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What it's like to Write Lyrics for Musicals--Part 2

October 20, 2021 • Season 1 • Episode 5

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We continue the conversation with award-winning lyricist Glenn Slater. Love the animated movie "Tangled" or the TV show "Galavant"? Glenn reveals some making-of stories that you need to hear. He also shares the building blocks of creating a song; talks about the differences between writing for stage and screen; and shares how it feels to work on a song for weeks or months and have it end up "in the trunk." You'll also learn the meaning of other showbiz terms like "kill your babies" and "birthing an elephant."

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Connect with him on Twitter: @SlaterLyrics
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Ultimately my job is to disappear. My job is for you to hear a lyric not as coming from a lyricist. But to believe that that cartoon spontaneously thought and felt these things and suddenly burst into song.

When cartoons burst into song with Glenn Slater's lyrics, they're sure to bring a smile to your face. Glenn's lyrics are clever, witty, thoughtful, and sometimes just sly enough to make you think. How did he come up with that? I'm Elizabeth Pearson, gar. And this is the experience Podcast, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of all sorts of interesting experiences. Today, part two with lyricist Glenn Slater. He's written the lyrics to some of the most popular musicals on Broadway movies and television. In this episode, we go deep into the Disney animated hit tangled, get a tutorial on the building blocks of creating a song and learn the differences between writing for stage and screen. In part one, we left off talking about inspiration. So let's pick up the conversation with Glenn Slater.

Talking about inspiration and some of your lyrics, I made note of a few that I just love. And I want to get your reaction and where these came from. Okay, from Tangled from I've got a dream. I can't sing so I'm not gonna sing it but call us brutal, sick, sadistic and grotesquely optimistic, Glenn. Glen. So funny to rhyme, sadistic and optimistic.

Well, thank you howdy.

I mean, was that just from the pad? Or how did you how'd you get that one.

