And there was three old women all dressed the same
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
And they was always singing in the back of your mind
Everybody meet the Fates!
Company
Mmm-mmm-mmm
Hermes
And on the road to hell there was a railroad line
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
And a lady stepping off a train
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
With a suitcase full of summertime
Persephone, by name!
Company
Mmm-mmm-mmm
Hermes
And if you ride that train
Company
Ride that train!
Hermes
If you ride that train
Company
You ride that train!
Hermes
If you ride that train to the end of the line
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
Where the sun don’t shine and it’s always shady
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
It’s there you’ll find the king of the mine
Almighty Mister Hades!
Company
Mmm-mmm-mmm
Hermes
We got any other gods?
Oh yeah, almost forgot . . .
On the road to hell there was a railroad station
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
And a man with feathers on his feet
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
Who could help you to your final destination
Mister Hermes, that’s me!
Company
Mmm-mmm-mmm
Hermes
See, someone’s got to tell the tale
Whether or not it turns out well
Maybe it will turn out this time
On the road to hell, on the railroad line
It’s a sad song
Company
It’s a sad song!
Hermes
It’s a sad tale; it’s a tragedy
It’s a sad song
Company
It’s a sad song!
Hermes
We’re gonna sing it anyway
Now, not everyone gets to be a god
And don’t forget that times are hard
Hard times in the world of men
Lemme introduce you to a few of them
You can tip your hats and your wallets
Brothers and sisters, boys and girls
To the hardest-working Chorus
In the gods’ almighty world!
And working just as hard for you
(indicates Band) Let’s see what this crew can do!
Alright, alright . . .
Alright!
On the road to hell there was a railroad line
And a poor boy working on a song
Orpheus
La la la la la la . . .
Hermes
His mama was a friend of mine
And this boy was a muse’s son
On the railroad line on the road to hell
You might say the boy was “touched”
Orpheus
La la la la la la . . .
Hermes
Cos he was touched by the gods themselves
Give it up for Orpheus!
Orpheus!
There was one more soul on this road
Girl, come on in from the cold!
On the railroad line on the road to hell
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
There was a young girl looking for something to eat
Company
Mmmm . . .
Hermes
And brother, thus begins the tale
Of Orpheus . . . and Eurydice!
Company
Mmm-mmm-mmm
Hermes
It’s a love song
Company
It’s a love song!
Hermes
It’s a tale of a love from long ago
It’s a sad song
Company
It’s a sad song!
Hermes
But we’re gonna sing it even so
It’s an old song
Company
It’s an old song!
Hermes
It’s an old tale from way back when
And we’re gonna sing
We’re gonna sing
We’re gonna sing it again!
Notes on “Road to Hell”
Off-Broadway
I’ve heard it said that opening numbers should be written last; that until you truly know what the tale is, you won’t be able to set your audience up for the telling. This was true of “Road to Hell,” which kept evolving right through Broadway rehearsals. I started writing it in the lead-up to New York Theatre Workshop, and at first it wasn’t a song at all, but a rhymed, metered narration from Hermes. It kept accumulating verses until I finally threw up my hands and said, “I have to write a chorus for this!” In those days, “Road to Hell” wasn’t the first song in the show; it came in spot #2, right after “Any Way the Wind Blows.” When I wrote the call-and-response chorus for it, it started getting troublingly fun, and the more fun it got, the more it troubled me, because everyone started wondering, even in off-Broadway previews, why it wasn’t our opening number. I remember having a crisis meeting about it with Rachel Chavkin (director) and Rachel Hauck (scenic designer) at a Mexican restaurant near NYTW. But it seemed impossible for “Any Way the Wind Blows” in its then incarnation to come in spot #2, by which point the audience is craving genuine story information, not apocalyptic impressionist poetry. So the choice would have been to cut “Any Way the Wind Blows” in its entirety, and I didn’t have the heart to do it. The whole thing required a rethink that couldn’t happen until later.
