Pop culture is full of fictional bands singing songs purpose-made to capture a moment, a sound. This music doesn’t organically emerge from a scene or genre, hoping to find an audience. Instead it fulfills an assignment: it needs to be 1960s folk music, 1970s guitar rock, 80s hair metal, 90s gangsta rap, and on and on. In this episode, we’re going to use ‘Stereophonic,’ which just opened on Broadway, as a kind of case study in how to construct songs like this. The playwright David Adjmi and his collaborator, Will Butler formerly of the band Arcade Fire, will walk us through how they did it. How they made music that needs to capture the past, but wants to speak to the present; that has to work dramatically but hopes to stand on its own; that must be plausible, but aspires to be something even more. The band in Stereophonic includes Sarah Pidgeon, Tom Pecinka, Juliana Canfield, Will Brill, and Chris Stack. Stereophonic is now playing on Broadway—and the cast album will be out May 10. Thank you to Daniel Aukin, Marie Bshara, and Blake Zidell and Nate Sloan. This episode was produced by Max Freedman and edited by Evan Chung, who produce the show with Katie Shepherd. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. If you’re a fan of the show, please sign up for Slate Plus. Members get to listen to Decoder Ring and all other Slate podcasts without any ads and have total access to Slate’s website. Your support is also crucial to our work. Go to Slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2013, the playwright David Adjme was flying to a conference, listening to In Flight Radio on his headphones.
And I heard this Led Zeppelin song, Babe, I'm Gonna Leave youe, which I knew from when I was a kid.
Baby, Baby, I'm gonna leave you.
And I was listening to the vocals, and I really started listening to them because I was on the plane trapped.
And I started to realize, like, wow, this is a really tempestuous, extremely emotionally intense song.
And so I started picturing in my mind's eye, like, what it must have been like to be in that room when they were recording this.
I just suddenly got a picture of it in my head.
And then I thought, wait a minute.
What if that's the set for a play?
David's written more than half a dozen plays, all of them very different.
There's a monologue delivered by a sneering member of the upper class, a ribald riff on the 70s sitcom Three's Company, a drama set in Brooklyn's Syrian Jewish community where David was raised, and another about the last days of Marie Antoinette, co starring a talking sheep.
With Led Zeppelin ringing in his ears, David began to imagine something realistic, grounded, set at a recording studio.
And then I thought about the content of that song, which is this weird push pull dynamic of love and hate, because he's singing I'm Gonna Leave youe.
I gotta go away and focus.
But it sounds like he's coming onto somebody.
And he's also sounding like he's going insane with conflicting feelings.
And I thought, that's kind of what I want this to be.
And that's all I kind of knew at the beginning.
Off the plane, David began to flesh out this flash of an idea to dream up characters, plot and language for a new play.
It would be called Stereophonic, and it's about an unnamed, romantically and musically entangled 1970s rock band recording their second album.