So Tangled is a movie that really has, it's a three character show, it's Rapunzel, Flynn, Ryder, and Mother Gothel. And if you watch the movie, everybody else was kind of a bit character in the original draft, and for the first year and a half of the existence of what we're working on it, that scene in the pub where that song happens didn't exist, or it existed in such a proto form. It was basically she goes into the pub, she's afraid to be there, she has a two sentence conversation with Flynn writer, and they leave. But as the score and the movie were taking shape, we kept looking at the structure. And we kept saying, you know, we don't have enough variety, we only have three characters really who have enough emotional growth to sing. And one of those characters Flynn writer you have drawn as being too cool to sing. Like that's his car, he refuses to sing. So you've only given us two characters. And that's, that's all we're hearing, we need to have a group number, we need to hear other voices. And we need comedy. And so Alan and I looked at the structure of the script, and the place where it seemed to fit the best was in where that pub scene was. But again, there wasn't really a scene there. So we went to the writer, and we said, is there a way to build this scene into something with more characters who have something to impart to her that works in with the theme of the film. And it can be a little bit more physical, but we need like a production number. And we need we need it to be funny. So he listened to what we had to say. And he came back with a scene. That was basically the idea of turning that pub into like a biker bar. And the joke was, and they're doing a poetry slam, and I read the scene, which was great. And I said, I'm okay, but I can't do a whole song on the poetry slam because the poetry and the song are, but that's not going to work together. So what if, what if I keep the biker quality, and I keep the idea of oh, they're sensitive, and they do things that you would expect bikers to do. But I kind of build it out of that. And it was like, do what you need to do, like just go off and do it. So Alan, and I talked about it. And we had as our basic building rubric for this piece. We were looking at it as a as a movie that was about folk rock as the sort of basic musical vocabulary. Why folk rock, the very first drawings they sent us were of this girl with long hair and this kind of flowery dress barefoot with a guitar in a medieval looking tower like this, just screaming like Joni Mitchell or bias, right? And we say, let's give her that kind of a feel. So it's a little hard to tell now from the score because it's been orchestrated, but knowing that that was our base, that was like kind of our basic vocabulary. And so when we sat down to write the song, Alan kept trying to say, well, what would the biker equivalent be of like folk rock? And he just, he wasn't finding it and going to straight up rock music wasn't giving us anything. We started talking about, like related things like renaissance fairs, or what about pirates and sea Chanteys. And he kept trying to find the right music and he wasn't coming up with it. So this was a rare instance when he said to me, You know what? I'm not finding it at the piano. Why don't you Go through the lyrics first. So for me, this is a rare opportunity because when I can control where the syllables fall and where the rhymes fall, that's when you can come up with a really clever rhymes. I'm in control of the of where it all falls. So I took the opportunity to try to set myself up, knowing that they're thugs that they're kind of pirated. First, I made a list of names, because remember, these didn't exist as characters. So what could they be called? And I came up with Viking names and pirate names and just names a bruisers and brawlers I think came up with a list of what could they do that would be sort of opposite. So, you know, calligraphy, pottery making baking, I just made a long, long list of things they could do, then I start to come up with scenarios. What's funny scenario, how can I combine this like, mean guy, angry guy, rude guy with this sort of lighter flour, more traditionally feminine person. And so the idea of, I mean, if you look at the song, the structure of the joke is, I mean, I'm bad. I'm terrible. I'm terrifying. And yet I do this other thing. It's so funny. And here's why I do it. And so I can set up the rhythm of the jokes. I could build. So funny guy, funnier guy. pile up of guys. Now it's. So we start with a mean guy who plays the piano, a guy with a hook hook for a hand. And the joke is, oh, he has hook for him, but he likes to play the piano. Funny. Then we have a guy who's terrifyingly ugly, but who is romantically inclined and is looking for a girlfriend. And so I could set that up with the how ugly he is, how terrifying his pictures are. And yet, alright, so once you do that twice rhythmically, you need to start that's a story, a story. Now you need to move rhythmically faster. So now it's short bursts. This guy, that guy, this guy, that guy, just quick portraits of you get a name of visual and here's the thing he likes to do. And then it's a question of where do I go from there? You know, you can't go back to yet another guy. You've already done that choke now, how many times? So now it's time. Ah, I've got Flynn writer, the guy was too cool to sing. Let's have them force him to sing. And so they force him to sing once he sings. Who else needs to think well, Rapunzel hasn't sung yet. So now let's get her to sing. So it's knowing who's there what the building blocks are, you can build a varied song, you can structurally keep the jokes coming from different angles, you can vary the basic joke from mean guy with with a flowery dream to guy who has no dream, or his dream is, you know, a little cynical to a girl whose dream is so over the top that that makes it funny. And so that's where it came from.

It works so well. It's one of those things that's just enjoyable on all levels. You know, for the little kids and the adults. I think that's one of the beauties of the animated films that work, I think, have that element.

Once we wrote that song. And we warned them about this, as we were writing it, we said, you're going to have to figure out now that we're giving these guys names and personalities, and they have a funny song, the audience is going to want to see more of them, the movie, the structure is going to feel imbalanced if they don't come back. So once we wrote that song, and they put it into a cut of the film, they're like, Oh, they're right, the audience loves them. And like, where else can we use them. And so they restructured the movie so that those guys come back in the third act in a way that is surprising. And where each of their different traits helps Flynn escape from jail so that he can get to Rapunzel for the big sort of climactic scene, the collaboration, whether it's the micro collaboration between the composer and the lyricist, the macro collaboration with the directors and the writers, the even bigger collaboration on anatomy to film or a Broadway show with your designers, and your animators and your costume people. And you're, and then ultimately, you're collaborating with the audience, because all of these things have to work for an audience. And if, if you put something on the stage, and the audience doesn't laugh, it doesn't work. If you put it on the stage, and they don't try, it doesn't work. And you have to be ruthless about that, too. So that's the final area of collaboration is getting the audience input into whether or not what you're doing is transcending the footlights, or getting across the screen. And then you take that feedback into into account as you continue to shape the piece.

So much of what you have worked on has worked brilliantly. And I'm wondering for you, how does that feel when you're sitting in a theater standing at the back of the house? After all your hard work? And you hear the audience laughing? Or clapping? What is that like?

