much.

None of this was the question I was asked by @AmeliaBell28 on Twitter. She asked why we changed the lyric from “loving you should be easier” to “let me go if it’s easier” and I’m so glad she did.

“Loving you should be easier” always sat with me wrong.

Years ago, a very famous actor who was singing the song pointed out that it should be “loving me should be easier” and that stuck with me. That didn’t feel quite right but it felt more right than what I had written (as this sophomoric beginner’s-lucky lyricist). But it’s spare AF and the melody requires something concrete and broad at the top of the sentence. Most sentences start with “I” or “you” or “last night” or something like that. But I needed something like “loving you” or “Saturday” or “better days”. And I needed whatever I did to lead into “but say the word, and I might have to stay.”

You’re me. Here’s what you’ve got.

Say the word and I just might listen. Say the word and you might get your way. _ _ _,* _ _ _ _ _ but say the word, And I might have to stay.

(*comma added to indicate phrasing)

This is literally what I stared at for weeks in the lead up to our workshop in the spring of 2016, cursing myself from a decade earlier for having squeezed myself into this box. I’m going to try to find another lyric for it right now as I write this and I’ll share the ways I narrowed down my options.

I was scared but now - Doesn’t work because you can’t say “but” or anything that negates the 2nd half of the clause because it’s part of a larger clause. That rules out the 4th word being but, since, or; you’ll end up in a run on.

All my life, I’ve been holding back but say the word, - Success!

The grammar is good! “All my life” feels iconic enough for the music; it feels repeatable. Don’t forget how many times we’ll hear this exact lyric. But has she been holding back? Does that make any sense? Not really. Still, this is good grammar. It’s possible to understand what she’s talking about enough to know she’s not making sense, which is a positive development.

So then I think to myself: I need some kind of island phrase that’s three syllables and that leads easily and truthfully to “but say the word”. Everything she’s been saying is a command - a sort of coy command, but command all the same. (You) say the word. I’m not going to say it.

In lyrics, we talk a lot about parallel structure:

Let me be your ride out of town. Let me be the place that you hide. We can make our lives on the go. Run away with me.

There are two kinds of parallel structure in that lyric. The first (bolded) is the more obvious kind. It’s when you have two lines (or more) in a row that start with the same words. It can be incredibly effective. It follows the contours of what the music is doing (repetition of motif) and insists upon something. The second (italicized) is a bit more subtle but it does train your ear. Three out of four of those lines are not statement of fact but commands - something the character wants.

The same is true for “Say the Word” but she’s less insistent. She’s more seductive. I looked at the whole chorus:

Say the word, and I just might listen. Say the word, and you might get your way. _ _ _,* _ _ _ _ _, but say the word, And I might have to stay.

And the grammar is actually pretty complex. Compare it to

Let me be your ride out of town. [NEW THOUGHT] Let me be the place that you hide. [NEW THOUGHT] We can make our lives on the go. [NEW THOUGHT] Run away with me.

There’s an if/then proposal being made by Sam. Essentially, “if you say that you want me to be here with you, I might listen and give you what you want. [BLANK] but if you say what you want, I might stay here.”

So that missing line takes on enormous import. It’s the thing that’s holding them back. My box got narrower and narrower. I liked the word “easier”, which fit so effortlessly on the music (it was part of our infamous dummy lyric even) and I became convinced that the complexity of the grammar meant that it would be easier to follow with a command at the top of that line. That left me with:

Say the word, and I just might listen. Say the word, and you might get your way. COMMAND,* if it’s easier, but say the word, And I might have to stay.

“Let me go” wasn’t the first idea that I had but it was the truest idea. There’s something poetic and simple about talking about either staying or going. It’s not about love. It’s about action. Do you want me to stay? Or do you want to let me go?

I wish I could say that when I hit that lyric, I felt a sense of relief but I actually sweated out the workshop and the production. Brian didn’t say, “I like the new lyric” until we’d already started performances of The Mad Ones off-Broadway. Once we opened, a few other people came up to me and mentioned the new lyric. That’s actually nuts. It’s one line of an unproduced show. I knew I was right to be nervous. If I got it wrong, people would actually notice.

