Zitat des Tages von Jason Robert Brown:
It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.
What I always wanted to do was to be a rock star.
I never wanted to write 'Mamma Mia!' or 'The Book of Mormon' - they're not my thing, I don't care about them. What I do is very different.
I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.
Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
I know I'm really good at writing for the theater. I can deny it all I want. Other people can fight me on it. It doesn't really matter. It's the thing I happen to know is my gift.
What's great about collaborating is getting to work with wonderful people. That's what theatre is about: other people getting you to give your best, and getting everyone else's best out of them.
In terms of my religious preference, if a year goes by and I don't have a Seder or I don't light the menorah, I feel a loss.
Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.
What I aspire to do, and what I try the hardest to do, is write stuff that's very personal in its way. I figure I can only say things the way I say them, so I'm trying to do something that is kind of anti-generic.
I write about outsiders. I write about people who are outside and don't know quite how to get in because it's how I've always felt.
When I started out, I wanted to be Billy Joel. The plan was to be a singer-songwriter of that ilk, and, then, I got waylaid - that's probably an unfair way to say it - from being a rock star by the musical theatre stuff, which I love doing.
Actually, if you ask my really close friends, they would say that 'Honeymoon' is more me than anything else I've written.
Personally, I've never been popular, so I'm not surprised that professionally I'm a bit out of step, too.
Being a musician - and I like to think of myself as a musician with a capital M - you need to be an omnivore, and I think the best musicians will listen to anything and love everything, and I do.
I love my stuff - you're not supposed to say that. But because I'm performer as well as a writer, I'm constantly interacting with my own work. I always get to find these little secrets that I left for myself, little notes - I find them all over the scores.
I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old.