So I'm one of those sad people who I am many years of therapy has not changed this. But for me, the high point of the process is not at the end. It's barely close to the beginning. It's that moment where I've written the first draft. I've shared it with my collaborator, and we have done the first demo and it's like the birth of the idea, and it feels right. And if it feels right, then I feel like that sense of I have created something. It's a great feeling. I feel like I can take the day off I can have a trick. It's that's the great feeling. Every moment after that feels like a diminishment in some way, a sense of it's being adulterated, it's being changed, it's losing some luster. Now, that's not always the case. Because most of the time, the choreographer is making it better. The director is making it better, the actors are adding something. But it never, for me gets better than that moment, that incandescent moment when it first exists. And when I sit in the theater, mostly what I'm seeing are not the things that work. Mostly what I'm seeing are the things that don't work, the rhyme that I had to get out, and it's Russian, it's not great, the thing where I had to fudge the grammar in order to make it work, the thing that the actor never quite caught, right, the thing that I couldn't convince the director to do, and now they're doing something that they're making some gesture that I didn't want them to make, or blah, blah, blah, all I'm seeing is the collection of flaws. The things that work best for me, or when I'm not focused on my input into the thing, it's when whatever I've done has disappeared, so entirely into the group effort that it feels like, it's not something I did at all, it just feels like a thing that has always existed. And that's ultimately what I'm aiming for is not to create the thing that makes me feel like I did something clever, or I wrote something funny. Ultimately, my job is to disappear. My job is for you to hear a lyric, not as coming from a lyricist. But to believe that that cartoon spontaneously thought and felt these things and suddenly burst into song, or that that actor on the stage is making up the words as he's going along. That's the illusion of effortlessness that we're trying to ultimately create. And the only way to get that across is for me to write in such a way that you stop realizing that a lyricist had anything to do with it. When I can do that. And when, when there's no rhymes that you snag on when there is no consonants that are distracting you when the ideas feel like they're not intellectual, but they're just part of what you're watching when the emotions feel like they have arisen seamlessly from what you're doing. And when it seems like the actors did not even have to take a breath before going from talking in prose to suddenly singing. That's when it works. And when that happens, I don't experience it as my triumph, I experience it as like the show triumphing, and that feels great, that feels great. And that's usually it's that group effort. It's the director, figuring out where everybody goes, and the choreographer coming up with that perfect gesture, or that perfect step that makes you feel lighter than air, and the actor making the right decisions on what to emphasize and how to hold the note and how exactly to pitch their voice so that you feel it in your gut. At the level that I'm working at. Most of the people we're working with, are ridiculously talented. These are the actors who are at the very top of their game, the animators who are just able to make ink look like it's alive by people who are truly brilliant. And so there's a certain sense in which we feed off of each other, but we also lift each other to new levels. And when it works, you don't know where it begins and where it ends, because everybody has been essential to the process

It just must be so exciting because you are surrounded by such talent, like you said, if you can feed off that great, yeah, creative energy, what a gift to be part of that,

you know, often when you're doing it, you don't know what it is that you're doing that's going to work or not work. Often the things that you crafted to elicit a certain response, don't get that response. And often the things that you did not expect to get any response are the things that work, Alan and I did a TV series based on tangled. It's called Rapunzel tangled adventure. And it's a three season show, we wrote about 30 songs for it. We had very short deadlines, we wrote very quickly. And we were writing very specifically to a script that had already been approved and we couldn't change things. So it was a slightly different experience than we had often had. And sometimes we were writing them as kind of, I don't want to say throw aways because it's not like we didn't put effort in. But the effort was more in getting down on paper what the director wanted us to do, rather than imbuing it with anything special that we had. And it was sort of a shock to see how some of those songs resonated with an audience. That was not the audience we were expecting. We weren't we thought we were writing for an audience of kids that were showing on the Disney Channel. But where that show ultimately found its audience was with older teenagers and people in their 20s because it was about characters trying to figure out who they were and investing it with an amount of sincerity that a lot of modern media doesn't allow characters to have. And somehow this thing that I didn't think was going to resonate the way it did, found huge audiences of not the audience, obviously sweating. And you can't predict that you just sort of have to be grateful when it happens.

