[Updates are at the bottom of this post!]

Summer has poured out and spread over Manhattan like pancake syrup. I sit at the piano in a sublet apartment on the Upper West Side with the air conditioner blasting in vain. I am trying to write a song about a football game. I have spent the last three summers trying to write a song about a football game. I couldn’t care less about football. My mind keeps skittering away from the page, my hands slapping away reflexively at the piano keys even though I’m not paying any attention. The sun rises, the page is empty; the sun sets, the page is empty except for three lines that I’ve crossed out. Clearly I’m in need of some distraction.

And so: The First Official Summer JRB Karaoke Competition!

I was zooming through my iTunes library when I came upon a list called Songs reh tapes. Upon closer examination, I realized what these recordings were: In preparation for the concert of Songs for a New World last year at Strathmore, I recorded the piano parts for many of the songs so I could send them to the soloists in advance of our rehearsal week in New York. Besides the fact that I made a lot of mistakes while playing, the recording technology was not particularly advanced – I placed my MacBook on a chair about three feet away from my piano and used the built-in microphone, compressed the resulting file down to an mp3 and emailed it off. Certainly not audiophile quality, but good enough to practice with. When you’ve got Brian d’Arcy James and Tituss Burgess and Laura Griffith and Alice Ripley, you can trust them to do their homework.

I’ve decided to use three of those accompaniments for this bit of interactive insanity. Anyone wishing to participate in the JRB Karaoke Madness will get to choose from “I’m Not Afraid of Anything”, “She Cries”, and “King of the World.” I suppose you could go nuts and do all three, but then you’ll probably be disqualified for being a psychopath.

Here’s how the competition works: using the accompaniment tracks posted below, record yourself singing the song of your choice.Then post that recording somewhere (YouTube? Facebook? Your own server? You kids know better than I do how to do this technological stuff) and put the link in the Comments section below along with your name or your nickname and your current hometown. DON'T POST THE VIDEO OR AUDIO ITSELF IN THE COMMENTS SECTION! JUST THE LINK! If you want to post video, that’s cool; if you only want to do audio, that’s cool too. If you did video but you only want us to listen to the audio, let us know and we’ll probably ignore you.

Once you’ve posted the link, the free-for-all begins. Anyone can watch or listen just by clicking the link you’ve posted. If they like what you did, they can click right here to send me an email, and fill in your name or nickname in the subject line. After August 5, I’ll count up the votes and post the finalists. Then I’ll figure out the next part of the contest, and there’ll be a prize of some sort and maybe you can take over as Elle Woods, but I’ll tell you more about that when we get there.

Anyone can submit a song. Young, old, professional, amateur, Equity, SAG, AFTRA, it doesn’t matter. If you’re eleven years old and living in Billings, Montana, you can participate; if you’re Sara Ramirez, you can participate. If you’re doing a Broadway show every night or if you’re in the chorus of a community theater production of 70 Girls 70, it’s all good. The more submissions, the merrier. Recording quality only matters to the extent that if we can’t really hear your singing, that will obviously work against you. Some people have recording studios in their basements; some people will have to set up wax cylinders and sing into a brass horn. (Let’s face it, the recording quality on the piano tracks is pretty crappy already; no matter what you do, it’s still only going to sound so good.)

The only rules you need to follow are these: You have to use my accompaniment tracks as posted below, and you have to sing the song as written – no parody lyrics, no mashups, no medleys, just the song I wrote with the accompaniment I played. Unless, you know, it’s really funny. ALL SUBMISSIONS MUST BE POSTED BY MIDNIGHT ON AUGUST 4, 2008. I’ll try to get the finalists posted within a week after that, though I have no idea what "finalist" means yet. Maybe I'll do categories, like "Craziest Bedroom Decor" and "Most Interesting Interpretation Of Pitch."

It may be that none of these tracks is in a good key for you. I’m sorry about that. You’ll have to wait for the next competition, if there ever is one.

You can find the lyrics to all three of the songs posted right here on this website. I can’t post the sheet music online, but it is widely available in the Songs for a New World folio or various other collections – it’s a good idea for you to take a look at the written notes before you record anything, trust me on this. I also suggest familiarizing yourself with the amazing (and more or less definitive) performances by Ty Taylor, Brooks Ashmanskas and Andréa Burns on the original cast recording, which you can get from the iTunes Music Store. I don’t want anyone to do an imitation of those singers, and I don’t want a slavish fidelity to the written score, but there’s a lot of stylistic and dramatic information on the album and in the music that you should absorb before you take on any of these songs. For further reference, there are alternate recordings of the two male songs on this very website, and those will be useful as well.

