Songs About New York (Part II)

Who’s the luckiest girl I know?
I’m the luckiest girl I know!
Here in the heart of a city just starting its day
After waking at dawn to its siren song of urban decay

Where’s the prettiest town I know?
Here’s the prettiest town I know!
Under the crime, and the layers of grime — like Pompeii!

Now, the dirt the noise and the fear
May not be what brought me here
But attractions like these
Are just some of the reasons I stay

Who’s the victim of unfair press?
You’re the victim of unfair press!
People complain that you’re loud and you’re vain and you’re cold
Put me straight in the ground if I ever sound so tired and old

Who’ll be with you through thick and thin?
I’ll be with you through thick and thin!
Here at your side, I’m along for the ride — all the way!
I can take on whatever may come
If here’s where I’m starting from
Think of all that could be
And it’s easy to see why I stay!

Back home they think I’m crazy
New York’s no place to be!
Well, E.B. White and I respectfully disagree
Ring Lardner and O’Henry —
They seemed to liked, too
Why not? When every window
Offers a bird’s-eye view
Of a fabulous picture postcard
From the city of my dreams
Where the message on the back says: BOOM!!
And it rattles and crashes and screams:

“Who’s the luckiest girl I know?
You’re the luckiest girl I know!
Stick with me, kid, like those other guys did and … some day!”
The allure of wealth and acclaim —
Sure, that may be why I came
But it ain’t happened yet, and do I look upset?
So please don’t ever let me feel doubt or regret
Could I leave you, my pet? Rue the day that we met?
I’d be lost you can bet, if I ever forget why I stay!

Songs About New York

The book pictured at the left is a new reprint of a wonderful 1960 children’s book by Miroslav Sasek. I happened to stumble across it in, of all places, an Anthropologie store last week. It was one of those funny little WTF moments, because the second song in the second act of Skyline is called This is New York, and I had just been thinking about it, and about the other New York song in the show, and about New York songs in general.

Broadway musicals have produced a whole catalogue of songs about New York, from New York, New York (On the Town) to I Happen to Like New York (The New Yorkers); from NYC (Annie) to Another Hundred People (Company) — and dozens more, each with its own distinct character and flavor, each a near perfect evocation of the city, in all its guises and forms: big and exciting, scary and loud, alienating and cold. And in writing a show set so specifically in New York, and in such a particular time period, it was probably inevitable — even necessary — that I’d wind up writing a song that aspired to those ranks. That second act song is a plot song, by which I mean that it’s less a celebration, or even generally descriptive, of the city, than it is a means of unifying the events that transpire in this particular scene. But there is “New York song” in the show, in the opening number in fact. It’s Allison’s portion of a musical scene called Go!(Stop)/Go!(Stay). It’s the number that introduces both Paul and Allison to the audience, and gives us a sense of who they are, their characters and desires and what we can expect of them and all that “Musicals 101” hibbeldy-bibbeldy.

I don’t know why, but Stay (Allison’s song) was just one of the most hair-pullingly, infuriatingly difficult things I’ve ever had to write. It took – without exaggeration – over a year of on-and-off, pick it up and put it back down writing and re-writing. Even though I knew exactly what I wanted to say, exactly the way I wanted to say it – even the basic structure I wanted the song to take it just kept being … too much! It was too long, the lines were too long, the rhyme scheme too complex, the details too wordy and overdrawn. I just.couldn’t.get it. And then one day, while standing in the shower (which as we all know is the place where all the best ideas come – seriously, I don’t know why world leaders don’t just all take a bath together. They could solve 90% of humanity's problem in about an hour), it suddenly came to me. I figured out how to take the first two lines of the first A, slap them together with the last two and eliminate everything in between (or at least, move it somewhere else). Once I had that, everything else followed, and although it still took months to actually write the damn thing, when I finally finished it, it was one of those things where – okay. I said in probably the first post on this blog that there were few things in the world more boring and obnoxious than writers talking about writing, but the thing is, we all have experiences in our lives where something just goes so beautifully right: baking a perfect tray of lemon bars, completing our first continuous three-mile run, successfully potty-training our kid, that no matter how petty and mundane they are, we just can’t help wanting to share it. We bring the lemon bars to work, post our miles on a runner’s website, memorialize the event for grandma in a photograph that will keep that poor kid in therapy for the rest of his life.

And this is one of mine: I’ve written a New York song. And I did a good job. Not only in the sense that it’s “a good song,” but in the sense that it does everything it needs to do dramatically speaking. It’s not just a New York song, it’s Allison’s New York song. It’s a song for a character who is both young and inexperienced and a little naïve, and also smart and ambitious and tougher than she looks. A young woman who moved to New York at a time when young women simply didn’t do that kind of thing, because she wanted to be a “real writer,” and you couldn’t be a “real writer” back in Ohio. Who loves everything about the city, the good and the bad of it, but who still manages to maintain a true New Yorker’s sense of humor and irony about it. A young woman who, shortly after singing this song, will sing another song, one in which she describes the moment, experienced by bright, ambitious young people throughout history, where she realizes that “I could change everything – and I probably should.”

I am happy about this. It was a long, drawn-out, painful process, but it’s done, and it’s good, and I really feel like it’s a great way to start a musical. A song about New York, for a musical about New York.

The Song That Almost Wasn't

I posted a while back about my doomed efforts to rush through a bunch of lyrics for this show to meet a prize deadline. And while it was almost certainly for the best that this didn't happen, it did at least finally get me working on the songs for the show. I've actually written six of them now (well, actually five and a half — the opening number, which is fairly complicated, is only about half complete).

