Online stories: StoryNights on Zoom

Why This Music?

 

I didn’t set out to write a musical.

 

In 2016, I was listening to Pandora when Sarah Jarosz’s rendition of Shankill Butchers came on. Boom. That was it. A Fitcher’s Bird song. It changed everything about how this story wanted to be told.

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Songs

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Then I started hearing them everywhere. Old songs, new songs, songs I had to find, songs that found me. Pieces of a puzzle were coming together rather quickly.

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A song changes depending on who sings it and why they’re singing it. A song I thought I understood became something else entirely when I heard it through the lens of Fitcher’s Bird.

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Put that song in the mouth of a woman standing outside a locked door, and its meaning shifts. Let another character answer with a song from a different artist, a different decade, a different musical world, and suddenly something new happens between them.

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That's how Fitcher's Bird  evolved into what it is today. I wasn’t looking for songs that would simply describe what the characters were feeling. I was listening for the places where a song could reveal something the character could not yet say—or perhaps didn’t know until it came out of their mouth.

 

​The score now draws from music by different artists, eras, and genres. Each song is there because it holds a piece of this story.

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They are not illustrations of the story.

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They are telling the story.