Now, here are some helpful hints based on the thousands of performances I’ve seen and heard of these songs. These apply not just to these songs but pretty much to any theater song in the world.

1. There is a lot of anger and confusion in all three of these songs. That doesn’t mean you should be playing the anger and confusion all the time. The less you draw from that well, the more powerful it will be when you do.
2. All those rests and pauses are there for a reason, take advantage of them; don’t rush through these songs. In all three of these songs, a major emotional realization occurs in total silence. After “David loves me,” after “She opens the floodgates,” before “At least I used to be,” those are big goalposts. Don’t knock them over, trust them. (Since the pauses are already built into the accompaniments, you don’t have much choice, of course.)
3. All three of these songs unfold with a fairly clear structure: verse/chorus, verse/chorus, long bridge, final chorus. Make sure that each of those structural points has a specific and unique musical and dramatic energy. If you do the first chorus big and broad, the second chorus should be different – perhaps more legato, perhaps placed in your head voice more; make musical choices and follow through with them. And watch that transition from the bridge to the final chorus: something very important is happening to each of the characters at that point. What happened in the bridge? What did they discover or decide? You have to incorporate that information into your performance.
4. If you sang any of these songs exactly as notated, with every rhythm performed with metronomic exactitude, you’d sound ridiculous and the song would sound terrible. The point of all that written-out backphrasing is to make the lyric fall as naturally on the music as possible. These are wordy songs, phrase them as necessary to make the lyrics clear, and make music out of every line. The best singers understand that instinctively – make the song make sense to you when you sing.

All right, enough with the disclaimers and hints and rules, this is supposed to be fun. Let’s make with the singing!



LEGALESE: These piano tracks are copyright Jason Robert Brown and cannot be used, duplicated, reproduced or published in any other form without the express consent of the publisher, Semolina Farfalle Music Inc.

Don’t forget to post your submission by August 5! Play nice!

1st UPDATE: Already several questions have come in, which I'll try to answer here.
1. Apparently some computers don't like the links above. (They aren't Macs, I'll bet.) My webmaster is working on it.
2. Hey Brits and other foreign types: use your native accent! I don't need to hear Fake American, unless you're competing for Worst Fake American Accent, in which case, carry on.
3. One of my commenters asked if I could work it so that there are different periods for posting and voting, so that people have time to get all their fans to vote for them. This is when I start thinking I've unleashed a monster, but for now, let's say that while submissions must be in by AUGUST 5th, you have until AUGUST 10th to vote; I won't pick finalists until after the 10th. It doesn't solve every problem, but it helps a little, right?
4. SPECIAL PROPS TO OUR FIRST CONTESTANT! Lovely Charlotte Godfrey, of the British Isles, offers her rendition of "I'm Not Afraid of Anything" here! Send love and support, people!
All right, carry on. I'm sure I'll be back with more updates.

I've maxed out my Facebook account. I had heard that it was possible to do this, but I didn't really think it would happen. The other night, I logged in, saw that I had four more Friend requests, and it wouldn't let me approve them because I already had five thousand Friends. The ceiling is 5,000, which seems like a fairly arbitrary ceiling to me, but there it is and there's not much within Facebook-land that I can do about it.

Which presents several dilemmas, none of which seem immediately solvable.

I'm capitalizing the word Friend because I am not talking about friends in any traditional sense. It should be obvious to the reader that I do not in fact have five thousand friends. I don't actually think I could cobble together the names of five thousand people I've met in my entire life. Five thousand is a lot of people. And I don't even like people. No, a Friend is someone who comes upon or searches out my Facebook account and asks to be linked to it. I don't really know what benefits accrue from this. I myself have asked to be several people's Facebook Friend, and all that it gets me is the opportunity to see whether they spend more time jerking around on Facebook than I do (the answer is no, with the possible exception of Deborah Abramson). So what you're really getting with a Facebook Friendship is a sort of approved association with someone; if you're a fan of Jason Robert Brown, becoming my Facebook Friend confers some kind of status upon you, I guess. You're not just a fan, you're not a stalker or a groupie, you're... well, you're a Friend. It's all very meta and Web 2.0 and new-media and of course the kids in my cast of "13" could explain it far better than I just did. Regardless, I am grateful for the fact that anyone desires that association, and clearly it is not an uncommon desire or my account wouldn't have maxed out. So there's the news: I'm popular for the first time in my life, and the Facebook Gestapo wants to stop me before I go too far and TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