Edmonton & London
In Edmonton I moved “Road to Hell” to spot #1, and the song continued to evolve as we rethought exactly who and what we wanted to introduce in our opening number. One of the main Edmonton additions was the choral and choreographic presence of a Workers Chorus (we’d had a Workers Chorus in Vermont, but didn’t have budget or space for one off-Broadway). “Road to Hell” started gaining verses left and right as it incorporated an intro for the Workers: You can tip your hats and your wallets . . . as well as one for the band: Let’s see what this crew can do! Hades hadn’t gotten an intro at all off-Broadway, and in Edmonton and London he got a nod, but wasn’t mentioned by name:
Hermes: Him? / Oh, we’ll get to him . . . / It’s just a matter of time / On this railroad line . . .
But the feedback that landed like a ton of bricks post-NYTW was this: people found Orpheus and Eurydice less fully drawn, and therefore less compelling, than Hades and Persephone. It was the beginning of what would become a yearslong process of trying to bring more specificity to our young lovers. Their off-Broadway intro went:
Hermes: On the railroad line on the road to hell / There was a young man down on bended knee / And brother, thus begins the tale of Orpheus / And Eurydice!
The bended knee was a beautiful, archet
ypal image, which got repeated in “Road to Hell Reprise” at the end of the show (There’s a young man down on bended knees). Ultimately, though, it didn’t give us enough information about Orpheus, and still less about Eurydice. For Edmonton and London I doubled the length of their introductory stanza this way:
Hermes: On the railroad line on the road to hell / There was a poor boy working on a song / Poor boy singin’ to himself / Waiting for someone to come along / On the railroad line on the road to hell / Like this young girl looking for something to eat / And brother, thus begins the tale of Orpheus / And Eurydice!
With “Road to Hell” now in spot #1, and longer than ever, it started begging for a “button,” a musical resolution that would give the audience permission to applaud. The Off-Broadway version ended on a suspension, segueing directly into “Come Home with Me.” It was painful for me to let go of the Off-Broadway line: It’s a tale of a love that never dies as well as its counterpart: (It’s) about someone who tries. But the new rhymes allowed us to cycle through all three of our choruses backward and land with a button on the line that ultimately came to define the resilience of the story: We’re gonna sing it again! And allowing the audience to go nuts at the end of the song was exactly what we needed, going into this sad tale.
Broadway
For Broadway, I finally gave Hades a legitimate intro of his own. In response to a note from Ken Cerniglia (dramaturg), I reordered the verses so Hermes’s introduction of himself felt more prominent, and added the Someone’s got to tell the tale stanza to let the audience know that Hermes is, in addition to a conductor of souls, the conductor of our story. The main rewrite, though, was (again) to the introduction of Orpheus and Eurydice. The early feedback about our young lovers feeling out of focus had never gone away, and Orpheus often bore the brunt of the criticism. Was he Che Guevara, or Woody Guthrie? A revolutionary, or a farm boy? Was he really as confident as he came across in early versions of the show? What had been a pesky ambiguity became a full-blown crisis after London, when review after review commented on the unsympathetic qualities of our hero. Audiences weren’t falling in love with him, and we needed them to, for the story to matter at all.
There was an emergency meeting post-London between me, Rachel, Ken, and Mara Isaacs (producer). We called this little committee “Team Dramaturgy,” and we convened on this occasion at the New Amsterdam Theatre, where Ken worked for Disney Theatricals. We decided to reframe Orpheus as more of an innocent. In hindsight, I’d been headed in that direction incrementally for a long time, but between London and Broadway I made a massive rewriting push. This “New Orpheus” wasn’t a shy character—that was important to me for the guy who sings “Wedding Song”—but a sensitive soul, the kind who gets lost in his own world sometimes. This is exactly how we encounter him in the Broadway version of “Road to Hell”: lost in his own world, touched by the gods as Hermes puts it, singing his “Epic” melody. Hermes has to introduce him twice, because he doesn’t hear the audience’s applause the first time. That little gesture alone seemed to endear him to the audience more quickly. It was the final, missing piece of our opening number, and it had to be written last.
ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS
Fates
Oooooh
Oooooh
Oooooh
Oooooh
Hermes
Eurydice was a hungry young girl
A runaway from everywhere she’d ever been
She was no stranger to the world
No stranger to the wind
Eurydice
Weather ain’t the way it was before
Ain’t no spring or fall at all anymore
It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold
Any way the wind blows
Fates
And there ain’t a thing that you can do
When the weather takes a turn on you
’Cept for hurry up and hit the road
Any way the wind blows
Wind comes up, ooooh
Eurydice
Do you hear that sound?