So let's

just do a hypothetical. Let's say you spent days working on this Alan's done the music, you guys go present it to the producers, the director, and they say, now this doesn't work. And that's that thing is scrapped. How does that feel? Is that a typical situation? Or is it usually Oh, we just need to tweak this a little bit. Are you just used to that? Is that part of the game? Do you have sort of a virtual treasure chest of unproduced work?

Yeah, when I first started writing lyrics, I needed a day job because you can't live on writing lyrics until you're until you have a show up. So I started working in advertising as my day job as a copywriter. And I sort of stumbled into it by accident. But it turned out to be sort of like the perfect training for being a lyricist in many different ways. You know, writing a headline coming up with a with like a tagline for a product is not unlike coming up with the title for a song. coming over. The headline is not unlike coming up with a clever joke, or a clever rhyme. Understanding how to work with a composer is very similar for a copywriter working with an art director, and that same sense of how do you get the words in the image to work together to tell different parts of one story? And how do you convey an emotion or an idea or tell a story in a limited amount of space? For advertising, that's a 30-second Commercial. For a song. It's a two minute, three minute song. But the thing that was most helpful in teaching me was how to kill your babies, as we say,

in advertising,

and film, also, kill your babies

in advertising, you can spend your day coming up with 10 Great ideas. And if they don't work, if the client doesn't like them, you throw them out. And the next day, you come up with 10 more great ideas. And so I got accustomed very early to that process of just having the confidence to know that I have an infinite wellspring of ideas, they're not going to dry up, there will be new ones. So don't get too attached to anything. If these don't work, turn your brain a quarter turn, start thinking of new ideas. And now here comes a whole bunch of new ideas. It's the same thing with writing shows you try to write great songs. Sometimes you write songs that when you finish them, they're not as great as you thought they were. And so you have to throw them away. Sometimes they're great songs, but they don't work for that particular moment. And so you have to throw them away. Sometimes they're great songs that work for that character, and work for that moment. But the actor or actress can't perform them because their voice doesn't go high enough, or they they stumble over the whatever it is. And then sometimes the script changes and so suddenly, your song doesn't fit in the story anymore, or you're 20 minutes too long, and you need to cut 20 minutes out of your show. And this happens to be a song they cut. So every show that we do, we have many, many songs that end up in what we call the trunk. For the Little Mermaid, which already started with five or six classic songs from the movie, we probably wrote another 30 to 40 songs to end up with the 10 additional songs that we added Wow. 30 or 40. On the show leap of faith, which was not a successful show. For the second song in the show for the song that our heroine sings, we wrote 20 songs for that slot. And the song that ended up in the show on Broadway was not the best song that we wrote, it was not the second best song that we wrote, it was probably not even the fifth best song that we wrote, it just happened to be the song that worked for that particular version of the script, with that particular version of the character, and that particular performer. And the other 19 songs that we wrote for that slot, that alone is the size of a Broadway show. There's 19 songs. So you write so many things that end up not working. Now, sometimes you just throw them in the garbage or not put them in the garbage, but you put them in a drawer somewhere, sometimes you end up recording them for a different purpose. So for example, for that first song in Tangled, the song was ultimately called, when will my life begin? But it was originally called, what more could I ever need. And so what more could I ever need was a song of a girl who has everything, and she's perfectly happy and where she was, it was a pretty good song. We all liked it. It was the same melody that is currently there. But what we discovered was that it didn't have enough of that unsettled quality. It made it seem like she was too comfortable and too happy. And it didn't set her up as somebody who needed to leave that tower. So we threw that song out. The writer rewrote the script. And then we said, well, what if we started as a young girl instead of starting her as a teenager? What if we started at an age like three? And we sort of trace how she grows that we can see how she became that comfortable? So we wrote a song that did that. That didn't quite work. And then we said, well, what if we still do that, but we trace her birthdays so that we're sort of tracking her making birthday wishes so we can see what she wants and how her want changes. So we wrote that song. And that didn't quite work because we started feeling like Going back to when she's a kid goes back too far. So we did another thing that didn't work. And then finally, we came back to know works best when we start with her as a teenager. And we wrote several songs with different pieces of music. Until finally, the director said, you know, we always like that original piece of music, is there a way we could take one theme from one of the songs he did use it as a sort of an intro, and set it up with that sense of yearning, then get into this more upbeat, happy, comfortable thing. And so we wrote that, and that was the title that it currently has, which is, when will my life begin. And that title already you can tell has some of that yearning in it. But what we found was that setting up with the yearning, and then going into the upbeat, got the priorities wrong. And what you took out of it was upbeat, not yearning. And so we cut the intro, moved it to the end of the song, and used it as sort of a coda. And the song doesn't have an ending, it just kind of ends on this thing that feels like an intro to something else. But eventually, somehow, we found it. So we have that original piece of music, new title, what was an intro to a different song. Now, the coda to the existing song. And that happened over probably 30 different drafts, maybe more 30 different drafts, and probably six or seven different full songs. So yeah, it could be a long, long process.