This all started with Friendster, and that was entirely my wife's fault. She had a Friendster account and thought it would be fun if I did too; I was very suspicious of the whole social-networking thing, but one night when I was bored in a hotel in Nashville, I set up an account to make her laugh. Within an hour, I had requests from two people I had never met asking if I would approve them as Friendster Friends. I decided that if I were going to do this, I might as well go whole hog, so I accepted them. Then I typed my name into the Search box to see if there was anyone who had me listed as their "favorite music." I got about four hundred hits. I had my solo album coming out right about that time, so I thought maybe I could use Friendster to get out the word. So I took the next week and sent Friendster Invites to each of those four hundred people (several of whom were entirely fictional entities, but that's a whole other issue), and most of them, after writing "Is this the real JRB?", accepted me.

Within a couple of months, though, it seemed that everyone on Friendster was actually from the Philippines. Also, whenever I told anyone I was on Friendster, they said, "Dude, Friendster sucks, you have to get a MySpace page!" So I looked at MySpace. MySpace gave me a total friggin' headache. I hated it then, I still hate it now. I especially hate how nobody has a real name, it's all PattiFan and imatosser and BwAyFaCe, like we're all living in a comic book. I made my decision and I felt comfortable with it: I didn't want to present myself online in that particular forum. Too messy, too weird, too insidious. So no MySpace. And Friendster was increasingly expecting me to speak Tagalog. It seemed my social networking phase had ended.

Then I got into rehearsal for "13" at the Mark Taper Forum, and I started getting invites from the kids to join Facebook. I was confused, because I had thought Facebook was only for college students (I'd seen some of my USC kids' pages), but apparently it had opened up and my cast members were among the first to jump on that bandwagon. I didn't want them to think I was a total drip, so I accepted an invite, and the Facebook drama began.

I was on Facebook well before most of my real friends, and in fact, for the first year I had my account, the majority of my Friends were college kids and high schoolers. It is weird for a married man in his mid-thirties to be establishing relationships with kids in high school, but such lines get blurry very quickly behind the veil of the Internet. Besides which, I wasn't really interacting with any of these Friends, I was just saying "Confirm" and watching the numbers add up. It was fun to see my account start taking over individual schools; I'd never really heard of Rider College or spoken to anyone at Oklahoma City University, but suddenly, forty students from there were all congregating on my Friend page. I made a rule: as long as the person sending the invite seemed like a verifiable human being (as opposed to a company or a club or a prank – like the nine invites I got from a misspelled Liza "Minelli"), I'd accept them. Why not?

And they piled up. Two hundred, five hundred, one thousand, can I break two thousand? I can! And on and on, so much so that I regularly got messages from people saying "You have 3600 friends? You're the king of Facebook!" and the like. I enjoyed being the king of Facebook. When I found out that Eric Whitacre had more Friends than I did, I got jealous.

Maybe in the last four months, something strange started happening. People my age started getting on Facebook. People with whom I had gone to college, summer camp, high school, even people I haven't thought about since the fifth grade started emerging from the cybernetic ether, usually with mortifying pictures from the late 70's and early 80's. Facebook went from being a place where I collected fans to a place where I reconnected with my life and began to understand how I became who I am in a much richer context than I had before. I speak often (and write often) of having spent my teenage years being lonely and outcast and unappreciated, but the flow of people who say "I always knew you were a star" and "remember when we wrote a song together in junior high?" and "you gave me some piano lessons when you were sixteen and I still remember what you taught me" suggests that perhaps my perception was not entirely attuned to reality. That's a massive adjustment to make to my personal history at this relatively late date. It doesn't mean the social stigmata I felt as a kid were any less real, but it does mean I have to take some responsibility for magnifying and perpetuating their effects. That realization can take some people decades of therapy and lots of money. For me, it took two years and five thousand Friends.

And so my current Facebookian dilemmas. Switching to another site isn't really an option; how would I get all of my Friends to migrate there? They all like Facebook, that's how they found me in the first place. And MySpace remains Website Non Grata as far as I'm concerned.

