Tag Archives: music

Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is “Fucking Amazing”

by RoseannLascelle Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Under the harsh fluorescent lights in the basement of a suburban DC concert venue, as they picked at a pre-show dinner of salmon and rice—I interrogated Swedish superstar Robyn and her Norwegian collaborators, the electro-pop duo Rökysopp, for details about their upcoming releases. The hugely popular Scandinavian acts are on a joint tour promoting Do It Again, their five-song, 35-minute, “mini-album” released in May.

Robyn got her start back in the ’90s as a teen-pop idol, only to leave that image behind in the mid-2000s, ditching her major label and transforming herself into an electro-pop superstar who has pumped out a string of club bangers with the sort of feminist messages seldom heard on the radio. Norwegian duo Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland formed Röyksopp in 1998, and since then have remained at the forefront of a worldwide boom in electronic music.

During our chat, Berge dropped the previously undisclosed title of their upcoming album: The Inevitable End is slated for release in November. “It’s fucking amazing!” Robyn chimed in. The duo’s last full-length album, 2010’s Senior, was a relatively downtempo affair, full of instrumental tracks that lacked the electro-pop dance sensibilities defining the band’s previous work. With The Inevitable End, Röyksopp will return to its roots, re-adding vocals, while still holding onto a bit of that introspective tone. “It’s got a dark energy,” Berge says. “And I think it’s very sincere in many ways. Well, all the music we make is hopefully sincere, but it sits with me.”

Berge and Brundtland said they might just have to steal Robyn’s description of their album: “It’s sad, but it’s not cold. It’s very warm.” If Röyksopp keeps its promise to fans, a new version of “Monument,” the opening track of their partnership with Robyn, will be on the tracklist.

Robyn has been working on a new album herself, a follow-up to her three-part Body Talk series, which spawned megahits like “Dancing On My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend” (below).

She’s hoping to have the new one out by year’s end, co-produced with her longtime collaborator Christian Falk, who died of cancer just a few weeks ago. “I worked with him for the first time on my first album—when I was 16. So I’ve known him half of my life. We became good friends and we kept working in different ways,” she told me. “We’re finishing the album without him, which is a really strange experience, but also a really beautiful thing because we get to be around the memory of him and the music a little bit longer.”

She’s been testing out some of the new material onstage recently. The show I saw this past Thursday included three fresh songs, which blended in seamlessly alongside her old hits.

Once the Röyksopp tour wraps up, she and Markus Jägerstedt, a member of her touring band and key collaborator on her latest songs, plan to head into the studio to put the finishing touches on the album. “I think it’s maybe messier than what I usually do, because Christian was messy,” she says. “It’s a raw energy and it’s based on a club world. I think it’s going to be fantastic, I’m really happy about it.”

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Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is “Fucking Amazing”

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Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is "Fucking Amazing"

by ReggieGRSccub Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Under the harsh fluorescent lights in the basement of a suburban DC concert venue, as they picked at a pre-show dinner of salmon and rice—I interrogated Swedish superstar Robyn and her Norwegian collaborators, the electro-pop duo Rökysopp, for details about their upcoming releases. The hugely popular Scandinavian acts are on a joint tour promoting Do It Again, their five-song, 35-minute, “mini-album” released in May.

Robyn got her start back in the ’90s as a teen-pop idol, only to leave that image behind in the mid-2000s, ditching her major label and transforming herself into an electro-pop superstar who has pumped out a string of club bangers with the sort of feminist messages seldom heard on the radio. Norwegian duo Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland formed Röyksopp in 1998, and since then have remained at the forefront of a worldwide boom in electronic music.

During our chat, Berge dropped the previously undisclosed title of their upcoming album: The Inevitable End is slated for release in November. “It’s fucking amazing!” Robyn chimed in. The duo’s last full-length album, 2010’s Senior, was a relatively downtempo affair, full of instrumental tracks that lacked the electro-pop dance sensibilities defining the band’s previous work. With The Inevitable End, Röyksopp will return to its roots, re-adding vocals, while still holding onto a bit of that introspective tone. “It’s got a dark energy,” Berge says. “And I think it’s very sincere in many ways. Well, all the music we make is hopefully sincere, but it sits with me.”

Berge and Brundtland said they might just have to steal Robyn’s description of their album: “It’s sad, but it’s not cold. It’s very warm.” If Röyksopp keeps its promise to fans, a new version of “Monument,” the opening track of their partnership with Robyn, will be on the tracklist.

Robyn has been working on a new album herself, a follow-up to her three-part Body Talk series, which spawned megahits like “Dancing On My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend” (below).

She’s hoping to have the new one out by year’s end, co-produced with her longtime collaborator Christian Falk, who died of cancer just a few weeks ago. “I worked with him for the first time on my first album—when I was 16. So I’ve known him half of my life. We became good friends and we kept working in different ways,” she told me. “We’re finishing the album without him, which is a really strange experience, but also a really beautiful thing because we get to be around the memory of him and the music a little bit longer.”