I also knew from experience, that hearing a new lyric when you know an old one is jarring. I vividly remember hearing Ragtime in the theater after hearing only the concept album and being incensed by some of the changes. There was a different lyric written into the liner notes of Miss Saigon from the one on the recording for the now very dead “It’s Her or Me” / “Now That I’ve Seen Her” - two songs with the exact same melody and entirely non-overlapping lyrics. The same was true for portions of Beauty and the Beast. There’s several in Ragtime. These drove me absolutely crazy. My loyalty to the lyric I heard first knew no bounds. I never thought the second lyric was better. Now as a lyricist myself, I know that in general, they sing less well and make more sense. And often they’re the product of producer notes.

Of course, I was in danger of the same error, the same failure to fans of the show, so I was shy about debuting this lyric change - small though it was - but I felt very strongly that I had to do it now before we might have a chance to record it or license it for posterity. So I tried to make sure that I wrote something truthful (yes) but also (I hope) just as fun to sing as “loving you”, which was always so weird. Why was loving him hard? Why should love be easier? What does that even mean???

Does it make it better if I apologize to any of the purists among you? I see you. I hear you. I. Am. You. If Tony Kushner touches a hair on the head of Caroline, or Change, I will cut him. But “loving you should be easier” drove me nuts. I couldn’t let that baffling lyric live. I hope you will pardon me.

For anyone who came to this post hoping that I had something profound to say about the in-show context, I’m sorry (more apologies). The context is simple. Sam wants to have sex with her boyfriend. She has a hard time talking about it. Finally, she drops trou’ and throws herself at him. He thinks that’s pretty weird. She concedes and finally opens up and sings this.*

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*with one minor lyric change… :)

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k-l · 7 years

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“Anyway” - Annotated

I get asked about “Anyway” from The Bad Years a lot. I’ll try not to repeat myself here. I went into a lot of depth in this interview if you want to know more obvious stuff.

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The character isn’t me - at all. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sardonic in my life (except maybe when I was 10 - another story for another day). But in my twenties, I had several friends who were my age die. The first one was when I was twenty. She got drunk and fell three stories out of a college dorm window. The second and third happened within a few weeks of each other. One died of a terminal illness and the other got hit by a bus crossing the street in a foreign country. The Mad Ones was always connected to grief. But this song isn’t Sam and it isn’t me. “Anyway” was an exploration of anger and guilt and posturing. The Bad Years has always been a tapestry, an ensemble show. As a result, the songs tell the whole story of a character. You have to immediately know who they are. When people ask questions about context for “Anyway”, I have to admit that it doesn’t matter. The song tells you everything you need to know. And there’s no personal context hidden under the surface like in “Not a Love Story.”

I didn’t expect to see you here – I mean outside, smoking. I’m more of a nicorette girl these days. I’m joking. I mean – I did quit. But who feels like joking now? I’ll see you your scowl and raise you a furrowed brow.

This first verse is about establishing who you are. You’re a little nervous and uncomfortable. You’re trying to get a laugh. One of the biggest issues we have with performers tackling the song is when they play the end of the song from the beginning.

It’s sad. Of course it’s sad. What’s interesting is when it isn’t. It’s when you’re vamping, trying to stave off the sadness.

The original setting was outside a funeral, or maybe outside a house where people were sitting shiva. Don’t think about that too hard because the circumstances of The Bad Years have changed (now it’s at the house party). Either way, there’s a sense of someone escaping a claustrophobic space, needing air, and finding the last person you wanted to be alone with - a ghost of christmas past. Picture an arrow. The person who died is the center point and you two are at opposite sides.

You were never close but here you both are. This song is not even trying to bridge the gap. This isn’t a relationship song. It’s a confession song. But the listener (and thereby we as the audience, the stand in) are put into the awkward position of a friendship that never quite took. Then comes the hook:

Anyway. Anyway.