At the same time, I don't want to lose the chance to connect through Facebook with people who actually have a history with me, or with whom I'm working. More of those high school classmates come out of the woodwork daily, and every day there are show business people with who I am flattered to be able to associate myself (just today, Bartlett Sher accepted my Friend request! Total fangirl geekout! He's so awesome! Squeeee!). So I have to shed some of my Facebook Friends who are not actually friends so that I can make room for some who are. But how to choose?

There is a Fan Page on Facebook, which is the logical place for people to go who are just fans. The problem is that I've already accepted around forty-five hundred people who are just fans, and it feels weird to cut through my Friend list with a virtual scythe just because I've now decided to be choosy. Would those forty-five hundred people sign up on my Fan Page or would they feel in some way dissed? Also, I haven't decided to be choosy, Facebook told me I had to be – I like the occasional random serendipity of exchanging a message or a poke with someone I've never met. (Don't ask me to explain the whole phenomenon of Poking; like everything else about Facebook, it delivers no gratification whatsoever and we'd all cry if they took it away.)

I've made some small accommodations until I can figure out a global solution. As far as new Friends go, I'm only accepting people I've actually met or who travel in my real-life circles. I hate "ignoring" the other requests, but I don't know what else to do. And in order to make room for the new Friends, I purge old Friends only as needed. If there are four Friends I want to accept, then I go through and find four random Friends to cut. Thus far, their last names all start with A. I felt bad about that until Georgia pointed out that people whose last names start with A get lots of other advantages in life, so it balances out.

The obvious solution would be for Facebook to cut me some slack and let me add as many Friends as I wanted to. But I'm not in charge of that, and unless Mark Zuckerberg turns out to be a big fan of mine, I don't think I have any sway over Facebook's decision-making. Moreover, I sort of appreciate that Facebook has limits. The same way I like that there's a single template for the Profiles and the Apps – such boundaries are exactly what distinguish Facebook from MySpace, and I'm not qualified to say which of those aesthetic determinations could be deleted without undermining the pleasures of the site.

All of which is to say: if you're a Friend of mine on Facebook and your last name is somewhere near the beginning of the alphabet, it's been a really fun ride and I hope we'll figure out how to connect again soon. Or, as they say on Friendster: Salamat sa pagkakaibigan.

What's new, Buenos Aires? I'm on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, the eighth cross-country flight I've taken so far in 2008. While I don't much enjoy the flying, this time in the air tends to be mercifully free of distractions. Generally, I've spent that time literally staring into space, just grateful to have my mind clear for a couple of hours; but a bunch of readers have actually written me vaguely threatening letters, taking me to task for not updating this blog, so I thought I'd take a minute and hip you to what's been going on since January lest things get ugly in cyberspace.

It's been long enough since I last wrote that most of the things to which I alluded in my "Blind Items" entry in January have finally been publicized. I'll take the opportunity now to clarify.

As has been announced elsewhere, "13" is doing a pre-Broadway run at the Norma Terris Theater at Goodspeed, in Chester CT, starting May 9. The show is substantially different, in every respect, from the version produced in Los Angeles last year. First of all, just in terms of the writing itself, we've replaced more than half of the songs, re-focussed the story, added a half-hour of running time (and with it, an intermission), and probably changed every single line of the book except for four really good jokes. Paradoxically, the show is longer because it's leaner and tighter, and there is now a much straighter line from the beginning to the end. A lesson I learned this year with both "13" and the London revision of Parade is that it's all too easy to let a secondary character hijack the show. I know we solved it in Parade by cutting down Britt Craig's role; I think we've now solved it in "13".

But apart from the rewriting, there are lots of other changes at "13". Most importantly, we have a new director, Jeremy Sams, who has been invaluable both in his ability to cut the fat away from the story and in his understanding of the way music functions in the show. The fact that Jeremy is a formidable musician in his own right doesn't hurt. In fact, Jeremy is a terrifying polymath; a quick look at his résumé shows that he has directed successful plays and musicals on Broadway and the West End, as well as having written film scores, lyrics and books of musicals, and translations and adaptations of classic and obscure plays (from several different languages, all of which he speaks fluently). Dan and I are convinced that in the event of some horrible catastrophe, Jeremy is perfectly equipped to take over any and all jobs on the show, ours included. (Mercifully, he's a lousy actor, and I'm sure his dancing is perfectly execrable, so the kids needn't feel threatened.)