And such a collaborative process. I was looking into your body of work, too. And that just shows that in feature films, it can just be such a long process. But when you're working in TV, it's such a fast process, right? And you just need to churn things out when you're working on galvanic was like so many songs in such a short amount of time. And I just find it fascinating that you can and I think you work with Alan so much, I call him Alan, like we're good friends. You can work at such different speeds. You can take these songs and rework them and rework them for films. And then you can just churn them out when you need to.

Yeah, I mean, each medium has a different way of collaborating. And so the process changes in theater. Basically, the songwriters are driving the whole process. musicals are about the music. And so we're in charge more I mean, with the book writer as well, but the artists are in charge. And if you want the song to be in the show, it will be in the show. If you don't want a song to be in the show, you need to be argued out of it by a director or a choreographer or you're not going to balk at cutting a song. If everybody kills it needs to go, but it's your prerogative. You can ultimately say no, it's staying in I can't see the show without this. In a movie, the directors are in charge. And you're sort of subsuming the songwriting to the directorial vision. So for example, I'm going to go back to tangled. The most famous scene in the in the movie is what we call the lantern scene, Rapunzel and Flynn writer are sitting in a rowboat, and there's all these sort of Chinese lanterns that are floating. It's this beautiful image. But when we got the assignment, all we had was the two of them in a rowboat, and it's this kind of awkward moment. And that's where we were told the Ballard was going to go. And so we're like, Okay, well, that seems like it's a big love song kind of a thing. And so we went back to our studios, and we wrote this big Broadway belting ballad, like a big, you know, a whole new world kind of a feeling thing. And it was pretty good. And we brought it to our partners at Disney to the directors into the writer and, and we played it for them and got the exact opposite reaction was that we wanted instead of there, oh, my god, that's amazing. We got that. Well, it's like, Okay, what's wrong? They said, well, it wasn't what we were hoping for, for this scene. And we said, well, what, what did you want? And they said, Well, we wanted something that was a little less show to me. So Alan being Alan said, Alright, let's get a piano. Let's all sit down in front of the piano. And let's work this out. Right then and there. Right? Great. So Alan sits down at the piano. And he says, what about this, this is less show to me. And he wrote it, and they were like, that's a little more poppy. But that's not what we had in mind. And I'm meanwhile saying, Oh, my God, that's an amazing melody. Like that could be an Academy Award winning song. Are you crazy? No, it's not what we had in mind. So Alison, what about this? And he writes another melody that had a little bit more, I don't know, it was a little more focus. It's like, Oh, my God, that's an amazing melody. No, it's not. It's not this enough. It's not that enough. This went on for literally three hours, he must have written 20 different, maybe 30 different melodies, each one of which could have been a hit song, each one of which didn't work for them. Until finally we said, you know, we're not getting what it is that you're looking for. And they said, Well, can we show you the visuals that we're going to be showing, like while they're in the rowboat, and it was the first time they got us out these big, like paintings that an artist had done of the lanterns. And it done. It was like, Oh, you're worried that the song is going to upstage the visual? They're like, yes, we want this all to be about those lanterns. We want it to be about that majestic moment and we don't want it to be about Allen's big ballad. So we said, Ah, okay, so once we understood what the issue was,

they hadn't been able to verbalize that to you. But they finally got it by seeing the storyboards.

