So my brother in law was like “Is this song about me?,” because he was living with us. Plus, it was amplified by the fact that I was in lockdown with my in-laws at the time I was writing it. How do we give them all complexity and real estate? I pitched a gossip number as, “We can learn a little bit about everyone by what they choose to whisper about,” you know? I think that’s a very universal thing, of what you can talk about in front of this family member versus that family member. I remember pitching the concept, like “What are musical forms we haven’t seen before in a Disney movie?” Because the challenge of the piece was always - and remains - that there are so many characters. How did the writing of that song come together? “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is one of the biggest singles of the year, speaking of surreal. So that’s usually how the lyrics come in, especially if it’s a hip-hop piece. In my neighborhood, I’m like the village eccentric walking around with headphones on, talking to himself.
ENCANTO SONGBOOK PRO
And then I very consciously graduated to Logic Pro for “Bring It On” and “Hamilton.” When I do that, I make myself a loop until I felt like it was suggesting things, then I would take that loop and walk away - like, separating that part of the process - and I find lyrics when I’m walking around. I mean, I wrote most of “In the Heights” on GarageBand - it literally comes with your computer, my kid uses it. Sometimes noodling on the piano, I’ll find it - I’ll just noodle inside a pattern until something emerges that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard before.įor those, “Hamilton” is sort of the best example of why computer programming has made my life so great. Sometimes a melodic idea will show up and it’s so strong it’s just about translating it from what I’m hearing in my head to the piano. And it’s time to take all that creative energy that’s happening in the margins of your notebook and bring it into class with me and with us.” He encouraged me to write for the student theater group at our high school, and nudged me: “They’ve never done a musical - go write musicals for them.” And the teacher sort of called me out on a subsequent essay I wrote for his class, saying, “You’ve been hibernating in the back of my class. I wrote a song for the key moments of each chapter, recorded myself a capella on a tape recorder - I was the kid in the group who did all the work - and I had the other kids lip-sync to my voice. We had an assignment where we had to teach three chapters, and I decided to make a musical of every chapter we had to teach. My eighth grade English teacher assigned us Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen,” and it was the rare English-class book where I was hooked. And it really was a teacher who brought me out of just writing songs about girls in the back of the classroom. (laughter) Girls in my class that I had a crush on. It depends on where you want to start! I was always kind of making up songs, but I started seriously figuring them out on the piano and writing them in around seventh grade. So it feels very surreal to see my songs be a part of the canon, all stacked up in one place.ĭo you remember the first song or songs you wrote? If you play piano, I think everyone’s Bible growing up was the Beatles two-volume set, and “The Ultimate Broadway Fake Book” - there’s certain staples that make a musical theater person. I learned through songbooks - going to Colony and getting the sheet music for songs or show tunes and figuring them out on my own.
It all really also reminds me of how far we’ve come. I learned rudimentary music theory in his class - a 12-tone piece I wrote for his class is still one of the things my hand doodles when I’m writing. We invited a bunch of teachers - my best friend since kindergarten, Danny San Germano, still teaches at my old high school, he’s the chair of the arts department - and my ninth grade music teacher, Michael Stratechuk, is here. It feels even more surreal with the company we have here.
So I’m fresh off an Acela, and I went to the Drama Book Shop and this book was there, waiting. to see Phillipa Soo in “Guys and Dolls” at the Kennedy Center. You grew up with musical theater and piano lessons - how does it feel to have your own songbook?Įmotional, and really, really surreal - this is actually the first day I’m seeing it in print, because I was traveling all last week: We had the Hamburg premiere of “Hamilton,” and then I just went down to D.C.
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