We Got the Power
Big Blue Bucket was the first song I wrote with Kory Alexander Majansky.
I’d heard them tear hearts apart onstage in Romeo and Juliet. This time, though, they were in the director’s chair, telling me what the scene needed: a town gathering to celebrate the mysterious Big Blue Bucket and all the wonderful things it brought to people’s lives.
The bucket had power. It gave people power.
Great.
My first instinct was power pop—something in the world of the Raspberries or the late Phil Seymour.
It just wasn’t clicking.
With my head still stuck somewhere in the 1970s, I started thinking about glam rock: Slade, Wizzard and T. Rex. Then one line came back to me:
“We got the power.”
It’s from Alice Cooper’s “Department of Youth.” Whether Alice really belongs under glam rock isn’t the point. What stayed with me wasn’t a melody or an arrangement. It was the sheer force of that line being shouted back by a crowd of kids—the energy, the attitude, the feeling that everyone in the room had suddenly joined the same gang.
That was what Kory’s scene needed.
Their script and lyrics gave me the dramatic foundation. I brought that rough, stomping musical world to it, added a few ideas of my own, and slowly carved out the song.
One thing was completely non-negotiable.
Emma asks the perfectly reasonable question, “How can a bucket bake bread?”
The Chairperson considers this carefully and replies:
“Hmmm... five, four, three, two, one...”
What does that mean?
It doesn’t matter. I loved the rhythm of it. It had to stay.
As the song took shape, I kept imagining crowds of screaming fans in tartan scarves and impossibly tight trousers, like the Bay City Rollers in their heyday, shouting “Big Blue Bucket!” back at the stage.
That image didn’t come from Kory’s script, and the song I wrote wasn’t sitting there waiting inside my record collection. It appeared somewhere between the two: their strange town and mysterious bucket meeting all those sounds and images rattling around in my head.
That’s one of the pleasures of writing for Nagoya Players Junior.
Every production brings an entirely new world with it. Working together means discovering the musical language that belongs to that particular world—and sometimes finding something neither of us would have arrived at alone.