sing city, the making of - episode one.

people have been asking - how did you guys write the whole thing? who wrote what? what were you thinking? blah blah blah. so... here's a little bit of background info on... where the songs came from.

i had a lot of musical ideas connected to certain lyrics (in cases, maybe just individual lines) that had bounced around my head for quite a while during the percolation process. so one saturday afternoon, my brother and i sat down and bashed out concepts for eight songs that would form the backbone (or so we thought) of our musical.

at this point, we had no script, or even any vague idea of where it was going - only that the musical was set at penn, and that it was about love - hence you may notice that most of the songs that actually survived this first wave ended up in act i (introductory material), and/or are pretty general. most of them began really just as tunes in my head, linked to a few words, phrases, lines. then under pressure from caleb, and occasionally with some chords from him that uh, were different from what i had in mind, i began to flesh out the rest of the tunes, and then add more lyrics.

this was the first wave of songs that made the cut -
you are here; random school facility; yellow people; university of pennsylvania; midnight; priorities; friday night lights, (waking up alone on a) saturday morning, SINGAPORE.

yes, some of these never survived to the next round, notably 'friday night lights', a frat party-themed rock song which died a horrible death (caleb hated it and i never really liked it) and was resurrected in spirit from the grave, and went heavy reconstructive surgery to become 'sing, little city' (which made much more musical and lyrical sense.) 'saturday morning' was meant to be a slow, soppy counterpart in the aftermath of 'friday night lights', and they were meant to meld into a call-and-answery layered reprise titled 'friday night/saturday morning' that... never saw the light of day.

'SINGAPORE' was this concept that we had in our head very early - an introductory song with lots of singaporeans waking up, along the lines of 'belle' from 'beauty and the beast'. i in fact wanted to begin the musical with grace singing the lines - "sing-a-pore/it's a quiet island/every day/like the one before/sing-a-pore/full of sing-a-po-o-reans/waking up/to/say...." and then i couldn't think of anything suitably singaporean and bisyllabic greeting-esque except "wah lau" to take the place of "bonjour", so that idea was tossed. much later... i ay-ay-ay-ay-ed 'results' into existence to caleb's chagrin, and the rest is history.

before i started this blog, i actually wanted to sit down and detail the work done on each individual song, both as a personal reference for myself on the songwriting process, as well as interesting anecdotal material for whoever's interested in how we actually wrote the whole damn thing in two months. so i did a rambly background on the making of 'you are here', and that took up all the energy i had. i'll write more if the mood takes me.

You Are Here - for the longest time, was just a chorus and a concept - in fact, jst the strange modulation/progression in lines 3-5 (..you are HERE (question posed)... when the WINter's done its WORST (strange chord, tension)... when the SNOW at last (progress, wistful chord, still strange).. has MELted into memory (resolution, return to comfort...). i had the tune for that ringing in my head long before i filled in the lyrics - the only lyric lines that were existent from the very beginning were 'you are here' at the beginning of each chorus line, and 'you are here, and it matters to me' at the very end. i was really planning to change that ending when i first wrote it - felt a tad cheesy? but after the wordiness of the previous choruses after i filled in more lyrics, it felt simple - clean - and by then it had settled quite definitely in my head. simple, primary school vocab - but simple, primary school concepts are also the strongest.

the chorus as we know it now - was actually going to be just a repeated verse unit, and i was stuck there with this song for a long time, but out of somewhere the lyrical/musical line 'where i'm from, things don't change..." just hit me - and then 'summer nights to summer days...' immediately followed - and after that the whole seasonal theme just piled on. other early lines that felt suddenly right were 'no one sees/ it begin/ just a changing of the wind' (personal bad inclination towards -ing-ing verbs into nouns); 'the lights go up on locust walk' (one of my favorite visual memories of penn). it came back to me then, that fall day in sophomore year, walking by vance hall, and the golden leaves suddenly all cascading down - the rest of the song wrote itself.

there are lines that i must continually apologize for/explain: 'a time to give/a time to take/where you going for spring break' - they were intended originally as an interlude of guorui (dad) and yanmin(mom) and random singaporean, to lighten the somewhat emo tone of the song. and then the following line 'when the heart begins to ache' allows a swift return to the original mood, and i was just thinking of valerie's voice soaring up that note in sweet contrast to the more farcical spring break line.but people still complain. aiyah.

the last verse is of course the one most relevant to me as a senior, and caleb actually takes the credit for assigning it to filip. early into the practices, he sold me on the idea of having filip half-speak, half-sing those lines ('here it ends/where we begun/packing boxes one by one') in his distinctive toodle-dy-doo filipian fashion. to my deep sorrow, the previous spring break lines appeared to have gained more ground in the filipian consciousness as opposed to my deeply sentimental ('i'll put my memories on rewind/looking back on better times/ now it's finally time to find/ what to take or leave behind') - because he sang the former instead! ah!!! :} i spent a lot of time cobbling those last two lines together. (though right now i feel that the last line should be 'what to keep or leave behind'). i saw those lines from the very beginning as a single character standing on stage in front of a box, two items in his hands - each invoking memories - but only one can fit. primitive foreshadowing. woohoo.

i actually thought the first take of 'you are here' would appear early in the play, and the last final reprise would be very late in the play, so i wrote the two lines 'after the world has done its worst/after the joy and tears have melded in our memories' with the extremely long 'after the' taking the place of 'when', thinking of some kind of musical dramatic pause (fermata? whatchamacallit?) (you are HERE ....pause....aaaafter the world..etc) to be injected there. i was also very smug when 'joy and tears have melded in our memories' took the place of 'snow at last has melted' in my head - ah, i love what you can do to the english language just by changing a letter. (in retrospect, the subtle difference is a little bit hard to catch while sung, though. lesson learned.)

'you are here' was the first song to be completed, and one of my personal favorites. (also the first original song i've written in, uh, 9 years.) i do somewhat regret that its eventual placement in act three somewhat downgraded its significance in the musical - and shanghai-ed its thematic focus away from seasonality/transience/permanence (the importance of time - which is what i was thinking of) and towards location (the importance of place - which is what it seems to come off as being about, both from title and the dialogue leading up to it). i was also thinking of it as a triumphant ending song, but caleb wrote his massive 'after all this time' ending over it, so, fine, bleah.

oh, and it's dedicated to jasmine tsai, for being here. the song's inspired by her, anyway. ultimately, the rest of the song is just icing - the last two primary school lines are what i mean to say. regardless of changing seasons, time and place - here and now, you are here - and it matters to me.