This was an incredibly hard thing for me to get started on. Partly because of circumstances generally: my work situation, the lack of time, the fact that the work situation has made me so awfully miserable that I couldn't even bring myself to think about writing. But part of it was that I just feel so strongly about this show. I want it to be "perfect," which of course isn't possible, nothing is ever really perfect. But the book turned out to be so solid; I was so happy with it, and so pleased with how relatively painless the process was. Not that I didn’t agonize over it a little, I did. But that was mostly in the thinking and planning phase, not so much in the writing phase. I don't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I'm writing this show using a musical theater book-writing technique I've developed over many years, and which I actually hope to start teaching next year. I wanted to use this show to sort of "beta test" that method, and I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well it's worked. In fact, the only thing in the very first draft of the show that really didn't work was the one thing that didn't conform to the "template" I'd devised. Once I went back and re-wrote the scene following the "rules," it all worked about eighty-five percent better.

So, I was obviously very determined, when writing the score, to adhere very closely to the rules I'd set out for myself (and anyone else who cared to use them). And one of those was that, in writing a new show, one must never, ever, ever go into a project thinking — before any writing has taken place — "well, I know I want there to be a song about such-and-such." Basically, the idea is that you never, ever write any song until after the book is completely finished, and even then you never even contemplate writing a syllable's worth of lyric that isn't absolutely necessary and doesn't make perfect sense in the moment. That seems absurdly obvious, but it's probably in the top five stupid mistakes every writer makes when writing a musical, and one that causes untold frustration and agony when they wind up spending months trying to find a way to re-write an entire scene — or an entire show! — to accommodate one ill-placed song, simply because that song is "so good! We cant cut it, it's the best thing in the whole show!" or worse, simply because it's too much work to write a new, more suitable one.

Well, I'd gotten to the top of the second scene in the first act, which is the scene where Allison first mentions Paul's crusade to her lecherous boss. And it felt like the boss should have a song there. It felt like the "right place" for a song. But there didn't seem to be any logical reason for the boss to be singing. His whole through-line in the scene is, he's encouraging Allison to be more assertive in the way she pitches her story idea, and I thought he might have a song about that (the hook "Sell Me!" came to mind), but the truth of the matter is, he doesn't give a stump about her story, or her career at the magazine or, frankly, her. He just wants in her pants. He wouldn't actually sing a song about that, because it would be grotesequely inappropriate. But he wouldn't waste his breath on a song about how she can present her story more persuasively, because he doesn't give enough of a rat's hat.

So, one night about two weeks ago, I was lying in bed, half-asleep, when it suddenly hit me: Of course Barry isn't singing about the story. He's singing about getting Allison into bed — he's just couching it in "pitching the story" terms. He's using his "advice" on how to get her story into print as a means to communicate his interest in her nether regions.
So I jumped out of bed and scrawled a couple of quick notes, and the next day, while I was out run-walking on Shore Road, the song literally wrote itself in about twenty minutes, and I have to tell you, it was the most fun I've had writing anything in I can't even tell you how long. The ideas, the rhymes, the rhythms, the wordplay, all just kept coming at me unbidden. I felt like I've always thought Cole Porter must have felt when he was writing "You're The Top" — just giddy with the fun of it, and never wanting it to stop. Sitting there at the piano thinking, "oh, come on, there's gotta be another — aha! Roxie usher! That'll work!" scrawl, scrawl, scrawl.
So anyway, here's the song that proved the easiest one of the bunch to write so far, probably because it was the one that I never planned to write (and almost didn’t write) to begin with:


You’ve gotta sell me —
Sell me!
It’s not enough to tell me
You have to overwhelm me
With the soundness of your case
So make a play for my attention
And then hold it once it’s got
If you don’t grab it first time out
You may not get another shot

So go on pitch me
Pitch me!
Your goal is to bewitch me
Show how this will enrich me,
Make my world a better place
You’ve got a lot of competition
Try to rise above the mob
And if it doesn’t leave me wanting more
You haven’t done your job

I only want to help you
If you’d give me half a chance
Those other guys won’t give
A kid like you a second glance
They see a pretty girl
And they’ve got one thing on their mind
But I can see the raw potential
They can never hope to find

So come on, schmooze me
Schmooze me!
But quick, before you lose me
I’m asking you to use me —
Let me help you win this race!
Because I’ve been around the track before
A couple hundred times
So if you learn from my experience
Would that be such a crime?

Yeah honey, woo me
Woo me!
Wind up and pitch it to me
Your best ideas don’t do me
Any good out there in space
‘Cause an idea is like a woman
Playing coy will often fail
And if you want to close the deal
You have to open up the veil

And baby, flaunt it!
Flaunt it!
You gotta make me want it
If I’m not feeling haunted
Hours later by the trace
Of your alluring proposition
Like a perfume in the night
And if it doesn’t drive me crazy
Then you didn’t do it right

Remember I’m your reader
If I buy it, so will they
Convince me that you’ve got
A vital message to convey
I don’t have to agree with you
I only have to care
So be eminently reas’nable
Be eloquent, be fair —

And then you hit ‘em!
Hit ‘em!
Divide ‘em up and split ‘em
This rag is the epitome
Of pressure under grace
You know, a couple million people
Look to us for what to think
And if they won’t write angry letters
Then it isn’t worth the ink

So come on, sell me!
Sell me!
Your message should compel me
Or else you might as well be
Running endlessly in place
You’re on a straight line to the finish
Bring it home before we’re old
You gotta sell me, sell me, sell me!
Sell me, sell me, sell me!
Sell me, sell me, sell me, sell me, sell me —
Until I’m sold!