Tag Archives: songwriting

Sleeping Beauty Wakes at McCarter, 0 Days to Opening: Letter to an aspiring musical theater composer.

May 6, 2011 – 12:20 pm

I’ve often wanted to get a time machine and at the very least, send a message to my former self. If I could, it would go something like this: Dear 16-year-old Brendan, Congratulations. You’ve written your first song for a musical. You’ve recognized that pop songs in and of themselves are too limiting for you, [...]

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Sleeping Beauty Wakes at McCarter, Days 8 & 9: Elation. Despair. Repeat.

April 5, 2011 – 1:06 pm

I swear, getting the three of us to agree on a course of action, getting the three of us to deCIDE how to define a particular moment in the end of the show is like herding cats. First we’re all filled with elation; we’ve found a direction that we all like! Then we pursue it [...]

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Sleeping Beauty Wakes at McCarter, Day 7: (gulp)

April 3, 2011 – 8:00 pm

In Act 1, there’s a dream sequence which encompasses the entire Sleeping Beauty fairy tale–from before birth of princess through to princes coming and slashing through brambles to kiss sleeping girl one hundred years later. Only the tale is told out of order and through the lens of the dreamers who are dreaming it–four sleep [...]

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Sleeping Beauty Wakes at McCarter, Day 2. Rewriting.

March 29, 2011 – 8:52 pm

Okay, I shouldn’t be writing this. I should be sleeping. But today was so great. Firstly, we have a rehearsal pianist, Chris Ertelt. What this means is he can go over parts to the songs with the non-patients while I set up in another room and write with Val. This is heaven. This is also [...]

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Walking Long Distances to Write Better Songs

August 2, 2010 – 6:00 am

Val and I live in greater Los Angeles, California. There are a lot of cars. Cars are, you might say, necessary to the economy and to a life in LA. Recently, I found myself mysteriously without either a car or a bike. Millie Van Lily, our aging yet functional monstrous van, was on its way [...]

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Verses and Choruses and Such

August 27, 2008 – 8:16 am

This blog entry may bore some of you to tears. If you don’t have any interest in a discussion of song form, I suggest you visit some other part of the site, or go out and play in the sunshine. For the rest of you — this came out of the comments that were posted [...]

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