Fates
Wind comes up, ooooh
Eurydice
Move to another town
Ain’t nobody gonna stick around
Eurydice & Fates
When the dark clouds roll
Any way the wind blows
Fates
Oooooh
Oooooh
Oooooh
Oooooh
Hermes
You met the Fates, remember them?
Eurydice
Anybody got a match?
Hermes
Always singing in the back of your mind . . .
Eurydice
Give me that . . .
Hermes
Wherever it was this young girl went
The Fates were close behind
Eurydice
People turn on you just like the wind
Everybody is a fair-weather friend
In the end you’re better off alone
Any way the wind blows
Fates
When your body aches to lay it down
When you’re hungry and there ain’t enough to go around
Ain’t no length to which a girl won’t go
Any way the wind blows
Wind comes up, ooooh
Eurydice
And sometimes you think
Fates
Wind comes up, ooooh
Eurydice
You would do anything
Just to fill your belly full of food
Find a bed that you could fall into
Where the weather wouldn’t follow you
Eurydice & Fates
Wherever you go
Any way the wind blows
Fates
Ooooh
Ooooh
Ooooh
Ooooh
Hermes
Now Orpheus was the son of a muse
And you know how those muses are
Sometimes they abandon you
And this poor boy, he wore his heart
Out on his sleeve
You might say he was naive
To the ways of the world
But he had a way with words
And a rhythm and a rhyme
And he sang just like a bird up on a line
And it ain’t because I’m kind
But his mama was a friend of mine
And I liked to hear him sing
And his way of seeing things
So I took him underneath my wing
And that is where he stayed
Until one day . . .
Notes on “Any Way the Wind Blows”
Off-Broadway
My daughter Ramona was conceived during Hurricane Sandy in New York. In the midst of that wet weather, I read a bit of news about wildfires in California. It was 2012, the first year I clocked the tragic irony of simultaneous flooding in the east and drought in the west. I put that into “Any Way the Wind Blows,” which was one of the first Hadestown songs I wrote in the post-studio-album era. I thought of it as an opening number, like the scene-setting “Arabian Nights” at the top of Disney’s Aladdin.
Soon after writing the song, I met and started working with Rachel. The original version of “Any Way the Wind Blows” is exactly the kind of “poetic portraiture” Rachel would have cautioned me against, which was my stock and trade as a singer-songwriter but posed major challenges for drama. A concert audience is happy to trance out during three and a half minutes of music and poetry, but a theater audience demands action from a so
ng. It wants a song to have results, revelations, or both. The “suspension of time” that I find so mystical in the music world has another name in the theater: stasis, the enemy of drama.
But it was too late; the song was written! I remember really having labored over the original language. I was pregnant by then, and wondered if I was annoying the baby in utero by singing the lines over and over:
Fates: In the fever of a world in flames / In the season of the hurricanes / Flood’ll get ya if the fire don’t / Any way the wind blows / And there ain’t a thing that you can do / When the weather takes a turn on you / ’Cept for hurry up and hit the road / Any way the wind blows
Sister’s gone, gone the gypsy route / Brother’s gone, gone for a job down south / Ain’t nobody gonna stick around / When the dark clouds roll / Any way the wind blows
In the valley of the exodus / In the belly of a bowl of dust / Crows and buzzards flying low / Any way the wind blows / No use talking of a past that’s past / Set out walking and you don’t look back / Where you’re going there ain’t no one knows / Any way the wind blows . . .
Sister’s gone, gone the gypsy route / Brother’s gone, gone for a job down south / Gone the same way as the shantytown / And the traveling show / Any way the wind blows . . .
I rewrote the verses many times over the years. I rewrote the choruses once, for a few reasons, but one was that use of the word gypsy. Like many Americans I grew up far removed, in space-time, from the historical implications of the word as an ethnic slur. I must admit it’s a word I grew up loving and found very beautiful. But it’s also true that poetic intent doesn’t matter, if the poetry is received as hurtful. Words change over time, and that one’s time was up.
Working on a Song Page 2