Working on a Song
Page 4
WEDDING SONG
Eurydice
Lover, tell me if you can
Who’s gonna buy the wedding bands?
Times being what they are
Hard and getting harder all the time
Orpheus
Lover, when I sing my song
All the rivers’ll sing along
And they’re gonna break their banks for us
And with their gold be generous
All a-flashing in the pan
All to fashion for your hand
The river’s gonna give us the wedding bands
Eurydice
Lover, tell me if you’re able
Who’s gonna lay the wedding table?
Times being what they are
Dark and getting darker all the time
Orpheus
Lover, when I sing my song
All the trees gonna sing along
And they’re gonna bend their branches down
To lay their fruit upon the ground
The almond and the apple
And the sugar from the maple
The trees gonna lay the wedding table
Eurydice
So when you sing your song
The one you’re working on
Spring will come again?
Orpheus
Yes
Eurydice
Why don’t you sing it, then?
Orpheus
It isn’t finished
Eurydice
Sing it!
You wanna take me home?
Orpheus
Yes
Eurydice
Sing the song
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
La la la la la la
Company
La la la la la la
Orpheus
La la la la la la
Orpheus & Company
La la la la . . .
Eurydice
How’d you do that?
Orpheus
I don’t know
The song’s not finished, though
Eurydice
Even so, it can do this?
Orpheus
I know
Eurydice
You have to finish it!
Lover, tell me when we’re wed
Who’s gonna make the wedding bed
Times being what they are
Hard and getting harder all the time
Orpheus
Lover, when I sing my song
All the birds gonna sing along
And they’ll come flying from all around
To lay their feathers on the ground
And we’ll lie down in eiderdown
A pillow ’neath our heads
The birds gonna make the wedding bed
Eurydice
And the trees gonna lay the wedding table
Orpheus
And the river’s gonna give us the wedding bands
Orpheus & Eurydice
Mmmmm . . .
Notes on “Wedding Song”
Vermont
“Wedding Song” didn’t exist in the early Vermont productions; there was a different love duet that came early in the show called “Everything Written.” It was beautifully arranged and orchestrated by Michael Chorney. The song was quite pretty, but to me it felt tonally too “sweet” in the midst of what I thought of as a “gritty” show. It had cosmic, star-crossed love in spades. First, the Fates invoked a series of constellations:
Fates: Seven Sisters / Little Dipper / Great Bear, Hunter / Drinking Gourd / Libra, Leo / Pisces, Pluto / Venus, Virgo / Capricorn . . .
Then we heard from Eurydice:
Eurydice: Don’t it make, don’t it make you feel so small? / Orpheus, when you look up at it all? / When I look into the skies / I lose my head for scale and size / And still you’re larger in my eyes / Than any star / You pull on me like gravity / I want to be where you are
The chorus went:
Eurydice: They say that everything is written / Everything written in those stars / The very lives we’re living / The very love in our hearts
Then Orpheus came in:
Orpheus: Who could write, who could write this kind of love? / From such a height, all those light-years up above? / And all these light-years down below / I don’t need any star to show me / What my heart already knows / Eurydice / You pull on me like gravity / I want to be where you are
Then they both sang the chorus . . . in cosmic harmony. For the second Vermont production, I added a little coda, which I can see now had the seeds of their essential characters embedded within it, with Eurydice calling the night cold and dark, and Orpheus seeing only the beauty of it:
Eurydice: Come near
Orpheus: I’m here
Eurydice: It’s so cold
Orpheus: So clear
Eurydice: It’s so dark
Orpheus: So fair
Eurydice: Come near
Orpheus: I’m here
Eurydice: You’re there . . .
Off-Broadway
I wanted to replace “Everything Written” with a different duet for the lovers, a number with more conflict and panache. I wrote the first version of “Wedding Song” for the studio album that came out in 2010 and that is exactly the version we delivered on the NYTW stage. It was mythically on point for a few reasons. It invoked the “wedding” of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is, in the ancient tale, the scene of Eurydice’s tragic snakebite. In the mythology, the music of Orpheus has the power to charm animals, change the course of rivers, and cause trees (and even rocks!) to dance—these spirits of nature appear in the song. It felt right for Orpheus, with his faith in the impossible, to wax poetic about the power of song. It also felt right for practical-minded Eurydice to counter his faith with realism.
