Wait for me, I’m coming / In my garters and pearls / With what melody did you barter me / From the wicked underworld?
The first two lines had to do with my own love life. I met Noah when I was just nineteen and had the sense early on that I was going to marry him. I was young, though, and ambitious to become a touring singer-songwriter, so I was asking him to “wait” while I did some literal and figurative “running around.” The next two lines were mysterious, a free association, but they seemed to point to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which had been a favorite myth of mine as a kid. Interestingly, neither the melody nor the lyrics appeared in the 2006 version of the show.
In 2007 I wrote the version of the chorus that audiences would recognize today, but it was intercut with these dialogue-style verses between Hermes and Hades:
Hades: Hermes! / Hermes: Hades! / Hades: Back in town! / Please, sit down / Please, relax / You’ve been around the world and back / Haven’t you, Hermes? / Hermes: I have / Hades: How’s the weather? / Hermes: Worse than ever / How’s your wife? / Hades: My wife is fine / Hermes: You’ve been spending a lot of time together / Haven’t you, Hades?
Hades: What have you brought? / Hermes: The latest crop / Hades: The freshest cut? / Hermes: A cut above / Hades: How many of them, a lot? / Hermes: A lot / Hades: A few too many, perhaps / What’s this? / Why have you brought me Orpheus? / I know I never ordered that / It seems you’ve gone behind my back / Haven’t you, Hermes?
Hades: What was that? / Hermes: What was what? / Hades: I heard a voice / Hermes: I heard it not / Hades: Someone singing / Hermes: I heard nothing / Hades: Some kind of song / Hermes: You could be wrong / It could have been the wind / Hades: The wind? / Hermes: It could have been the rain / Hades: The rain? / Hermes: It could have been the train . . . (the train / the train / the train / the train . . .)
Off-Broadway & Edmonton
I rewrote the verses of “Wait for Me” entirely for the studio album. I remember feeling that our 2007 production had skewed too “dark,” and part of it was that our “coyote” Hermes seemed to have joined the dark side. I wanted him to be more of a mythological helper, like Joseph Campbell’s “mentor” figure in the “hero’s journey.” I worked on the new verses on the first tour I opened for Bon Iver. It was Europe in 2008, the first time I’d met Justin. I was in search of an Orpheus; I’d already asked a few people who’d turned it down. This happened to be for the best, because the moment Justin opened his mouth on the first night of the tour, my heart exploded. It has to be Justin! I thought. But I was shy to ask him, having just met him, and he was already doing me a great favor by having me support the tour. I’ll wait till the end of the tour, I thought, and then ask. But a couple nights later we were on a ferry from Scotland to Scandinavia; I’d had a bit of wine and couldn’t contain myself. “I’m writing a folk opera,” I blurted out all in a rush. “We’re making a record, Ani DiFranco and Greg Brown are on it, I need you to sing the role of Orpheus.” He said simply, “Sure.” It was on another ferryboat during that same tour that I wrote most of the new verses of “Wait for Me.” The band and crew had flown somewhere on a day off for a television taping, so it was just me and the bus driver on the long drive to Dublin for the end of the tour. Because I was with the driver, I got to enjoy the section of the ferry devoted to “lorry-men,” including a little sleeper cabin, where I worked on the new verses. The off-Broadway and Edmonton versions of “Wait for Me” were the same as the album version.
London & Broadway
At some point before London, we started to become aware that Orpheus had almost no songs that ended on a “button” that gave the audience permission to applaud for him. I don’t think it was arbitrary. There was something in his artistic nature that leaned toward musical suspensions and away from “zazzy” resolutions. But we started to worry that by not allowing the audience to applaud for their hero, we might be undermining their ability to fall in love with him. At the same time, I remember a book-writer friend, Sarah Gancher, watching a pre-London workshop performance and saying: “You could use an eleven o’clock number!” To me, that moment of bring-down-the-house-style energy capable of revitalizing us for the show’s denouement had to be “Wait for Me Reprise.” But as it stood, neither of the “Wait for Me” numbers had a button; both ended on a suspension. This is where the London and Broadway outros of those two songs—I’m coming, wait for me / I hear the walls repeating . . . —came from.
The other note we’d received fairly continuously was that Orpheus’s journey to the underworld didn’t seem too tough on him. We didn’t witness what Joseph Campbell called the “road of trials” in real time, only heard Hermes’s ominous instructions about it. At the same time, Ken had tasked me with finding a way for Orpheus to “go a few rounds” with the Fates over the course of the show, so that by the time we got to “Doubt Comes In” we were witnessing a familiar, inevitable struggle. It turned out to be the simplest thing in the world to add a bridge to the song. In it, the Fates confront Orpheus, and we’re introduced to the “Doubt Comes In” theme for the first time. This is countered by Orpheus, who sings his “Epic” melody, which is picked up by the Workers in a choral moment that succeeds in “cracking” the wall of the underworld. It was almost infuriatingly simple. The music-theater lesson for me had two parts: One, music is emotional shorthand. It took only a few bars of “Doubt” followed by “Epic” to make the point. Two, bridges are a music-theater writer’s best friend. A musical departure and return signifies travel—real and psycho-emotional—and travel is what’s required in order to feel we’ve arrived someplace at the end of a scene.
