Friday Night Is Music Night has been broadcast on BBC Radio 2 continuously since 1953, devised to feature the extraordinary musicians of the BBC Concert Orchestra. It is now the longest-running orchestral radio programme in the world. I can’t imagine the founders ever planned for a quirky middle-aged American songwriter to hijack the entire thingRead More »

Four years ago, I went to Potomac, Maryland, to conduct a concert version of Songs for a New World. Among the 87 instrumentalists and 35 singers involved was a woman named Nova Y. Payton, who sang the most electrifying version of “The Flagmaker” that I had ever heard.  I made a mental note that ifRead More »

Sutton Foster is a star. Broadway musical performers generally drive me crazy because I find they fall into one of two camps – either they’re insanely proficient, skilled beyond imagining, I-went-to-Carnegie-Mellon kind of dazzling where they can do anything you ask them and more, but they’re strangely cold, like they’re so busy pushing their talentRead More »

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 “HearRead 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 tableRead More »