The hook was the inspiration for the song. I had come up with this musical idea to stretch out the word “anyway” as well as the turn from “anyway" as a restart to “any way” as a plea, like, 10 years ago. I’d written this weird Ani DiFranco-esque lyric when I was fooling around with trying to learn how to write music to songs. We held onto it until we had content that felt like the right emotional territory for it. As soon as we hit on wanting to write a song about immediate grief from the perspective of someone who isn’t emotionally open, we took this hook out of the trunk.

Do you remember how we used to read Rilke, Joyce? And we barely understood it, But it gave us a voice Or a language… I don’t read poetry anymore. But if I did, I’d be reading it tonight for sure.

First thing’s first: the other character isn’t named Joyce, ok? The references are Rainer Marie Rilke and James Joyce. If that was really obvious to you, good on you. If not, you’re welcome.

The silence that you get back from the other character gives you latitude. Your mind starts to wander. I think of the other character in this moment - how there are moments where you don’t know where someone who’s talking to you is going, and it’s almost scary. I remember my mom telling me stories about her childhood that felt off limits when I was a teenager - these windows into who she was, how she became who she became. I remember not speaking for fear of her realizing I was there: true monologue with an audience, where the person goes deeper and deeper into their internality but it’s spoken aloud.

This verse starts a bit more external - a memory, wry - something I’ve thought about, how I used to read poetry all the time. I searched the lines for meaning. And now, I almost never pick it up. It’s so therapeutic, but it never occurs to me anymore. I used to do the same thing with songs. Now I rarely go back and trying to analyze them. It’s an act so anchored in your teen years when your taste is forming. By the end of this stanza, you’ve lost your audience - you’re thinking aloud.

Oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

Then you remember - you’re talking to someone. It’s a little weird. It’s a little embarrassed. You’re not getting that affirmation that you might want.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh -

It makes you feel awkward, but your brain is going now. You can’t stop it.

I keep thinking about how the timing seems false, How some days seem faster than my fucking pulse. And others go so slow. Like this morning Feels like a month ago. Oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

You’re getting lost. The weekend of my third friend’s memorial was back in Pennsylvania and, by some horrible trick of luck, it was booked on the same weekend as our mutual friend’s wedding. I went to the wedding on Saturday night and the memorial on Sunday afternoon, and so did my friend. She was still wearing her wedding hair as we held hands and cried. I felt like that weekend would never end. Every time I think about post-funeral meals at someone’s house, the warmed over lasagna, the hard dry dinner rolls, it feels like time stretches out like dough. But the entire summer I spent with my friend who got married and my friend who we mourned went by in a snap. Does that make any sense? You’re just thinking aloud. You’re just trying to make sense… Which leads you to a new thought:

I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater.

It’s muted underwater. Everything moves at a different speed. If you scream, no one can hear you. If you open your eyes, it’s beautiful, but you can’t breathe. You can’t survive there.

The first time you hit the idea, it should feel so surprising to you, such an attempt to name something that hadn’t previously been named.

And then you brush it off. It’s nothing.

Anyway. Anyway.

Start over. Full reset.

When we were in rehearsals for The Mad Ones, we talked a lot about “Go Tonight” and why the moment existed - much of the song is about replaying a moment that we already replayed. But the first time, we don’t deal with why it mattered. Sam doesn’t name for herself the point of it (that going back over these moments won’t change the moments but that at the center of this ONE moment, she feels something that she needs to hold onto and take with her).

Here, in “Anyway”, you haven’t hit the dark places you need to go. You scratched the surface but you need to start again, try again. It’s the most basic instinct. You return to the scene of the crime. You write your memoir. You experiment with recovered-memory therapy. Now that you know what it feels like to scratch the surface of the feeling, you need to go at it one more time and see where it leads you.

There’s this building you pass On the subway to Queens - It’s on the L or the R or the one that’s green. [the G train. It’s the G.] - It’s covered in tags, [graffiti] Bright hieroglyphics. These fifteen-year-olds – [taggers] They’re so fucking prolific. I’m commuting, I’m eating my goddamn apple And they’re secretly painting their Sistine Chapel. But whatever, It’s like they know their odds. If you’re gonna die young, you’d better live like gods. Gods. Gods.