WHY WE BUILD THE WALL
Hades
Why do we build the wall?
My children, my children
Why do we build the wall?
Company
Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Hades
How does the wall keep us free?
My children, my children
How does the wall keep us free?
Company
How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Hades
Who do we call the enemy?
My children, my children?
Who do we call the enemy?
Company
Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Hades
Because we have and they have not
My children, my children
Because they want what we have got
Company
Because we have and they have not
Because they want what we have got
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Hades
What do we have that they should want?
My children, my children
What do we have that they should want?
Company
What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
Hades
And our work is never done
> My children, my children
And the war is never won
Hades & Company
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Company
We build the wall to keep us free
Hermes
Then Hades told Eurydice:
Hades
There are papers to be signed
Step into my office
Hermes
And he closed the door behind
Now a lot can happen behind closed doors
That’s for sure, brother, that’s a fact
But a lot can happen on the factory floor
When the foreman turns his back
Persephone
Anybody want a drink?
(End of Act I.)
Notes on “Why We Build the Wall”
Vermont
“Why We Build the Wall” is one of the few songs in my life that I wrote very quickly, almost before I understood what it meant. It was 2006 and I was living in Vermont. The song went into the first staging of Hadestown and then quickly became, at my songwriter shows, the one everyone wanted to hear. There’s much I could say about it—and how its meaning continues to change as the world changes—but I’d rather leave that conversation to the audience. It is, after all, a series of questions, and my guess is that the conversation it provokes is worth more than any statement I could make. Instead, here’s a little anecdote about the song’s language and where it may have come from. In college, I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt. My Arabic Lit professor was an older woman with dark eyeliner who took it upon herself to introduce leftist, bohemian values to a generation of distracted young Egyptians. She barely concealed her disdain for then-president Hosni Mubarak, and expressed nostalgia for the 1960s and the populist president Gamal Abdel Nasser in particular. “What did Nasser call the citizens?” she asked the students, who remained silent, some gazing into mobile phones. “‘Brothers and sisters’!” she said. “And what does Mubarak call us? ‘My children’ . . . ”
Off-Broadway & Edmonton
I wrote the outro Behind closed doors . . . in the lead-up to NYTW. Initially it was longer, and included this stanza:
Hermes: A lot can happen behind closed doors / With the big boss and his fountain pen / A lot of dirty deals go down / When there ain’t nobody watching . . .
We cut those particular lines in rehearsal, as the moment seemed to overstay its welcome, and the metaphors were too vivid (the outro describes the moment in which Hades summons Eurydice into his office to—as we learn later—“sign her life away”). Before NYTW, we were still questioning whether and where to place an intermission in the show. Rachel loved the idea of putting it just after Behind closed doors, which she called a “cliff-hanger” moment. Mara was adamant that in order for it to work we needed an Act I “button,” which is why I tacked on Persephone’s laugh line: Anybody want a drink? That little moment of levity worked wonders after so much emotional and political drama. As it turned out . . . everybody did want a drink.
London & Broadway
In London, we noticed a troubling trend. “Wait for Me,” with its new bridge, outro, and positively seismic design elements (we were now witnessing, in real-time, the “crack in the wall”), was getting so climactic that “Why We Build the Wall” was beginning to pale in comparison. People fully expected “Wait for Me” to end Act I, and were surprised to find not only another song but a recitative outro scene between themselves and the bar. We underwent a massive experiment in Broadway rehearsals in which we ended Act I with “Wait for Me” and began Act II with “Why We Build the Wall.” Ultimately, though, it made our already long second act longer, not to mention Hades-heavy. An alternate idea from lighting designer Bradley King was to somehow turn Behind closed doors into a bridge, rather than an outro, and end Act I with the line: We build the wall to keep us free. It was an interesting idea that I just couldn’t entertain. I was unwilling to interrupt the structure of what had long felt like the show’s iconic song, but perhaps more vehemently, I was unwilling to lose the laugh line Anybody want a drink?, which felt like an important vestige of our downtown legacy.
ACT II
OUR LADY OF THE UNDERGROUND
Persephone
Step into my office . . . !
I don’t know about you, boys . . .
But if you’re like me, then hanging around
This old manhole is bringing you down
Six feet under getting under your skin
Cabin fever is a-setting in
You’re stir-crazy! Stuck in a rut!
