Saturday, February 10, 2018

The joy of a replenished song list!


Towards the end of the Sisyphus production I started getting back into the mode of composing music. It takes about 6 months to compose the songs needed to create a full length musical. Composers are always thinking about their "next" work, but you never really know when an idea will get enough traction for you to commit to the magnitude of a full length musical. In any case, you need a bunch of songs to work with so you might as well get at it and replenish your song list with new musical ideas.

At first, you're just putting chords and melodies on paper with words scattered around here and there. Then the story emerges and the songs start having relevance to the characters and the plot, that's when the lyrics start flowing and complete songs are placed in the libretto.

For me, if the songs come, so does the story. I wouldn't be good at writing songs for a predefined script. So here's the list of songs we have to use with Eigg, I started working on them in early 2017 as the Sisyphus production geared up and I put that work in the hands of the director. There are nearly 50 new songs here! I'm so thankful they came together like they did.