Edmonton
But the song was not without its problems. The exuberant confidence of Orpheus got us in trouble because it painted him, again, as a braggart—not an underdog poet we could root for. I made one change to the body of the song between NYTW and the Citadel, in an effort to temper his self-focus: And they’re gonna break their banks for me / To lay their gold around my feet became: And they’re gonna break their banks for us / And with their gold be generous. And bend their branches down to me / To lay their fruit around my feet became: And they’re gonna bend their branches down / To lay their fruit upon the ground. And: And they’ll come flying round to me / To lay their feathers at my feet became: And they’ll come flying from all around / To lay their feathers on the ground. To this day I prefer the poetry of the original; it was connected, in my mind, with the ground beneath your feet lines in “Chant” (the Hades / Persephone verses in “Chant” are a dark inversion of “Wedding Song”). But I can’t deny that our audience’s love for Orpheus, and their genuine desire for him to succeed, was more important than any lyric.
London & Broadway
There remained something decidedly static about “Wedding Song” as a dramatic scene that no amount of rewriting “Come Home with Me” could solve. We contemplated cutting it various times. It was Rachel who suggested somehow introducing Orpheus’s “Epic” melody in the scene, and I resisted at first, afraid it would compromise the structure of the song. But I started messing around on my guitar, segueing back into the lovers’ “Come Home with Me” banter in the middle of the song and then shifting into the unveiling of Orpheus’s “Epic” melody and its magical effect on the world. It was a test Orpheus could win right before our eyes, which made it a turning point for bot
h Eurydice and the audience, and it seemed to change the alchemy of the song so that, by the time we got to the end of it, the air in the room felt different.
It wasn’t the first time I’d attempted a spoken “Wedding Song” interlude—here’s an exchange that appeared once in a workshop:
Eurydice: You have a way with words, don’t you? It’s too bad none of them are true
Orpheus: It’s not a lie—it’s poetry
Eurydice: How many mouths does a poem feed?
Like the So when you sing your song . . . section on Broadway, the lines came over the “Come Home with Me” chords, a continuation of that introductory banter. Unlike the Broadway interlude, though, it didn’t represent any kind of new revelation or elevation of stakes, and therefore didn’t earn its keep. One of the lessons I learned slowly and thoroughly over the course of working on Hadestown is that a classic three-and-a-half-minute “songwriter’s song” can be exploded any number of ways in the theater without compromising its integrity, as long as the additions provide new information. When I started writing intros, outros, bridges, and interludes, often I was concerned about “breaking” a song that sounded, to my songwriter ears, structurally perfect. Usually, though, I found the songs less fragile and more flexible than I’d given them credit for. Not 100 percent of the time; I did have the experience of adding too much to a song and then finding it overstuffed (as in the London version of “Chant” with its extra Orpheus language), or taking away too much and then finding what was left wasn’t really a song at all (as in the Edmonton version of “Any Way the Wind Blows,” which had only one proper verse and chorus; the rest was narration / dialogue). But nine times out of ten it turned out that a healthy song could absorb plenty of new information, that the element of change and surprise kept the audience engaged, and that, once a successful addition was written, it was hard to imagine the song had ever existed without it.
EPIC I
Hermes
Where’d you get that melody?
Orpheus
I don’t know—it came to me
As if I’d known it all along
Hermes
You have
It’s an old song
A song of love from long ago
Long time since I heard it, though
Orpheus
You’ve heard that melody before?
Hermes
Sure . . .
Orpheus
Tell me more
Hermes
Remember that tale I told you once?
About the gods?
Orpheus
Which ones?
Hermes
Hades and Persephone
Remember how it used to be
Their love that made the world go round?
Orpheus
Yeah, I remember now
But that was long ago
Hermes
Tell it again, though . . .
Orpheus
King of shadows, king of shades
Hades was king of the underworld
But he fell in love with a beautiful lady
Who walked up above in her mother’s green field
He fell in love with Persephone
Who was gathering flowers in the light of the sun
And he took her home to become his queen
Where the sun never shone on anyone . . .
Hermes
Go on . . .
Orpheus
The lady loved him and the kingdom they shared
But without her above, not one flower would grow
So King Hades agreed that for half of each year
She would stay with him there in the world down below
But the other half she could walk in the sun
And the sun in turn burned twice as bright
Which is where the seasons come from
And with them the cycle
Of the seed and the sickle
The lives of the people
And the birds in their flight . . .