You’ve done this, right? You’ve looked at the impossible. You’ve stared at graffiti 20 stories off the ground. You’ve thought the twin thoughts of ‘why would you risk your life to spray paint on a wall that will only get painted over, or worse, torn down?’ (as with the 5 Pointz, though check this out if you want to see who got the last laugh there), and 'how glorious.'

The fact is that the kids who are graffitiing walls are in danger. They’re crying out. They need someone to pay attention, to know they were here, because without that, the world may never notice. And they know something we, commuter mortals, forget: we’re going to die.

This is a small point but I think it matters. You’re being kind of a dick by saying some of this. You’re romanticizing something that’s not romantic. You’re equating things that aren’t equal. The death of your friend is not endemic. The incarceration and lower life expectancy of the majority of young urban men who are making street art is. But you’re right on one count:

We might die tomorrow. We might get hit by a bus. Make something now. Otherwise, your mourners will read poetry from your elementary school projects at your memorial. I’ve seen it happen. Dare to try to make something impossible / glorious that lives beyond your life.

And me? I’m not doing anything. I’m not helping or cleaning. I’m not even crying. I’m not doing anything. She’d be so goddamn helpful. Well, fuck her for dying ’cause I - I’m not writing her elegy. Not me. I’m not writing that down. They would scrawl her name on a city wall but I’m a fucking clown. I’m making jokes so I don’t drown.

They say write something that scares you. Saying “fuck her” scared me. I worried it would alienate the audience but you say things like that when you’re grieving - especially when you tell yourself you’re not grieving.

I remember a friend of mine telling me how much our friend’s death didn’t bother her because they’d fallen out a year before. Does she even remember saying that? It was the guilt talking. Even if you don’t say it, you think terrible things when someone dies. The inconvenience of their timing, how you saw it coming when you can only see that in retrospect. You are guilty in the fact of your own inertia, be it the commuter eating an apple; the leach on a funeral, smoking a cigarette because you can’t deal. You live inside the sensation that you have never contributed, that you may never contribute. You survived - the one who had nothing to give - and the other person (future astronomer, social justice lawyer, red cross volunteer) died. If roles were reversed, she would be inside the house making other people feel better. She would comfort the grievers. You - right now, yesterday, and tomorrow - you are doing nothing. Talk about self-loathing.

I was never the best friend, the sister, the mother. I was ten feet away and I was shaken. In the months that followed, I kept thinking about their actual best friend, their siblings. I don’t know what that feels like. But even ten feet away, I felt this seismic shift in who I was. What would be like to feel that every day in the grooves of your routine? I thought about that a lot.

I didn’t want to write about grief. I had to write about grief. Because I could. Because after seeing The Mad Ones, after hearing this song, people grab me by the arm and ask me who I know who died. They have tears in their eyes and I know that they lost someone and this feels true to them and that means something. At the moment when someone dies, you don’t want to talk about it, or feel it, or deal with it. You don’t want to write about it. You want to avoid it because you’re afraid that if you name it, you will be consumed by it.

By naming the great fear that you will drown, you give into the sensation you’ve been fighting. You let it wash over you.

I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater. Like the whole world is underwater. Like I’m screaming out underwater. I feel like I’m underwater these days Anyways.

“Anyways” is a perverse attempt at recovery, of pretending none of that happened. You didn’t start to drown; you weren’t gulping for air. You’re fine. You’re making a joke. You’re rhyming, goddammit.

It doesn’t work. It falls so flat.

Anyway.

The final restart. This is real. This is what you should have said, what you couldn’t have said when you started. This is what you mean.

I didn’t expect to see you here. I mean – thanks for coming. I thought you’d oppose the use of religious rites as numbing. I mean – it is dumb. But what if she can hear them pray? I mean what the fuck do we know? Who are we to say? If there was any way. Any way.

I told you this wouldn’t be personal. I lied. Everything’s personal.

