Send in the Potato Salad

And keep opening doors.

Yesterday was my birthday.

Sorry. Too late. But put it in your calendar for next year, please.

Today is Stephen Sondheim’s birthday. The first one since his passing last November.

And yes he left behind a remarkable body of work with recordings and performance videos and master classes and documentaries and two large, fantastic books going VERY in depth about his work and his process and his opinions about pretty much everything. But I still worry that I’m too late.

For the last decade or so, I’ve been reckoning with Sondheim in my “spare time.” But I’m not sure I’m anywhere close to wrapping my head around what he was up to. Maybe because I’m a kid from Nashville, not New York City. And I’m a few generations behind his moment. Also because I’m not really even sure that I’m a that big of a fan of musical theater as a going concern. Or how would I know? I’ve never had the chance to see what I’m sure it can be at its best. Growing up in Nashville, I got to see folks like Chet Atkins, Randy Travis and Dolly Parton all do their thing both up on stage and up close. That might be why I love Country music the way I do and it is definitely why I know how high the bar should be. But this Broadway stuff? You tell me.

Song Friends Chet, Randy and Dolly

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Sondheim’s songs and I’m still not convinced that by the definitions I was taught that they’re really even technically songs at all. Very few of them are independent units that can exist, or thrive at least, entirely outside of their original context. Not the way any decent pop or country song can and not the way even older “show tunes” (or “jazz standards” or just “standards” or “songs boomer rockers eventually make a milquetoast record of”) like Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart’s My Romance or My Funny Valentine can.

Nevertheless, Sondheim did make a number of these song-type things that have words attached to musical notes and (never imperfect) rhymes and occasionally even refrains. And his best ones contain moments that bore a hole straight through your chest and down to the core of what it means to be a human person on the planet earth like only the best songs can.

For example: What do you know about Sunday in the Park with George? How much should you even need to know? The titular George is Georges Seurat, the impressionist, or more specifically, pointillist painter. And I’ve gathered from context that his girlfriend/model, Dot (get it?) wishes George could love her in a way that he never will be capable of. I may have said too much as I’m already tearing up in anticipation. Just listen to this “song” when you have a quiet four minutes. (And yes, I’m intentionally featuring this grainy YouTube bootleg version to highlight several points.)

“I am unfinished/I am diminished/with or without you”

C’mon, now! Who’s crying with me? Crying and thinking about how great Ms. Peters is at her job. Crying and kicking yourself for not living (or not yet being alive) in New York City in 1984 and sitting in the dark while she made you feel that way by standing and singing right there just a few feet in front of you.

Song Friends Steve, Bernadette and Mandy

Still. Listening to one song (or a hunk of music and lyrics, more specifically) like this feels kind of like you’re crashing a stranger’s family reunion. You fill up your plate with the potato salad because a friend of a friend told you it was the best potato salad they’d ever eaten. Then you stand there with your plastic fork and your paper plate full of potato salad and you stuff your face because dammit it really is as good as the best you’ve ever had in some strange way that you can’t quite identify.

Wait. There’s no mayonnaise OR vinegar in it?

You want to ask someone from the family what’s up with that potato salad but they’ll either answer with a condescending “Really?” or maybe worse, launch into an extended lecture on their family’s special potato farming techniques and all of the other times someone made this recipe and the first time they ever tried it and and how this time it was better or worse or more special than ever before. Have I reached the end of this metaphor yet?

Probably not.

Because even though I’m not a “singer” singer by any stretch, early on I was told that the best way to learn how to write songs was to sit down and learn how to sing a few very good songs as deeply and completely as I possibly could. For reasons that are obvious if you know the songs and/or if you know me; Bob McDill’s “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” Alan Jackson and Jim McBride’s “Someday” and Travis Tritt’s “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)” were a few of my most worn-out textbooks.

So I decided a while ago that I would learn how to make Steve’s potato salad.

And four years later, this is what I had.

I’m pleased enough with my effort, obviously, to let y’all listen to where I’m at with it (if you so choose.) But I also know I’m just getting started with it. I swear there are so many layers to this thing and every time I push or pull a single line or even syllable it takes the song to a whole new level or brings it all crashing down. And if I think of a different person or situation or moment in my life as the words come out of my mouth, what the song is about changes completely. Once I start opening doors, so to speak, it’s impossible to stop opening doors.

So to speak.

And the funny thing is, when Sondheim wrote it for A Little Night Music (What’s that show about? Beats me… shouldn’t matter) he wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns… known as a great actress but a pretty weak singer by Broadway’s (and anyone else's) standard. So he wrote it so it would be “easy” to sing?

Song Friends Francis and Babs

And from a technical standpoint, it is. No big notes or runs or interval jumps. Still there really isn’t a version on tape anywhere (mine included, obvs) where someone completely nails it start to finish. Because as soon as you start to “singer” sing it, the song is lost. Sinatra? Streisand? They are some of the best we’ve got. They get close… some moments of magic. But there’s always a blink where they lose the thread, or go too hard… or just miss the whole point altogether.

So did Sondheim write an easy song that’s impossible to sing? And if so, doesn’t that make it a bad song? Or does that make it the best song?

Or maybe I was right from the start and it really isn’t a song after all. Maybe it’s more like that weird-ass modern painting in the museum that you keep staring at even though the redneck in you is saying hell I coulda done THAT but you know you couldn’t and why can’t you just move on past it to the next painting that actually looks like an actual thing and stop just standing there with your mouth open and is that really a tear running down your cheek jeezum it’s just a weird-ass painting and hey haven’t I seen you in here before?

#30 “Autumn Rhythm” by Song Friend Jackson Pollack

So now thanks to Steven Sondheim I have an additional favorite thing about my job. Sure, the hours are great… except every now and then when they’re terrible. And the pay is terrible… except every now and then when it’s ridiculous. And the company you keep, if you keep it right, is always weird and/or lovely. But now, whenever I feel like it, I can climb around inside even the easiest most impossible song of all time and discover and rediscover it and fall in then out then back in love with it in a way that I only could have if first I’d spent several decades trying to be the guy who one day makes the perfect Country-style mayonnaise-based potato salad to bring to his own family reunion.

jay

And here’s the playlist with some good, bad and just plain strange versions of Clowns, as well as the other goodies.