Posted on October 13, 2025 at 4:19 pm

I’ll tell you what I hear.

I hear my band in college, with a big Earth, Wind & Fire-style horn section, playing a riff that I eventually turned into “The River Won’t Flow.” 1988, I was eighteen years old, that’s thirty-seven years ago. I was dating one of the backup singers, I can still hear her part on that song.

I hear Paula Wayne’s cranky Chow Chow grunting at me. Paula was teaching at a performing arts school in Miami that hired me as an accompanist. She said I could come to her house and use her piano any time I needed it, so I went after work almost every day, and that’s where I wrote “She Cries.”

I hear a waterfall which thundered majestically behind the playhouse all summer in Weston, VT, where I worked as a pianist and wrote “I’m Not Afraid of Anything” in the basement.

A woman named Susan, banging furiously on the door of my studio apartment in the West Village. I was writing “On the Deck of a Spanish Sailing Ship” at 10:30 on a weeknight and she could hear it clear as a bell all the way across the building.

Same apartment, I’m pretty sure I hear my girlfriend snoring while I was up in the middle of the night working on lyrics for “King of the World.”

That’s Richard Maltby’s voice I hear, he’s talking to me in the backyard of his townhouse and telling me he really likes that one song of mine, and then he laughs and says, “The one you stole from ‘Life Story’ in Closer Than Ever.” (He’s referring to “Stars and the Moon,” and he’s right.)

In the middle of a piano bar, I hear maybe four people clapping after the amazing Annie Hughes sings “The Flagmaker,” and then I hear her introducing me to her friend, Daisy Prince, who wants to know where the hell that song comes from, and so I start telling her about this crazy idea I have for a musical revue that’s kind of a song cycle that’s kind of a concept album and before I know it, I hear myself asking her if she’d direct it.

I had this weekly gig where I would go to a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side to help a vaguely narcotized trophy wife practice her singing, and thank God I can’t hear that, but what I hear is her shouting helplessly at her tiny incontinent Maltese, and in my mind I thought she was yelling “Murray!”

I hear Amy Ryder sing “I’d rather have a yacht” upstairs at a club called Eighty-Eight’s, and then I hear, for the first time, an audience laugh at a line I wrote.

I hear Brian d’Arcy James, Laurie Beechman, Debbie Gravitte, Sally Mayes, Ann Hampton Callaway, Jim Morlino, so many singers breathing life into my songs in clubs, cabarets, concerts, in readings and workshops, at their auditions, on their self-produced cassettes, so that gradually, almost imperceptibly, people start recognizing my name, people start asking what else I’ve written, people want to hear what I do.  I hear Kyle Renick offering me a spot at the WPA Theater in 1995 so that Daisy and I can do “whatever it is this thing is.”

I hear Andréa Burns and Jessica Molaskey and Brooks Ashmanskas and Billy Porter soaring at the end of the opening number, I hear “…the sky-y-yyyy!” and I cue the bassist and the timpani and the drums and the other keyboard while I rumble a low Eb before the final button, and I will always hear that applause, even when there were only thirty people in the house, I hear what it means when I put my heart out in the world and people send theirs back out to meet mine.

I hear Ty Taylor, alone in a basement studio in suburban New Jersey, finding his own riff in the middle of “Flying Home,” and carving his own path through this score a year after everything else was recorded.

There was a listening station at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square back then, and I remember putting on the sweaty headphones so I could listen to the CD when it came out. I can only hear one channel because – no surprise – the headphones were broken, but I kept listening, even though I of course had the CD at home, even though I of course knew every note and breath, because if it’s on these shitty broken headphones, it must be real.

I’m listening to the songs now. I hear the four Steves – Sondheim, Schwartz, Reich, and Wonder – and I hear Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon and David Shire, I hear Bruce Hornsby and Carole King, I hear Leonard Bernstein and Harold Arlen and Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin and Fredric Rzewski and Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk, I hear everything that went into my head for the first twenty-five years of my life, but I also hear me. Not always Fully-Formed Me, if there ever is such a thing, but something more than Fetal Me, more than Embryonic Me. Young Me, I guess; that’s what this sounds like. That’s what I hear.

And then … thirty years of echoes, of weddings and Christmas parties and reunions and baby showers, of New Orleans where I saw the very first licensed production, and London where I snuck in unannounced to a community theater production, Audra and Sutton and Betty Buckley and Karen Akers and lots of other stars (and the moon), high schools, colleges, dinner theaters, in German, in Spanish, in Japanese. 

I hear my daughter’s elementary school choir singing “A new world calls across the ocean” at the third-grade assembly.

I hear the ping from my computer telling me there’s an email, and it’s Michael Friedman asking me if I’m interested in having Songs for a New World at Encores! Off-Center.

I hear my English agents saying there’s a push to do a 30th Anniversary concert at the Eventim Apollo, which I know as the Hammersmith Odeon, the place where the Beatles and Frank Sinatra and Queen and Bruce Springsteen all played legendary concerts, and suddenly I’m on that stage…

… and I hear my own footsteps walking on to the stage at the WPA Theater in October 1995. Thirty years that have been possible because people believed in this show, this score, this composer, this kid from the suburbs with no credits and very few interpersonal skills but boundless confidence and a relentless desire to share his music and tell his stories because it might do for the audience what it did for him, help him believe in tomorrow.

I hear the roar from 3500 people standing on their feet at the end of the performance, claiming this show as though it was their own, as though it belonged to them because they had heard that CD, they had been in that college production, they auditioned with that song, they had played piano in that cabaret.

I hear all that.

Your turn.

Photos from the 30th Anniversary production, starring the magnificent Shoshana Bean (who also did the Encores! production in 2018), the otherworldly Tituss Burgess (who did the show at Strathmore in 2007!), the phenomenal Jordan Fisher and the extraordinary Joy Woods (who was not even alive when we did the original production), and directed beautifully by Michael Longhurst. [Photos by Danny Kaan]

SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD: The 30th Anniversary Concert
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Conceived by Daisy Prince
Shoshana Bean
Tituss Burgess
Jordan Fisher
Joy Woods
Directed by Michael Longhurst
Musical direction by Leo Munby
Production design by Joseph Thomas
JRB: Piano and orchestrations
Ollie Woods: drums
Julian Poole: percussion
Tom Green: acoustic and electric guitars
Greg Hagger: upright and electric basses
Laura Melhuish: violin (concertmaster)
Rebecca Bill: violin
Elaine Ambridge: viola
Rachael Lander: cello
Presented by Lambert Jackson