Have you read A Year in Magical Thinking? I recommend it. Joan Didion wrote it after her husband died suddenly. She’s a master memoirist and so when she turned her lens on such a personal subject matter she’s skilled enough to write something beautiful and restrained. She wrote:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

Each time I’ve experienced a death, I’ve had a sensation of cognitive dissonance. I know in my brain that the person is dead, but my heart’s slow to respond. Another friend of mine died this summer. He wasn’t my closest friend. I was ten, even 20 feet away. He was incandescent. Everyone had experienced some unforgettable night where he stared into their soul. We’d had several. He flattered me by meeting up several times to work up a project together. It never got off the ground but just the other day, I had the impulse to share a new thought that might break it open before I remembered that I would never be able to tell him.

I don’t believe in a god. I think your body and soul are intertwined. Nothing magic happens when you die. My friends aren’t haunting the ghost lights of America. But at the same time, I have the humility to hope I’m wrong.

Anyway. You asked. This song is a pandora’s box.

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k-l · 7 years

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“Not a Love Story” The Story Behind the Lyrics

Brian and I started writing songs from very different angles. I started writing libretto before writing lyrics so songs always came from story and plot for me. And then, a few years into writing together, we decided to try to experiment with song forms, which meant not writing from story but reaching for other impulses. A lot of the songs that came out of this experiment that turned into The Bad Years including “Two Strangers”, “I Look Around for You”, and “Not a Love Story”.

“Not a Love Story” took the longest.

The initial impulse for the song was just the chorus, which I wrote about my best friend who had started dating someone and I was grappling with the sensation that it felt like a break up, even though it was platonic (see: Frances Ha and why I love it). It’s not a love story. It’s not a coming of age.It’s not the kind of thing you put into a play. Embedded in that lyric is the very fact that I wasn’t writing this into a plot. It felt too small, too personal, too trivial. I remember writing it on the subway back to Washington Heights from Brooklyn one morning after the fling that inspired “Two Strangers”, (which I wrote on another subway ride from Brooklyn to Washington Heights).

From this little chorus, Brian sent me back an audio file of a 6-minute song that took on a life of its own. Months had passed. Impulses had shifted and anyway, the music was its own beast. It music sounded like a violin line - mournful and yearning, virtuosic. At first, I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d written something so simple, so matter-of-fact, and Brian had exploded it open. When Brian looked at the lyric (and the bit of melody that came with the hook - one of the first times we used one of my melodies as an anchor in a song), it gained its own dramatic context. It became about the the lie of the chorus - someone saying that something wasn’t a love story when, of course, it is.

I listened to the music for a long time and eventually came up with a real context for the song - it would come to be one of the most personal songs I’ve written. It hinged on a moment between me and my college boyfriend on a night after a party that we went to at a co-ed frat.

Every year, ADP had a party called “Hot Jazz” and a friend of mine was a frat member so she got us in. I was excited to bring him to the party. We’d gone to lots of parties at Harvard, at the Lampoon. There were less opportunities at Barnard - more bars, less classic parties - at least in my circle. So it felt special to dress up and dance together. The night hadn’t gone as I’d hoped. I had expectations. I wanted to dance with my boyfriend and my friends and something was off between us.

There are so many things I realize now about what was off - our relationship was already falling apart. The distance was getting to us after three years of it. And he didn’t know anyone at the party and he was shy. I was so obsessed with him - his talent, his wit, his kindness - but I wanted to share that with people and I found it so upsetting that no one understood why I was so desperately in love with him. Hanging out at Harvard was easier. I was easier with people I didn’t know - or at least that’s my perception of it. It was a perfect storm.

We left the party and I was already annoyed. And of course, we were drunk on cheap champagne. We walked down 114th street. I remember St. John the Divine looming in the shadows. It was probably 2 o’clock in the morning. Groups of people I didn’t know walked by, drunk and laughing. We didn’t break up that night but it was the beginning of the end - the turning point. I remember not crying, but feeling cold and a little bitter. I remember seeing my breath. I remember trying to explain why I was upset but I don’t think I was able to name for myself the things I can name now, much less name them for someone else. I had that sensation that I sometimes have of being outside the moment looking in at it - like I’m filming it, or memorizing it, taking a picture - burned into my memory was the smallness of our lives next to a cathedral that remained under construction after a century of scaffolding.