Yeah, whether or not they didn't want to insult Ellen by saying we don't want you to upstage ourselves. which is what I think it was. But when we eventually got it, we're like, Oh, okay. And so Allah wrote a melody that was very tranquil. It didn't build. It's not histrionic, it doesn't feel dramatic, it just sort of sits in a place. And when I heard that music, I was like, alright, emotionally, what am I getting out of this tranquil piece of music, what I'm getting is these two characters who have been talking at each other a mile a minute, I mean, they're like a screwball comedy couple throughout the movie, it's insults and banter and one upping each other until this moment where they're sitting in the rowboat, and these lanterns come up, and for the first time, they're both quiet. And it was like, Okay, that makes sense. To me, it's the first time that they can stop and look at the other person. And think, and this is not a ballad, that they sing to each other. This is a ballad that's inside their heads. And once I got that, I was able to piece together what the lyric needed to be, literally, I mean, they needed the song the next day. So when we left the office, it was four o'clock. And at nine, the next morning, we handed them a finished demo.

Wow, that's impressive.

So this is by way of saying that, ultimately, we are ceding control of what the score is to the directors, they have the final say, of what ends up in the show,

you have to kind of be a mind reader or not a mind reader, but it's a work in progress. They know what they don't want, and then you're giving more it's not quite it a little more. It's not quite it, and then it's finally comes to fruition.

Yeah. And it's collaborative, often, we're telling them what they want, like, no, no, no, you want this, because you don't understand what you're asking for, this is what you actually want. Again, if it's a good collaboration, they'll get it and they'll move on the gestation period for a musical, a Broadway musical is anywhere from three to eight years. It's not usually shorter than that. And it can be longer. But it's a long term. It's like birthing an elephant, a movie, even an animated film now that they're computer generated is usually more like a two, two and a half year process. And in terms of the sense of the weight, in a Broadway show, you're kind of writing for the ages, for whatever reason, it's going to be performed by all different people, it's going to be performed by professional Broadway actors is going to be performed by kids at a summer camp, it's going to be performed by a sixth grade class, it's going to be performed at an old age home by community theater. So you're writing the song so that they can they're sturdy enough so that they can last no matter who's doing them. If it's 50 years after the show is open, they're still going to work for a movie, you still want it to stand the test of time. But you're writing it once for one performance, it's going to be captured in cellular Lloyd. It's less weight on you somehow to get everything right. I don't know why. But it feels like it's let's wait. A film television episode is no less permanent. But because you're doing one of 22 episodes, or one of 12 episodes or whatever it is, somehow it feels less weighty. And the television schedule is so much faster. You may not know that your show has been greenlit until just a few months before you shoot. And often you are racing the clock in order to get your things into the hands of the actors so that it can be shot. So on Galavant, we got greenlit in May of 2015. But we weren't given an actual slot. We didn't know when we were going to fit into the schedule until more like August. And then we found out you are airing in January, you need to start shooting in September basically so go. And so there was no time to think and

can't really birth an elephant in a month.

Exactly.

So Galavant the first season was eight episodes, we were trying to get three songs into each episode. And sometimes also like a reprise of a song. So altogether, it ended up being something like I think 33 or 35 songs for the first season. And because we were racing the clock, often we worked out what the songs were going to be, as the actors had started shooting the episode. And we're trying to get it into their hands so that they're on set. It's a Monday, they're going to shoot the scene on Wednesday. So we have to get the song written and arranged and they have to rehearse it and record it before the shooting schedule. So it was no time to think no time to second guess you're not writing for posterity, you are writing for just like get it out of your system, what's your first best idea and executed as well as you possibly can? And cross your fingers and hope for the best?

You're not looking in the thesaurus for the best synonym and all that.

Yeah, when I started writing songs back in the beginning of my career, and I was really trying to polish and nail down everything and get everything perfect. I would spend you know, a month writing a song like really polishing it and getting it to shine. When I started working with Alan, the very first song we wrote he gave me the music I went off to work on it after we he called me up and he said so where is it seems like that's a very different schedule than I'm used to. So I got trained Alright, like one song a week. I can do a song a week and still feel like I'm polishing it. As we began working together more and began doing multiple projects. I'm tediously, that week began to be well, sometimes it's three days, sometimes it's two days. And for Galavan, it became basically a song every other day, three songs a week, we cannot fail, because they are sitting in waiting.

