Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brownis an American musical theatre composer, lyricist, and playwright. Brown's music sensibility fuses pop-rock stylings with theatrical lyrics. An accomplished pianist, Brown has often served as music director, conductor, orchestrator, and pianist for his own productions. He has won Tony Awards for his work on Parade and The Bridges of Madison County...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth20 June 1970
CountryUnited States of America
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There are actors I have very strong chemical responses to, and I strive always to figure out ways to work with them and get them to sing my stuff.
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I've never been particularly good at explaining or even understanding what this sort of rage is that is so accessible to me. I'm not an out-of-control person, but I can access in my work very easily a feeling of real fury. Thank goodness I've channeled it into my work, I guess.
constantly left love notes performer stuff supposed work
I love my stuff - you're not supposed to say that. But because I'm performer as well as a writer, I'm constantly interacting with my own work. I always get to find these little secrets that I left for myself, little notes - I find them all over the scores.
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My work is very popular with performers, and there are theatre people who get what I'm doing and what tradition I'm working in. I'm very grateful to them - they're my people, who understand why I work the way I do.
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What's great about collaborating is getting to work with wonderful people. That's what theatre is about: other people getting you to give your best, and getting everyone else's best out of them.
people
I write about outsiders. I write about people who are outside and don't know quite how to get in because it's how I've always felt.
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Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
What I always wanted to do was to be a rock star.
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I grew up in the '70s, and I hear in my own stuff a lot of what I grew up listening to, which is to say I hear a lot of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.
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I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old.
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I find I like the spotlight for a very brief period of time... and I sort of need it. But then, the minute that it's done, I have to sort of go hide. So I was never really meant, I think, to be a performer for a living.
anyone artist coming matter point stop time
I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.
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You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.
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When I started out, I wanted to be Billy Joel. The plan was to be a singer-songwriter of that ilk, and, then, I got waylaid - that's probably an unfair way to say it - from being a rock star by the musical theatre stuff, which I love doing.