Yes, but.

I wrote an application this week for a musical theater development grant. My musical “Jack” has been on the back burner for a few months while I’ve worked on my book, so I was happy to have this grant application draw me back into it. I need money and institutional support to keep it going, so I’m applying for grants. After the reading of the first draft last year, when I found it was way too long and wooly, I pulled it apart, left 2/3 of it on the table, and put the rest back together, streamlined to tell the story more directly.

I’ve fussed with this piece for so long that I’ve ended up with several orphan songs, songs I cut for one reason or another, usually because the character who sang it was cut. There are several. Some of them are very good. What should I do with them? If I were 25, I’d record them myself and release an album on cassette, get a few nice reviews, no sales, and move on. Or maybe try to get a few gigs where singer-songwriters sing,

I get asked fairly often, well, not often like every day, but with enough regularity that it’s a question I should be prepared for and I’m not. The answer is yes, I miss it a lot, but I always find myself saying yes and then babbling for a while about why it’s not likely to happen. There are lots of ways to plot one’s aging; one way is to see it as an accretion of things you miss.

I cut this song because, one, there are a lot of slow, melancholy songs. All I seem to want to write these days, or listen to, if I’m honest, are songs drenched in sad cello, and I have to keep reminding myself that I have a much higher than average appetite for wistful regret. But also I’m not sure what it adds. Maybe some later day I’ll figure out how it works and find a way to put it back in—maybe not. I sure love singing it, though.