Posted on June 1, 2006 at 7:33 pm

Talking about my first years in New York City. (Also, is anyone reading these? Drop me a comment or something, for Christ’s sake, I feel like I’m howling into a vacuum out here.)
Benjamin Goldstein writes:
I’m moving to Toronto soon to sort of pursue things in a piano bar/first CD sort of way and I was wondering if you had any pearls of wisdom to bestow. I only ask because it’s my understanding that you sort of went that route yourself.
JRB responds:
When I was twenty years old, I came to New York and started playing at all the piano bars in the West Village; there was Eighty-Eight’s and Rose’s Turn and the Duplex (I never played there) and Don’t Tell Mama in midtown, and if I was lucky I could get four or five nights a week of work.  I never got a regular night, I think everyone perceived that I was only in it for the short term, but I subbed in for a lot of the regulars.  It was a lot of fun sometimes, and it was very valuable in these respects: I learned an awful lot of repertoire really fast, to the point where even now I still can play and sing about three hundred songs from memory (which is nothing compared to some of the real stalwarts); I learned how to “read” an audience, and a particularly mercurial one at that – a drunken crowd can go from festive to hostile in sixteen bars – and I learned how to keep them entertained without necessarily doing exactly what they thought they wanted; it was great practice time for me as a pianist, since I never really was the type who could sit at home and do exercises, at the piano bar I had to keep focussed, play the right notes, not jerk around; and I got a lot of very useful experience in accompanying singers (and learned when not to push it: Billy Porter came in once with an arrangement of “God Bless The Child” and it was really cooking, so I modulated up a half-step in the middle, not knowing that he had built the arrangement to ride at the very top of his range already; he got through it, but he wasn’t happy with me).  I also met a lot of wonderful people, some of whom I still count among my collaborators and friends.  (See the next question below.)
The downside: I don’t know what it’s like in Toronto, but back in the 90’s, people could smoke in piano bars in NY, and I came home every night smelling like an ashtray.  The hours are not conducive to having a real life: I got home at four or five in the morning and still had to “wind down,” which meant that I generally couldn’t start the next day until at least noon, and then the whole cycle was in place.  It’s hard for me to be around alcoholics, and even harder for me to be around people who are having an artificially good time because they’re so hammered they don’t remember their names – I don’t drink, not more than a half a glass of wine every month or so, and I found that sort of alcohol-fueled belligerence to be the most hateful part of my job.  The hardcore alkies were a different thing altogether, they were all generally kind of sweet, but it was very sad and depressing coming in every day to see them at their same positions at the bar, where they’d been since four o’clock in the afternoon and where they’d stay until the joint closed.  The biggest downside was that, as a piano bar entertainer, you learn a lot of tricks to keep a room pumped up, and most of these tricks involve being flashy, being (this sounds pretentious) dishonest.  If you’re not careful, you can get addicted to those tricks; after all, they work.  But there’s a reason why a lot of piano bar entertainers never move up to the next level professionally, and it’s because they rely on being crowd-pleasers and rousers instead of being communicators.  I can always tell which singers in a given audition spend too much time waitressing in piano bars.
Ultimately, I lasted for only one year, and then, just as I determined that I didn’t really want to do it anymore, the calls mysteriously stopped coming in.  I could have pushed harder and gotten more work, but I knew, even though I had made pretty good money doing it, that it was time to move on from piano bar work.  The weird thing about it is that I thought piano bars were like magical islands when I first got to the city: oh my God, it’s people who sing show tunes all night!  Nirvana!  And now I can’t really imagine enjoying an evening there: oh my God, it’s people who sing show tunes all night!  Seventh circle of Hell!
Aaron Buitron writes:
What was Surabaya-Santa originally written for? It’s one of the most creative things I’ve ever heard. 
JRB responds:
When I worked in piano bar, one of my favorite singers was a woman named Kristine Zbornik, who did the most outrageous parodies and also had an amazing belt in a real Ethel Merman-meets-Eydie Gormé kind of way.  Krissy got asked to be part of this album called “Cabaret Noël,” and she asked me to write a song for her about the long-suffering wife of Santa Claus.  I decided it would be fun if there was a sort of Bluebeard’s Castle aspect to it, and then the whole “Surabaya-Johnny” joke came to me.  I usually advise against writing too many ideas at once, but there are about forty things going on in “Surabaya-Santa” at the same time, and I still think it works largely because Krissy forced me to keep that character focussed on what she wants.  Krissy was a little pissed off when I put “her” song into “Songs for a New World,” but it’s exposed a lot of people to that song (and she gets royalties for it, since the monologue in the middle is all hers), and even though I’ve seen about two hundred people do it, Krissy still does it better than anyone else.
Tom Brady writes:
I am directing and musically directing Songs for a New World in September of this year in Northampton.  I have a good idea about my concept for the show, but I wondered if you could give me a few guiders as to what you orginally intended to communicate when you first wrote and performed the show?
JRB responds:
“Songs for a New World” is about community, and about the mutability of faith.  That’s a pretty heavy thing to say about what is essentially just a pile of songs, but we chose those songs and the order in which they’re sung very carefully.  Each of the characters in the show takes a real journey, from innocence to experience, or from cynicism to hope, or from detached to committed, and I think the show is most powerful when the audience can feel and see those journeys taking place.  There’s a lot of talk about “Songs” on this site, snoop around, let me know if you find what’s helpful.
Laura Poyner writes:
I am organising a production of Songs for a New World, which is in rehearsal period at the moment. I’m playing Woman 2, as well as directing some scenes. Did you write the songs with any attention to running themes between characters? While some characters seem to follow patterns in their songs, others seem not to (a.k.a. woman 2).  I saw a production of Songs at the Edinburgh Festival last year that had a cast of 11 or 12.  (Our production is 4 performers as intended.) Their version was odd. Not at all like I imagine it should be. In light of this, what’s your opinion on productions increasing their cast sizes?
JRB responds:
Check out my answer to Sean Bala here.
Kevin Bell writes:
What’s the story on “Flying Home”?  O.K., obviously someone/something has passed on to another realm… but, the opening lyric?  It is “The angels called you to leave this land; my work is finished, the angels command…”  Who is Man One addressing? 
JRB responds:
From the liner notes of Lauren Kennedy’s album: 

I had started writing a show called “Flying Home,” about a young clairvoyant girl searching for her father’s murderer, but I got stuck when I realized that the plot I had written would take about nine hours of stage time.  So I bagged it, but this song had already been written – it was meant to be the finale – and I just took it and stuck it into “Songs for a New World.”

More later, kids!