St. John the Divine loomed large in my childhood. I knew of its existence before I even moved to New York City. I was an avid Madeleine L’Engle reader in middle school and The Young Unicorns and The Severed Wasp were two of my favorites. Both were set at this cathedral - that now held my real life and the fictional lives of my favorite myths in its grip. The poetry of us standing against the background of this cathedral was not lost on me even in my drunk anger - or perhaps because of it.

“Not a Love Story” is about telescoping back and then back again through a evolution of a relationship. There are 4 moments that strike within the one moment of song. The first is the moment of the chorus “it’s not a love story”. It’s a person looking back on that second moment of “the old cathedral looming in the shadows”. And then, gloriously - fueled by the sound of Brian’s music - we fall back into “one dark second” - the beginning of the relationship, which for us was our senior year of high school.

He was the smartest kid in our school and we both had the administration wrapped around our fingers. Every afternoon, I had an independent study about women writers (because the school literally didn’t have any novels written by women on the syllabus for all 4 years of high school including AP English and I complained) and he had AP physics. I had created a student-run theater and was directing a show and had gained full access to the auditorium. We spent countless afternoons in the back of the auditorium falling in love.

Then the song fast forwards to college - moment no. 4 - three years of sleeping in extra-long twins together, which is a legitimately terrible way to sleep, but we never said that. We said we liked the size of the bed. I swear we were nostalgic even as each moment passed during those intervening years. It’s easy to be nostalgic when you’re far from each other most of the timing, missing each other. We didn’t even have cell phones. We were dependent on landlines, trying to stay home to catch each other, trying to coordinate so roommates weren’t on the line with their long distance lovers. We sent PINE emails to each other in the printing lab. The moments when we were together were precious and celebratory and stretched out. And we were certain. For a while, we were certain that there was no one else for us.

I remember after we broke up, our post-mort on the phone about how we met each other at the wrong time. It was his idea. It caught my imagination - the idea of alternate timelines. I don’t know if there’s anything to it. By the time we were older, we were probably too different from who we had been, but I have on occasion wondered. I realize now that I’ve only been in love three times and each of those times, I fundamentally changed as a person before I was able to fall in love again.

My favorite painter Amedeo Modigliani had an affair with one of my favorite poets Anna Akhmatova when they were young - before either of them became the artists they’d become. She wrote, about their tryst, “Probably, we both did not understand one important thing: everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one. The breathing of art still had not charred or transformed the two existences; this must have been the light, radiant hour before dawn.” We’ve both become writers in our own right. I know that I needed those intervening years without each other to solidify my voice, but the idea that this was the light and radiant hour before we became who we would become - the romance of that feels resonant to me.

And so we come back to the reality of the night when things began to decay. The moment of half-life, as the seconds ticked away too quickly into morning.

Cathedral bells rang out to mark the hour, Reminding us that this was just another night, That hours pass, That morning breaks, That somehow there’s still sunlight.

The relationship didn’t end in front of a cathedral. That only happens in the movies. In real life, it takes another three months, a bad New Year’s Eve with a scraped elbow after dancing on a table, another half-transgression on a different long night in Florence. Decay comes slow. The next morning would come and we’d still walk down to the deli in our pjs for egg sandwiches but something is already different - even if you can’t quite pinpoint why or how. There are so many bad nights that you recover from, and then there are those that cut to the bone.

Here’s the thing about love stories: they are never just love stories. They are two friends all grown up, who no longer fit together. The difference between love stories and friend stories is that many of the sad friend stories don’t have that additional moment of clarity - “the break up”. They do have this moment - the fight, the silences that can’t be bridged - a beginning of the end.

I’m no longer friends with my college boyfriend. I don’t know how we could become friends unless our jobs somehow brought us together. But I’m going to my best friend’s house to take care of her kids for the weekend when she and her husband (not the boyfriend I mentioned) go out of town for the weekend. Change is the only constant.

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