WTF? A musical???
A little backstory. I started down this path after regularly attending The Cowboy Poetry Festivals in Alpine beginning in 2022. There was something about the simplicity and rawness of that music. Then I discovered Carl Sandburg’s “The American Songbag” in 2023, a great collection of American folk songs published in 1927. I did two albums inspired by this book, Today’s American Songbag, and then The California Songbag, which was all about the rise and fall of the dream of California. I had attended the Adobe conference in LA in October of that year, and afterwards my cousin and doppelgänger Paul took me on a tour of the deserts east of the city, including the Salton Sea, which seemed like a metaphor for everything that had gone wrong there. I created a long form animated video taking the songs from these two projects and telling an early version of the Lilly and Willy story (although they didn’t have names yet). I submitted the video to the San Antonio Luminaria arts festival, but it was not accepted. So, the idea of a story based on these songs went back on the shelf.
Until…
During the summer of 2026, I had a sudden desire to write a musical. This occurred after I saw the pro cut of “Hadestown” at the movie theater. I loved its blend of ancient Greek myths and New Orleans Jazz…and that narrator – he was AMAZING! I thought to myself, “I think I can do something like that…”
But let’s go back even further. \Since 2015, I’ve been a big musical theater fan. It started when I joined the Board of the San Pedro Playhouse in San Antonio, and saw first hand the creative energy that goes into producing live theater. It continued with my role on the Board of the Fredericksburg Theater Company here, where I help manage the money and where I’ve helped with sound and lights on a couple of shows. I’ve seen an unbelievable number of live theater productions n the last 10 years, because theater is one thing my wife D and I thoroughly agree on. And so I’m very familiar with the musical form…I just never knew some day I’d try to write one.
Because, well, after I finished my last music project Those Voices in My Head, I was ready to pivot back to writing. But it was August in Texas and still too hot to make the trek up to my writing nook on the hill. So, inspired by “Hadestown” (still can’t get that opening number out of my head!), I started on this project. I always saw my songs based on the Songbag as a connected by a narrative arc, but on the albums, it was hard to see the connective tissue. It is so much easier when you ate doing a musical, because you usually have actual characters with speaking and singing parts telling a story. And, as I worked on this project, the story became more detailed, and began to reflect more and more of my view of American history. I am struck by how these songs from over 100 years ago describe the America of today so well – the income inequality, the snake oil salesmen, the escapism, etc. In the end, the project has 18 songs, 14 of them based on the Songbag, and 4 original. When I first played the rough drafts of the music to my wife in the car, she said it gave her a massive headache – it was just too much Broadway bombast, kind of like watching one of those vocal competition TV shows where every singer hits a never ending crescendo in the first 30 seconds. So I varied the styles of the music to give the work more of an ebb and flow. It also gave me a chance showcase the history of musical styles in America, roughly tracking the historical path of Lilly and Willy. There are jigs, blues, 60s psychedelia, raw country, and so on. It’s a sing-through musical, so the songs tell the story, as the music is interspersed with snippets of dialog much like “Hamilton” or “Evita”.
For the artwork, I was inspired by a recent visit to the Blanton Museum in Austin, which had an exhibit featuring works from the WPA Art Project from 1935-1943. There is a very definite style to the art created from that period, which is epitomized by the posters created for the National Park service during this time. It has become know as the “WPA Art Style”, which is characterized by “dynamic composition, and an optimistic, heroic focus on everyday American life and labor”. It seemed a perfect fit for the songs and the story, especially the first Act, songs 1 through 9. For the second Act, songs 10-18, I inject a little more psychedelia into the palette, which seemed appropriate for the subject of many of the songs. You can see the artwork for each of the songs below.
Finally, how did I create the music? This was once again done with the use of Suno, an AI tool for creating music. I had the songs I had written and recorded for my two earlier albums, so I had lyrics and arrangements. It was just a matter of creating the characters and outlining the story, and then spending time with ChatGPT to generate the lyric and style prompts for Suno that matched what I wanted the songs to sound like. Then I fed these song by song into Suno, and went through numerous iterations until I got the sound and arrangement I wanted. I was really impressed by the ability of both ChatGPT and Suno to take my increasingly complex requests and rapidly generate the things I was looking for. This is a vast leap in complexity over the standalone songs I composed using just Suno for Those Voices in My Head. In many ways, it felt like the work I did back when I was a computer programmer, because I was merely programming these tools to produce an actual musical. As with my previous forays into AI music generation, I don’t see these songs as finished products. They are merely highly polished demos hopefully I can use to entice actually humans one day to perform them. Instead of being berated as just more “AI slop”, I hope and pray that this is received as “AI assisted”, and you can perceive the human element at its core.
…Not sure what happens next with this project. Summer is ending in Texas, and I eventually will be able to return to the writing nook and resume my writing. So, I’ll put this on the shelf for a while and let it incubate. Before you listen to the music, please ease the concise synopsis below, which will hopefully help you understand what I’m trying to convey with this work.
Concise Synopsis
The American Songbag: Lilly & Willy on the Fast Train to Mars follows two young Americans across generations of dreams, disasters and promises, all under the watchful eye of a ten-thousand-year-old Devil. He claims he does not create human greed, fear or foolishness. He simply knows how to exploit them. But when asked what he can sell for love, he has no answer.
Restless Lilly leaves Pike County for the West in search of a better life. After a failed marriage, a lost fortune and the death of her lover aboard the Titanic, she returns to Placerville penniless and meets Willy, an unsuccessful Irish prospector with little to offer except himself. They fall in love and begin pursuing the promises America places before them: miracle cures, honest work, faith, prosperity and patriotic duty. Each eventually fails them. Their farm is taken by the banker, and Willy leaves Lilly behind to go to war.
Alone and exhausted by loss, Lilly dreams of escaping Earth entirely in Jesus, Take Me to Mars. Instead, she escapes through drugs and dies of an overdose just before Willy returns home.
Devastated, Willy turns first to drinking and casino gambling. His addiction then follows him into the modern world. A slot machine called Lilly the Gold Digger, bearing the image of the woman he lost, draws him from the crowded casino into solitary gambling. Soon the casino lives on his computer and phone, where he can bet endlessly on sports, elections, even wars. The banker once took his farm; now the “tech bros” take everything else, dollar by dollar, click by click. Penniless and furious, Willy vows to expose them on social media. The Devil scoffs, “Yeah, that’ll change the world…”
Still searching for escape, Willy turns to another modern promise in Rich Man, Take Me to Mars, placing his faith in wealth and technology. But when he watches a rich man allow a homeless child to freeze outside his door, Willy realizes that all the money and technology in the world mean little without compassion. He finally follows Lilly into drugs, becoming the “angry tweeter” and addict of Willy the Weeper, and dies beside her in the morgue. The song explicitly gathers the farmer, banker, soldier and orphan back into Willy’s final hallucination.
The Devil believes he has won. But as A Hundred Years Ago reminds him, generations continue to be born, dream and fall in love. Lilly and Willy’s hearts begin beating again.
They rise from their morgue tables and dance.
In Lilly & Willy on the Fast Train to Mars, Mars is finally revealed not as a planet to which Jesus, wealth or technology can deliver them, but as the impossible place beyond despair that Lilly and Willy find in each other. After chasing nearly every promise the world could sell them, they discover the one thing the Devil cannot corrupt or buy.
Love.
The Devil survives. Humanity will make the same mistakes again.
But so will young people.
And that is the Devil’s problem.
Videos
The links to the music are below. Enjoy!