Many years ago when I was in my mid 20s, I served as composer-in-residence at the New York Shakespeare Festival for around five years.  It was an unbelievable opportunity to learn on the job, get major experience writing for the theater and work with the best people in the business.

Most composers for the theater are happy if they can get a show on and out there in the public eye once every three to five years.  In my five years at the Festival I did music for over 40 productions.

In the course of doing all that work I had the opportunity to meet and work with the best talent in the world in the theater.  At the time, though I often wrote lyrics stumbling blindly along, I always collaborated with a lyricist when it came to anything important.  My abilities as a composer were far ahead of my lyric writing chops.

I remember one evening while there at NYSF running into Stephen Schwartz who was a contemporary.  Steven had written the music and lyrics for Godspell and Pippin and later for Wicked and a host of animated Disney films.  I was looking for a lyricist for a project at the NYSF and asked him if he might be interested in collaborating.

He turned me down explaining that he was trying to establish himself as both a composer and a lyricist and wanted to only do both. Then he said something that changed my life.  He said, “Why don’t you do both?”  I explained that I was really only a composer and that lyrics were just not my thing.

He said, “Well, they may not be your thing now, but if you start seriously now and stay at it, you could become a really good lyricist in 10 years.”  To a 25 year old that seemed like a long time, but I took him at his word.  I started and kept at it, filling notebooks and stumbling through for the next 10 years.

Collaborating with a lyricist can be painful for a composer.  The annals of theater collaborations are full of stories about fighting composers and lyricists.  It’s said that Rodgers and Hammerstein got to the point where they couldn’t be in the same room together and Hammerstein would just messenger his lyrics over to Rodgers’ apartment when they worked.

It always was a pain waiting around for a lyricist to finish his work so that I could get on to mine.  And then what if they weren’t right?

So the chance to self-collaborate was, for me, a long desired and constant goal.  I’ll admit that my early songs were full of mistakes.  My notebooks are full of half-baked ideas, unfinished ramblings and simply bad crafting with clichés galore.

Occasionally I would get lucky and out would pop a good one and I suppose that drove me on in my quest.  Along the way I got a lot of great help from mentors Alan Lerner and Julie Stein.  They shared their appreciation of the craft of both theater composition and lyric writing unselfishly and I gobbled up their wisdom whenever offered.

Today I try to continue the tradition and teach at a time when lyric writing seems to be on a diminishing trend.  Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I still love rhymes that rhyme, melodies that repeat perfectly in a song because the lyrics scan perfectly, songs that have form (though I do break form more than the next guy, at least I know when I’m breaking it) and melodies that stick.

I am my own lyricist now and love it, though I do still on occasion collaborate when I find a gem.  If I were to write another musical, I would want to do the lyrics.  Now I could handle it.  My ten-year apprenticeship has long been over and now when I write a song, I feel like I know what I’m doing and immensely enjoy the process.

Stephen was right.  For me, it took about 10 years before I could consistently turn out a crafted lyric. Or in the words of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, I’ve spent my 10,000 hours learning and honing my craft.

I recently did my second collaboration with a terrific lyricist named David – King David to be exact (funny, I don’t know his last name).  He wrote over a hundred and fifty published songs in a book called the Bible.  The melodies have since disappeared, but the lyrics remain and although they are all translations from the original language of the man, many of them still ring with great grace and portent.

Our most recent collaboration was on his 23^rd song and probably his best known hit.  I’ve wanted to tangle with that one for many years now and I’m so glad that I waited until later in life to do so.  What transpired was one of my favorites and the sheet music, for those interested, should be posted on watchfiremusic.com in the next couple of weeks.  The piano transcription is being prepared as we speak.

I wrote it for the Missus as a gift her for our 10^th Anniversary and she sang it at her weekend gig just last week.  It’ll be on her next CD due to be released this summer or fall.

So thanks to Stephen for his words of wisdom oh so long ago.  He steered me right.

To those of you who have similar aspirations, I give the same advice.  Stick with it.  It makes for a life of deep thought and concentrated endeavor and it is very worth the effort in the long run.

And remember, “If at first you don’t succeed; try, try again.”

For more inspiring music you can download
and information about Peter Link, please visit Watchfire Music.