Hermes
Singing . . .
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
Hermes
Down below and up above
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
Hermes
In harmony and rhythm
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
Hermes
The gods sang a song of love
Orpheus
La la la la la la
Hermes
And the world sang it with them
But that was long ago
Before we were on this road
Notes on “Epic I”
Vermont
Brother, thus begins the tale of my epic struggle with the “Epics.” These songs, called variously “Epic I,” “Epic II,” and “Epic III” (there was also an “Epic 0” at one point, as well as an “Epic IV”), date back to the second Vermont incarnation of Hadestown in 2007. The early concept for me was that the songs were a chance for Orpheus to show himself as a working poet and musician, something like a community bard. They were called the “Epics” because they comprised a ranging, narrative folk song about Hades, Persephone, and how the world came to be the way it is. Fun fact: Orpheus’s mother is not just any muse; she’s Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.
I unearthed this 2007 version of “Epic I”—at the time, it was the very first song in the show, followed by “Way Down Hadestown.” It made very little sense to anyone, coming at the top of the show, but here it is in its entirety:
Orpheus: King of diamonds, king of spades! / First there was Hades, king of the dirt / Miners of mines, diggers of graves / They bowed down to Hades who gave them work / And they bowed down to Hades who made them sweat / Who paid them their wages and set them about / Digging and dredging and dragging the depths / Of the earth to turn its insides out / Singing la la la la la la la . . .
Then came Persephone, Hades’s wife / Our Lady of Shadows and Meadows entwined / Made to spend half of the days of her life / Right alongside of him down in the mine / But the other half she could walk in the sun / And the sun in turn burned twice as bright / Which is where the seasons come from / And with them the cycle / Of the seed and the sickle / The lives of the people / And the birds in their flight / Singing la la la la la la la . . .
So it was and it might have stayed / And the sun came up and the sun went down / A circle of fourths, a perfect cadence / The serpent’s tail in the serpent’s mouth / But the strong will take what they want to take / And the weak can only tell the tale / And the king began to lay his heavy hand upon the scale / What did he want? He wanted Our Lady / To have and to hold, not half, but wholly / To love him and never to leave him again / And as for the seasons, to hell with them! / And the earth warmed over in the dead of the winter / The stillborn spring lay cold beneath / Summer gave a stormy sermon / Autumn walked in the wake with a wreath / And the people moved like weather patterns / Looking for shelter, looking for warmth / Helter-skelter the four winds scattered / The scavengers over the ravaged earth / Singing la la la la la la la . . .
Off-Broadway
Off-Broadway, the scene and song looked like this:
Hermes: Orpheus and Eurydice
Eurydice: So, what’s your song about?
Hermes: They lived off of the land
Orpheus: It’s about the gods
Hermes: It was sometimes famine, sometimes feast / Depending on the wind / Eurydice was a hungry young girl
Eurydice: Well, go on . . .
Hermes: Young and hungry as anything<
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Eurydice: Sing your song
Hermes: And Orpheus was a poor boy . . .
Orpheus: It’s not finished . . .
Eurydice: Sing it!
Hermes: Till he opened his mouth to sing . . .
Orpheus: Gather round, you vagabonds / Picking fruit and hopping freights / And anyone who’s wandering / Wondering why the winds have changed / I’ll sing a song of a love gone wrong / Between a mighty king and queen / Gather round, I’ll sing the song / Of Hades and Persephone
Queen of flowers, queen of fields / Queen of the green and growing earth / Lady Persephone, half of the year / Was bound to stay down in the underworld / But the other half she could walk in the sun . . .
And from there it resembled the Persephone verse from Vermont. In fact, the main purpose of this radically shortened off-Broadway “Epic I” was the introduction of Persephone. I was rightly cautioned that our audience might not have Mythology 101 at the forefront of their minds, and might therefore need a reminder about Persephone and the six-months-above, six-months-below situation that was so essential to our plot. At the end of the scene, when Orpheus trailed off, there was a sweet exchange between the lovers. Eurydice, overcome by his music, kissed Orpheus on the mouth. “That’s good!” she exclaimed (referring to the song, but maybe also the kiss). “It’s not finished,” he said, and he kissed her again . . .