You could use a little pick-me-up
I can give you what it is you crave
A little something from the good old days
Hey, I got the wind right here in a jar
I got the rain on tap at the bar
I got sunshine up on the shelf
Allow me to introduce myself
Brother, what’s my name? My name is
Company
Our Lady of the Underground!
Persephone
Brother, what’s my name?
Company
Our Lady of Ways!
Our Lady of Means!
Persephone
Brother, what’s my name? My name is
Company
Our Lady of the Upside Down!
Persephone
Wanna know my name? I’ll tell you my name:
Persephone!
Come here, brother, let me guess
It’s the little things you miss
Spring flowers, autumn leaves
Ask me, brother, and you shall receive
Or maybe these just ain’t enough
Maybe you’re looking for some stronger stuff
I got a sight for the sorest eye
When was the last time you saw the sky?
Wipe away your tears, brother
Brother, I know how you feel
I can see you’re blinded
By the sadness of it all
Look a little closer and
Everything will be revealed
Look a little closer . . .
There’s a crack in the wall!
Ladies and gentlemen, (Trombonist) on the trombone!
(Cellist) on the cello! (Violinist) on the violin!
(Drummer) on the drums! (Bassist) on the bass!
(Guitarist) on the guitar! And (Pianist) on the keys!
You want stars? I got a skyful
Put a quarter in the slot, you’ll get an eyeful
You want the moon? Yeah, I got her too
She’s right here waiting in my pay-per-view
How long’s it been?
A little moonshine ain’t no sin
Tell my husband to take his time
What the boss don’t know, the boss won’t mind . . .
Notes on “Our Lady of the Underground”
The idea behind “Our Lady of the Underground” was one of the first I had for the show, a touchstone in the early days. The idea was that Persephone moonlighted as the proprietress of an underworld speakeasy, a club she ran behind her husband’s back. In it, she handed out intoxicating contraband imported from the aboveground world—bottled essence of wind, rain, and sunshine. It was inspired by a scene from Soylent Green in which a regular carrot is a contraband delicacy. The speakeasy’s pièce de résistance was a binocular machine, the kind you insert a quarter into at the seashore for a glimpse of the ocean. Persephone had
the machine trained on a crack in the wall of the underworld, and those who looked through it could see the night sky. In my earliest imaginings, Orpheus had arrived in the underworld prior to this song and stumbled into Persephone’s club. She was his protectress, like the giant’s wife in Jack and the Beanstalk, who hides the hero beneath her skirts. The 2006 version of the song was titled “A Crack in the Wall” and went like this:
Persephone: Come and see the stars! / They’re fixin’ to fall / Slidin’ and a-slippin’ / In their gravity shoes / Old Man Mars / Taking Venus to the ball / Big dipper dippin’ / To the blue-sky blues
Have you forgot / Which way is up? / I think you’ll find / I have just the thing for you / Put a quarter in the slot / You can fill your loving cup / With a little bit of moonshine / From the pay-per-view
How selfless! / The silent moon / Holding a mirror / For an ungrateful sun / Hey, Orpheus! / Are you leaving so soon? / Every night around here / Is a fateful one
Maybe you got blindsided / Lost your papers! / Lost your mind! / Maybe you once loved an angel / Just to watch her fall / Look a little closer and / The water turns to wine / Look a little closer: there’s a crack in the wall!
So I raise my cup / To the stars in the sky / If you want a show / Go on, get in line / Step right up, brothers / Don’t be shy / What the boss don’t know / The boss won’t mind
In 2007 I revised the song to a version very similar to the Broadway version, and renamed it “Our Lady of the Underground.” In both Vermont productions, Ben designed an actual binocular machine and staged the Workers looking through it, as the song describes. Our Vermont posters, designed by Brian Grunert and Tim Staszak, depicted the machine (the 2006 poster was double-sided, with die-cut eye-holes you could look through). When I began working with Rachel in 2013, though, we let go of the machine. We also moved away from Orpheus’s participation in the scene. The song now followed the conspicuous action of Hades going behind closed doors with Eurydice, so the whole scene was tinged with Persephone’s retaliatory abandon. It was a big diva moment for Amber Gray as well as a showcase for the band’s improvisations. Rachel was excited to let “Our Lady of the Underground” function as an “entr’acte,” more of a palette cleanser than a story beat. I later learned that according to Jack Viertel, an Act II opener is often “one for fun”—a feel-good number that doesn’t appreciably advance plot or require too much of the theatergoers who are just settling back into their seats, drinks in hand. That casual, clubby feeling was enhanced by a practice that began in the concert era and stuck—that of Persephone introducing each of the band members by name.
Working on a Song Page 10