Did you enjoy that?

I loved it, I absolutely loved it. There's something so freeing about being spontaneous, and about not having to second guess yourself, about coming up with that great idea and just doing it and knowing it's going to be on the television screen in a week. It's so exciting and exhilarating. And, you know, it was a great project with great writers and great collaborators, great performers, it was so much fun. So often on that show, all these other things we're talking about came into play. So there was a song that we cut from one of the early episodes, it was meant to be a duet between Galavan and his squire, it was supposed to be a comedy song. And in this sort of like a race to the finish environment, we couldn't really afford to cut a song. So already that put us behind the fact that we were cutting. So when we got to the last episode, we had to write a final song that was written in the script as a lullaby. But it was meant to have all this funny stuff happening around it. Again, a conundrum like how do you write a funny lullaby that's meant to be both emotionally serious and get laughs and I was stuck. And Alan said, Alright, I have a piece of music that I think will work. And he gave me that song. But when that we cut the comedy song, but slowed down, and it was like, Ellen, we already cut this is like, Yeah, but works better as a ballad than comedy song. And I listened. And I was like, yeah, that kind of works. I said, but I have to get this out in two hours. He said, just right. And so you know, I'm sitting there at his kitchen. Like trying to figure it out. What do I do? What do I do? How do I make it funny? After an hour? He said, where is it? It's like, I don't have it. I don't have it an hour. And he's like, all right, he said, Glenn, here's what to do. Don't worry about being funny. Just write a lullaby write a lullaby, like you are writing to your kids. And it doesn't have to be clever. Don't worry about the comedy, just rightful alumni. And I knew that piece of music, not about the piece of music, thought about my kids, whenever I tuck my kids in for sleep, for whatever reason, I was always a good night, my friend. Good night, my friend, as I said, All right, that fits on this piece of music. That's my title. Meanwhile, the writers are calling Alan in the other room, say, Where's the song? Here's the song, we're going to be in the studio. And in 45 minutes, the actor is freaking out because he doesn't know the melody. And we're very bright for the studio to the set. So right, right, right, right, right, handed it off to Alan, they emailed it to England, to where the actor was waiting in the studio. Thankfully, the actor could sight read, he performed the song, five minutes after he got it, they recorded it, they got them on the bus to the set. He loves singing the song on the set, it was a rap. And it turned out to be one of the best songs in the series. I'm so so

and it reminds me of your kids probably when you hear

Yeah, the thing that

you do, painstakingly when you have all the time in the world, and you're trying to write the song that will live in posterity for the musical, all the things that you learn about how to do it, all the instincts, all the lessons that you've learned before, all this sort of shortcuts, you've taken all the wrong turns you've taken, they kind of coalesce when you're under the gun, and you can apply them all super fast when you need to. And just get out something that you haven't thought about at all. It's just get it out the door and you somehow automatically apply all those same lessons.

How do you juggle all the things do you get overwhelmed sometimes of there's too much going on? Are you pretty good at compartmentalizing and say today I'm just working on this.

The ideal situation for any writer is to have one thing to work on where you are focused on the one big project that you love. And that's what you do. And you know, Andrew Lloyd Webber works that way. It's usually one show at a time. Sondheim works that way. It's one show at a time. But they have the luxury of doing that because Edward Webber produces his own shows, whatever he writes, is getting on stage, Stephen Sondheim, whatever, he writes, somebody will stage somewhere. So there's no pressure on him to do anything other than that, for the rest of us mortals, we can never be sure of whether or not the show will find an audience whether it will get the financing, whether it will get put into turnaround, whether it will get a green light, whether it will get canceled, you never know. So for most of my career, I've tried to balance about four things at once. And I try to mix it up between film and television and theatre, because of the different timelines because of the different working modes, because the different amounts of control that you have. So it's different frustration levels. And then there's also you get paid differently. So for a Broadway show, you don't get paid to write a Broadway show, you get a percentage when the show is on stage. You know, you can be working for eight years on a Broadway show and make zero money. And if it then opens and flops and closes the next night, you just spent eight years and didn't get paid. Conversely, if you worked for eight years, and you wrote Phantom of the Opera, which has grossed, I don't know $5 billion You get 2% of that $5 billion into perpetuity. So, you know, you can make a killing but but it's hard to make a living.