She’s been testing out some of the new material onstage recently. The show I saw this past Thursday included three fresh songs, which blended in seamlessly alongside her old hits.

Once the Röyksopp tour wraps up, she and Markus Jägerstedt, a member of her touring band and key collaborator on her latest songs, plan to head into the studio to put the finishing touches on the album. “I think it’s maybe messier than what I usually do, because Christian was messy,” she says. “It’s a raw energy and it’s based on a club world. I think it’s going to be fantastic, I’m really happy about it.”

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Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is "Fucking Amazing"

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"I Pay Taxes Out My Ass But They Still Harrass Me": 11 Amazing Songs About Police Brutality

by HalleySapp Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, just days after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, 29-year-old North Carolina rapper J. Cole uploaded the stirring tribute “Be Free” to his SoundCloud, dedicating it to “every young black man murdered in America.” The song promptly went viral.

Protests against the shooting, and police brutality more broadly, already had been gaining steam as the police launched a highly militarized crackdown, and Cole’s timely reaction—in visceral, heartfelt form—struck a chord among people who know what it’s like to be profiled or harassed by law enforcement. As Cole writes in a blog post introducing the track, “That coulda been me, easily. That could have been my best friend.”

Cole is hardly the only one speaking out: Artists as far and wide as Frank Ocean, Big Boi, Moby, John Legend, and Young Jeezy have taken to Twitter and the airwaves in recent days to express their dissent, and Cole is part of a long tradition of musicians who have done so in song. Here are eleven other amazing tracks on the topic of police brutality in America:

1. “Oxford Town,” by Bob Dylan: Dylan wrote this tune in 1962 in response to a magazine solicitation for songs about the admission of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, its first black student. Covered here by Richie Havens, it makes terse observations about a racist police force that don’t seem too far off today: “Guns and clubs followed him down / All because his face was brown / Better get away from Oxford Town.”

2. “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” by The Rolling Stones: “You’re a heartbreaker / With your .44,” Mick Jagger sings of the New York police in this symphonic 1973 double-ballad from the album Goats Head Soup.

3. “Who Got the Camera?” by Ice Cube: Released on the heels of the Los Angeles riots provoked by the beating of Rodney King, Ice Cube narrates the experience of being a black motorist harassed by law enforcement. “Police gettin badder,” he raps. But “if I had a camera, the shit wouldn’t matter.”

4. “Sound of Da Police,” by KRS-ONE: “Whoop, whoop! That’s the sound of the police!” goes the memorable hook off KRS-One’s 1993 debut solo album, Return of the Boom Bap. “After 400 years, I’ve got no choices,” he raps, noting the continuity between slavery and racist policing. “The overseer rode around the plantation,” he raps, while “the officer is off patrolling all the nation.”

5. “The Beast,” by The Fugees: “Warn the town, the beast is loose,” the Fugees sing over police sirens in this 1996 classic. Lauryn Hill, Pras Michel, and Wyclef Jean spit old-school rhymes from gritty “ghetto Gotham,” where “I pay taxes out my ass but they still harrass me.”

6. “American Skin (41 Shots),” by Bruce Springsteen: “41 shots,” goes the chorus to Springsteen’s 2000 tribute to 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, shot at that many times by four NYPD officers who killed him outside his Bronx apartment in February 1999. “Well, is it a gun? Is it a knife? / Is it a wallet? This is your life,” he sings, referencing the cops’ purported rationale for the barrage, which began when Diallo reached for his wallet. Backed by the E Street Band, Springsteen mournfully reminds us that “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”

7. “Made You Die,” by Dead Prez, Yasiin Bey, and mikeflo: Dead Prez’s stic.man, consistently one of hip-hop’s sharpest social commentators, opens this Trayvon Martin tribute with his characteristic community-mindedness: “Now let’s put it all in perspective / Before the outrage burns out misdirected / What can we do so our community’s protected?” The three other MCs join in to flow on what Bey calls a “young black world in a struggle for a survival.”

8. “Don’t Die,” by Killer Mike: Killer Mike has long protested the corrosive effects of racist policing on black communities in his native Atlanta, where his own father was a cop. In this song off his 2012 release R.A.P. Music, Mike works through the nuances of that personal history, acknowledging that while police are often honest, working-class individuals, their institutional role can be insidious. “‘Fuck tha police’ is still all I gotta say,” he concludes, paying homage to the NWA hit from the dawn of gangsta rap.

9. “Stand Your Ground,” by Pharoahe Monch: Here Monch repurposes the name of the Florida law used to justify George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin into a slogan for community organizers rallying in the killing’s aftermath. “Get involved, get involved, get involved,” the Queens rapper urges over roaring guitar riffs, soliciting support for the Martin family foundation in its effort to repeal the statutes.

10. “Amerika,” by Lil Wayne: Lil Wayne is a rapper far better known for punch lines than political analysis, but he leaves the puns behind (mostly) in this somber single from last summer. In the video, riot police stand glaring in front of a flag whose stars “are never shining.” Wayne’s “Amerika” is a blighted landscape of foreclosed homes and teargas for which he modifies the patriotic anthem: “My country ’tis of thee / Sweet land of kill ’em all and let ’em die.”

