What was the motivation for writing Songs for a New World?
SFANW didn’t start out literally as a show. It was just songs that I’d written. I used to play in a piano bar in Greenwich Village and I knew that a few years before a show called Closer Than Ever had started there and eventually moved off-Broadway for a financially successful run. I thought, I can write a show that can make a little money. So I stole the idea. I thought I’ll put four people on stage with a little band, and it’ll be exactly the same. So I took the room upstairs and started to put Songs together and, of course, found out that it wasn’t as easy as it looks! So then I started throwing songs out and writing new ones. Gradually over a number of years a very clear emotional arc began to run right through the show. At the end of the day I had written more than half of the songs specifically for it, which was certainly never the intention. How many sources were there for the original songs? There were a bunch but it’s safe to say that none of them ever got finished which I thi