Our choreographer is Christopher Gattelli, whose work is represented in New York not just by Altar Boyz but by two equally dazzling Broadway revivals this year, Sunday in the Park with George and South Pacific. Our set and costume designer also worked on Sunday, the masterful David Farley. We have an absolutely first-class lighting designer, Tony Award-winner Brian MacDevitt; a terrifically gifted sound designer, Jon Weston; and our musical director is none other than Tom Kitt, whose own show (the thrilling Next To Normal) just closed after a powerful production at Second Stage. Going into rehearsal knowing that this team is supporting us is a tremendously reassuring, even empowering, experience.

None of that would matter if we didn't have the talent onstage to bring this show to life, and I'm over the moon about the cast and band that we hired. Assembling the cast took a long time, and the final group that's going into rehearsal in two weeks comes from all over the country – New York and the tri-state area, of course, but also Los Angeles, Texas, and Florida – and while some of the kids have résumés longer than mine, others have never done a professional production before.

The band is an equally amazing group, and the band audition day was the most fun I've had in a long time; sixty-five awesomely gifted teenagers showed up and made glorious music together for seven hours. The hardest part was figuring out who to send home; all of the grownups in the room felt that we could have randomly picked five kids at any given time and ended up with a superb band. Needless to say, the five that made it to the end are exceptional. I know that kid musicians are not as used to the arbitrary and bizarre process of auditioning as kid actors are, so I wanted to take this space to thank all the musicians for coming out and playing so beautifully and rolling with the experience. Having a "kid band" is a huge experiment for a Broadway musical, but I know it's going to pay off handsomely.

So that's "13", which, as you can imagine, has been taking up the overwhelming majority of my time. But there are some other things going on worth noting.

Last week, Lauren Kennedy and I took to the stage at Birdland for a concert performance of The Last Five Years with the original New York orchestra (thoroughly terrifying pictures available here, and don't say I didn't warn you). Tickets sold out in three hours, and when we added a second show, that sold out within an hour. Neither Lauren nor I could have anticipated the kind of excitement that this event generated. As it was, neither of us was performing under optimal conditions – I'd been swamped with "13" auditions and pre-production and hadn't sung in public for months, and Lauren had just gotten off a plane from England the day before after doing two sold-out concerts at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Maybe the fact that we were both shellshocked accounts for how intensely emotional the concerts were; or maybe it was the fact that we hadn't done the show together since 2003; or maybe it's just a ridiculously emotional show. Whatever the reason, I walked off the stage at the end of the show feeling both triumphant and that I had just been run over by a Hummer. Lauren and the band all did sterling work, and I was honored and truly moved by their commitment to what remains an intensely personal piece.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center announced the forthcoming premiere of a new project I'm working on, an adaptation of E.B. White's classic children's book The Trumpet of the Swan for narrator and orchestra, conceived and adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman. It will be something like Peter and the Wolf crossed with Appalachian Spring, if you can imagine that; it's a wonderful and liberating challenge for me to be able just to write music without having to put lyrics on top of it. More news about this as things progress.

And on a totally different front, the people at Laura Geringer Books have been keeping busy with my work. In August, they're publishing a novel Dan and I wrote based on "13"; and later this year, a children's picture book adapted from "The Schmuel Song" is coming out, with some unbelievable artwork by the incredible Mary GrandPré. So come holiday time, I'll be able to walk into my neighborhood Borders and see two of my own books for sale! Now that is an unexpected turn in this crazy career of mine.

There's other news too, but we just started our descent into LAX, so I'm wrapping this up. Rehearsals for Goodspeed start on April 7, so I'll be on the East Coast for a while, but I will have to jump back to California for two concerts in May (one at Pepperdine, one at Citrus College) as part of the Festival of New American Musicals. I hope to see you on one side of the country or the other soon! (Or perhaps I'll meet you on a 727 somewhere over the Midwest. I'll be the one staring into space.)

As your reward for getting through this entire megilla, here's a little music. As I noted above, we've cut a lot of the songs that were in the Los Angeles production of "13". The unkindest cut of all was "Being A Geek," which is a song I have been doing in my concerts for a couple of years now and which I love deeply. In the song, Evan (whose parents are in the midst of a titanic divorce) tries to explain to his rabbi in Indiana why it's so important to be popular. When we recorded the score in L.A., we got to preserve this heartfelt performance by Ricky Ashley, the boys of the cast, and the entire amazing band. Enjoy!