Jason Robert Brown

For the majority of this residency, I’ve been focusing on writing and performing tracks for my new album, but since that album is now all but finished (fingers crossed), I thought it was time to look at some material that I haven’t played in a long time and see how it feels. I wrote “Hear My Song” in 1991 – I was an entirely different human being, and I wouldn’t have known back then how to imagine the life I have now; so what does a song that I wrote when I was 21, or 31, or even 41, meanRead More »

The first time I recall meeting Stephen Schwartz was at a party at Daisy Prince’s apartment, before I had ever gotten any of my shows produced and long before anyone other than Daisy knew who I was. At a certain point in the party, most of the folks had wandered off to the dessert table in the other room, and Stephen was at the piano with only three or four people around him while he sang songs from Pippin and Godspell and told stories. I was staring at a bookcase (this is the sort of thing I do at partiesRead More »

The good folks at Brigham Young University (namely Jeff Martin) got wind of the SubCulture concert that Kelli and I did together last January, and asked if we would come and do it in their gorgeous deJong Concert Hall to finish the BYUArts season. Thus it was that I got to fulfill my lifelong dream of spending the third night of Chanukah in Provo, Utah. Eight hundred folks came out to share our evening of music-making, which included a suite of songs from The Bridges of Madison County; Kelli’s first time singing “Still Hurting” since 2001, when we offered herRead More »

It’s been a hell of a year, and I have the uncomfortable feeling it’s going to get worse before it gets better, so what I try to find when I perform is some feeling in the room, some sense that we are all doing this together, that we are all fighting and hoping and despairing and waiting together. I brought a lot of songs to the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills that I’ve only ever done in New York, and I asked two full houses to listen and share and connect with me. It was a glorious feeling, exultant,Read More »

I think it starts with Barry Manilow, who included “Cloudburst” and “Avenue C”, both with Jon Hendricks’s lyrics, in the “Jump Shout Boogie Medley” on his 1977 “Live” album, which I listened to religiously as a child. I think the next thing was that my Dad had Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan Recorded Live at Basin Street East in his record collection and I found it one day in high school and started playing it constantly, obsessed with how the lyrics rode on these insanely twisty bebop solos, and loving the vocal harmonies. Three of my friends and I learned theRead More »