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
people popular tradition understand work
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.
accessible easily explaining good goodness rage sort thank understanding work
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.
What I always wanted to do was to be a rock star.
life specific
I think that when you write for stars, I think that you have to be very specific about what they do beautifully and let them bring it to life.
billy grew mitchell paul stevie stuff
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.
ambivalent anyone doubtful open paying whether
I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.
form knowing medium musicals people realizing
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.
best capital listen love musician musicians
Being a musician - and I like to think of myself as a musician with a capital M - you need to be an omnivore, and I think the best musicians will listen to anything and love everything, and I do.
best great people theatre wonderful work
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.
billy love musical rock star unfair
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.
needing utterly yearns
As much as I can act, I don't have anything in me that yearns to be an actor - that sense of needing to be onstage, in costume, in character; that is utterly not interesting to me.
dig expose period scary sort
It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.
kinds music skin underneath
I try to get underneath the skin of all kinds of music, and I never know what's going to inspire me and what makes me crazy.
Actually, if you ask my really close friends, they would say that 'Honeymoon' is more me than anything else I've written.