NEW YORK — It was a tough job: write a song for a moment on stage that was transcendent. Make it fun and exciting and for a five-member band. Write it in a way that would keep the audience on the edge of their seats for two hours before they finished listening. And, oh, it should probably be a rock hit in 1976.
That was the task facing singer-songwriter Will Butler and the music arrangers for a song included in the Tony Award-nominated play “Stereophonic,” a major contender for the June 16 Tony Awards.
“It’s like, ‘Okay, there’s a lot of things to think about, but let’s give it a try,’” says Butler, who left Arcade Fire in 2022 and formed a new band, Sister Squares. “It’s like, ‘Okay, there’s a lot of things to think about, but let’s give it a try,’ and we gave it a try.”
“Stereophonic” is playwright David Adjmi’s story of a Fleetwood Mac-like band in the mid-’70s recording music over the course of a life-changing year in which personal differences open, close and then reopen.
The music accompanying the play includes full-on rockers like “Masquerade” and “Drive,” but also fragments and demos as the band reworks the tunes. It’s a wonderful piece of funky, classic rock for a fictional band that became a real band on stage.
“I was trying to get inside their heads. For a long time I spent just trying to make a great song, which is a hard thing to do. And then hopefully a great song can support multiple interpretations — that’s the dream.”
Butler was connected with Adjmi through a mutual friend, and they first met at a diner about 10 years ago. Butler had just moved to New York and loved writing for the theater. It was a spontaneous meeting and they hit it off: the two talked about “Moby Dick” for an hour.
Adjmi hadn’t written a word of “Stereophonic” yet. He had the title, a vague concept and wanted to set it in the recording studio. Butler would submit “random” demos over the next five years, like the kind of song someone might write after listening to Phil Spector all day or a song inspired by Sylvester in San Francisco in 1973.
Once the script was ready, Adjmi assigned Butler to fill in the song gaps. In one moment Diana, a young singer-songwriter, nervously plays a new song for her controlling boyfriend, the band’s de facto leader and guitarist.
What would it sound like? It could have been a Stevie Nicks-inspired I’m-looking-at-you takedown, a Joni Mitchell-ish mystery trip or a Neil Young “Heart of Gold”-like approach. Butler wrote plenty of options, some of which ended up on his new band’s 2023 self-titled debut.
He tried to give the musicians a sonic backstory. They probably listened to Nina Simone and girl groups growing up. They probably listened to Glenn Gould and folk music transitioning from Peter, Paul and Mary to Bob Dylan.
Butler credited the entire team — Adjmi, sound designer Ryan Rummery, orchestrator and musical director Justin Craig and director Daniel Aukin — for perfecting and refining the songs. All have been nominated for Tony Awards.
“The music I’ve always made is a very intensely collaborative art form. And theater, by its nature, is intensely collaborative,” says Butler.
“We were all going to have each other’s backs, and there wasn’t going to be any hierarchy. We were just going to work at it and keep working at it until it was good.”
Butler was also able to explain to the artists what it was like to work long hours in the recording booth, and helped with technical details – such as the time it might take the engineer 15 seconds to rewind a piece of music – but left the writing to him.
“The emotional world matches my experience exactly. I was in a band with my brother and his wife for 20 years, and now I’m in a band with my wife and her sister,” he says.
“It’s like you watch it and think, ‘I don’t like this play!’ It’s very real. So, the emotional scenario is completely accurate.”
Putting together a cast to play a rock band was a different task. The show needed a real drummer, as a year of training wasn’t enough. They found a drummer-actor in Chris Stack.
He found a capable bass player in Will Brill and a fine guitarist in Tom Pecinka. For the two female members of the band, he found Julian Canfield and Sarah Pidgeon, who played piano as children and had a sweet, raw voice.
“We really lucked out with our voices. On the first day of rehearsal, Tom Pecinka and Juliana Canfield and Sarah Pidgeon sang together, and I just thought, ‘OK, this is going to work.’ It sounded like they’d been singing together for a decade, and it was really beautiful.”
Pidgeon says the experience has been a bonding one between them, and the actors now feel like a band, practicing every day and seeing their egos melt away. The band was even asked to play at Butler’s most recent album drop party.
“I feel like an athlete every night, like a trick snowboarder where I’m trying to flip and spin and get my highest score and I need to stick the landing.”
Butler, who received a Grammy for Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” and an Oscar nomination for his work on Spike Jonze’s film “Her,” now finds himself a darling of the New York theater scene. He admits that when the show debuted Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, he was a little skeptical when producers wanted to take it to Broadway.
“I didn’t say it in the room at the time, but in my mind, I was like, this is your money,” he says, laughing. “For it to be a hit is so absurdly gratifying, like joyous and absurd. Just crazy.”
This story changes the title of Neil Young’s song to “Heart of Gold”
Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
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More information about the Tony Awards: /hub/tony-awards
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