Fucking Plato.

Early this year, I planned a reading of the musical I’m working on, the one called Jack. I‘d booked the room, cast the roles, and it was going to take place on April 14. Of course it didn’t happen. Even though the event was just a table read, not an audience thing, I was so looking forward to sharing this new work with a roomful of actors.

Back when I was writing songs for bands or for Y’all, I knew that if I wrote a new song and I thought it was good, we’d work it up and put it in the set. And when I wrote songs for theater, even in cases where there was no venue on the horizon there were always collaborators to respond in real time to the new stuff. But most of Jack no one but me has read or heard.

I’ve always been apprehensive to the point of superstition about exposing unfinished work — it just feels too fragile. But these are unusual times. It’s driving me crazy sitting on all these new songs for months, so I started making little videos of selected songs. The videos at first were solely about the fact that it’s easier to get people to click on a video than an audio file, but once I started to put images together the process became a way to get to know the songs more deeply.

In this song, Fucking Plato, 16-year-old Jack goes to the library to look up who he is. It feels like a perfect song for Pride month. The whole show is gay gay gay, but this song is the gayest.