Finding a home for “Home Sweet Home”

“Juliet's Nightingale” didn't begin with Juliet. It didn't begin with Shakespeare. It didn't even begin with Romeo and Juliet.

It began with Jeff Fritch and another family show.

Jeff's idea was a song about longing for home: “Imagine a place... home sweet home.” He suggested something with a country feel, perhaps a little John Denver. That was certainly familiar territory for me, so I picked up the guitar and started playing around with the idea.

And then, for some reason, I thought: what if I completely de-Denver this?

Rip it apart, just to see where the pieces fall.

Take those warm, nostalgic, singalong lyrics, slow everything down until it really hurts, and mash them together with stark, dark piano.

Why not?

So I did.

I sang right up close to the microphone, almost as though I were whispering to a spirit to save me from falling. It became something quite different from the song Jeff had asked for.

I knew perfectly well that this version probably wasn't going to fly in a family show.

But I couldn't resist.

I sent it to Jeff anyway and told him, “I want the adults watching to be in tears listening to this.”

He really liked it.

And then came the entirely predictable verdict:

Absolutely no way for this show.

Fair enough. Back to Denver.

But Jeff also said something else: “You've really got to use this sometime.”

Perhaps a year later, I was talking with Ana Valdes Lim, the director of Nagoya Players' Romeo and Juliet, about the music she wanted for the production. When we began discussing the scene in Juliet's chamber, I remembered Jeff's words.

And I remembered “Home Sweet Home.”

So I pulled it apart again. I reworked the lyrics for Juliet and began pushing the music further away from where it had started, mangling distorted, mechanical, twisted sounds into the melody. By this point, that original John Denver-inspired country song had travelled quite some distance.

Then I played it for Ana—the demo that's now on this site.

She agreed to go with it, for which I remain eternally grateful.

I'd finally found a home for “Home Sweet Home.”

But the demo is still only the bare bones.

The version that was eventually performed onstage was, from my perspective, breathtakingly beautiful. Instead of my cracking voice on the demo, there was the superb voice of Juliet, and all the work that goes into taking something from a composer's recording and turning it into a moment in a theatre.

After Jeff saw the show, he sent me a message:

“I heard ‘Home Sweet Home.’ I was in tears.”

That meant a great deal to me.

I'd told him at the beginning that I wanted the song to pull at the heart of an adult watching the show. It had taken a rejected arrangement, another production, another director, rewritten lyrics and a completely different dramatic situation to get there.

But somehow it got there.

And then there was Romeo

“Romeo's Lament,” the other demo from the production that's on this site, had a similarly strange prehistory.

It grew out of another song I was working on at the time, called “Genevieve.”

That song included a character wanting “a partner, not a project,” and another line about how she “drove a nail through the heart of town.”

That second line survived.

When I began working on Romeo's song, I wanted multiple voices around him—almost a kind of Greek chorus, echoing the tragedy engulfing him. The material from “Genevieve” started finding its way into this completely different world.

Again, what you hear on the site is a demo.

Onstage, Kory and the backing singers took that raw material and turned it into something much larger. The voices, the performers, the sound filling the theatre—and all the incredible work required actually to get something like that onto a stage—transformed it.

That's one of the strange things about being the person who writes this stuff.

You can sit at home with a microphone and a computer and make something that suggests what a song might be. Then you hand it over.

And other people make it something else.

My only regret, in a play deeply filled with regret, is that we didn't make a cast recording.

I wish we had.

Because the two recordings on this site aren't really the finished story. They're the sketches—the basic ingredients that the performers, director and production team eventually turned into a feast for the senses.

And I would dearly love to be able to hear that again.