It's a risk.

Yes. So usually I try to balance four things at once, the pandemic sort of threw a wrench into all that, because with nothing being produced on stage, and nothing being produced on film, nobody had anything to do. But one thing you could do was make deals. And so during all last summer, it was a flurry of pitching ideas and getting pitched ideas and who do I want to work with? And who do I not want to work with and getting things in place? And basically, agents and managers telling you don't say no to anything, because so many things are getting greenlit, not all of it will be able to get produced. At some point, you know, if something gets pushed back a year, it's possible that the executive who bought it is gone. And then that thing falls off the map. You never know what's going to be there. So everybody said yes to too many things. And now that the world is opening up, again, we're dealing with the fallout of, we're always trying to handle this, the uncertainty of the entertainment world, but it's now more uncertain than ever, and we're all trying to balance. Alright, I've said yes to 10 things, which of them are real, what's the priority? How do I do triage? How do I balance the thing I really want to do versus the thing that I now politically have to do, because I said yes, versus the thing that I have to do, because I signed the contracts, versus the thing that I need to start doing now. But it won't actually be a thing until down the road a piece and I need to sort of keep it in play. It's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of work, it's been a little bit different than the usual balance of work. Usually, I'm spending five to seven hours a day in writing, and then a certain amount of maybe another hour or two, on phone calls or in meetings. With a pandemic, it's been sort of the amount of phone calls and meetings has ballooned astronomically, I'm spending almost my entire afternoon on Zoom calls, or phone calls, or of the many things that I'm balancing. Some are based in London, some are based in New York, some are based in LA and one is based in Australia. And so the emails and the phone calls come all day long. You know, I often like to tell collaborators, particularly new collaborators who have never done this kind of thing before, musicals that work, whether it's on film, or television, or the stage, musicals that work, or the musicals where everybody is writing the same musical musicals that don't work are the ones where you think you are, but you're not. And people are working across purposes, people don't see the characters of the same way. People don't understand the themes the same way. Whenever you're working on the same thing, and you're all on the same page. Everything fits together seamlessly. When not the cracks form, the fissures form, things don't go together, the structure doesn't hold things, feel shoddy, you end up with a problem in the second act that you can't fix in the first act, because this person doesn't understand what you're trying to do. Or they don't see the arc that you see. And then suddenly you're in previews, the audience is restless, nobody's agreeing on anything, and your show closes two weeks later. So those face to face meetings where everybody is, you may not be agreeing. But you're at least talking and arguing and bickering and testing things out. And building that consensus and understanding where other people are. They're completely essential. And that's what we've all been missing for a year and a half.

Thank you, you absolutely delightful and a font of information. And I don't need to wish you continued success because you've already got it flowing. But I really appreciate all your time.

And thank you for all the great entertainment and I look forward to more.

Absolutely.

So much of what Glenn taught me about musical theater can be applied universally. Here are my takeaways. Number one, when your team is on the same page, things work out seamlessly to let yourself be surprised by outcomes. Sometimes the things you don't think will get a big reaction make the biggest splash and vice versa. Three, allow yourself to bloom where you're planted. stumbling into a job like becoming an ad copywriter, when you want to be a lyricist can turn out to be a great gift for you have an infinite wellspring of ideas. They're not going to dry up. And finally, number five, it's okay when things end up in the trunk. You can create a lot of things that don't work on the way to creating the thing that does work. I have to give a huge standing ovation for the generous and kind Glenn Slater. Please visit our website, the Experience podcast dotnet to explore other episodes and find out how to follow us on social media. And if you liked what you heard, please subscribe rate and review this Podcast it helps others discover us I'm Elizabeth Pearson gar thanks for joining in the experience