11. “Remove Ya,” by Ratking: In this dance-y, grime-influenced track, the young rap experimentalists reflect on their daily experiences with cops in today’s New York. The song is a upbeat call for community against adversity, featuring rapper Wiki playing off the well-circulated Nation recording of an NYPD officer’s stopping and frisking a guy (“for being a fucking mutt“): “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah, we some mutts.” His companion Hak chimes in with memories of being arbitrarily stopped by an officer: “Hear the ‘whoop whoop whoop whoop, stop don’t move’ / ‘Hands on the hood, you gave me that look, wearing your hood.'”

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"I Pay Taxes Out My Ass But They Still Harrass Me": 11 Amazing Songs About Police Brutality

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Most Songs are Three Minutes Long Because That’s How Most of Us Like Them

by JayEastham Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kelsey McKinney asks today why popular songs are almost all 3-5 minutes long. The historical basis for this is obvious: 45 rpm singles hold about three minutes of music, so modern pop music was born in an era when technology limited songs to about three minutes or so. But what about more recently?

It makes sense to assume that since the basis of the three-minute song was the 78 and then 45 rpm single, then songs would become longer as technology evolved….But the length of songs had its biggest jump, according to this data, between the ’60s and ’80s, and very little has changed from the ’90s to 2008, a time period when the technology of music changed drastically.

“What drives what is heard on the radio is an artist’s desire to have their music hit the mainstream, and a record label’s desire to profit from that,” Steve Jones, vice president at the Canadian radio firm Newcap, told NPR….Jones is right. The length of a song on an album doesn’t matter for anyone except for the artist and fans, but a song that hopes to make money and be played on the radio simply has to be a certain length. Either that, or radio stations will edit the song down to the standard, making it three to four minutes, just like the 45.

But this begs the question. Why do radio stations insist on three minutes? They don’t run ads after literally every song, so it’s not because advertisers demand it. The obvious answer is that this is, in fact, what most fans want.

The core explanation, I think, is that most popular music simply doesn’t have the complexity to sustain itself beyond a few minutes. Both the lyrics and the melodies tend to be fairly simple, and after a few minutes they’ve exhausted their potential. Compare this to classical music and you see it more clearly. Most classical music is considerably more complex than your average pop song, but even so a single movement of a sonata or a symphony usually clocks in at no more than ten minutes or so. Opera arias—which developed in a pre-technological age and with much more patient audiences—are closer in length to modern pop songs, typically lasting 3-7 minutes.

Obviously there are exceptions to this. There are plenty of examples of longish pop songs, just as there are examples of classical pieces longer than ten minutes. But generally speaking, you need a fair amount of complexity to sustain these lengths, and that’s not what most people want. They want simple and hummable, and that means not too long.

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Most Songs are Three Minutes Long Because That’s How Most of Us Like Them

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Madonna’s Billboard Number-Ones, Ranked

by DebbraCranwell Posted on August 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Madonna Louise Ciccone was born August 16, 1958. In celebration of her birthday, here are her songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 ranked, according to me, a fan with opinions.

12. “This Used To Be My Playground” (1992)

11. “Justify My Love” (1991)

10. “Who’s That Girl” (1987)

9. “Live To Tell” (1986)

8. “Music” (2000)

7. “Take A Bow” (1995)

6. “Crazy For You” (1985)

5. “Papa Don’t Preach” (1986)

4. “Open Your Heart” (1987)

3. “Like A Virgin” (1984)

2. “Vogue” (1990)

1. “Like A Prayer” (1989)

Source – 

Madonna’s Billboard Number-Ones, Ranked

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Contact: Gene Ween Grows Up

by NydiaI55htoavia Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ween co-founder Aaron Freeman in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff


Puss n Boots


Holly Williams


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Gabriel Kahane


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Jill Sobule


Benmont Tench


Leyla McCalla


Keith & Tex


Declan O’Rourke


Michael Daves

As Gene Ween, Aaron Freeman was the co-leader of the long-lived alternative cult band Ween, which he started with friend Mickey Melchiondo (a.k.a. Dean Ween) when they were middle-school students in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In 2012, after more than 25 years of recording and touring, Freeman left the group as part of his effort to get sober.

Freeman, out this week, is his first album of original songs since leaving the band. It is an openly biographical and personal album that nonetheless utilizes Ween’s ability to inhabit numerous styles and eras of pop music. The musical reference points of post-Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney (“All The Way to China”), Donovan (“Black Bush”), and Cat Stevens (“Golden Monkey”) indicate inspirations that helped carry Freeman through his escape from addiction. I photographed him in Brooklyn, and we spoke again by phone from his home in Woodstock, New York. The following is in his words.

Going through the Ween breakup was really tough. Getting sober was a whole different thing. So there were two levels of it.

For me it’s a lot of patience, because I honestly didn’t know whether I was going to write again. When I write, it always kind of happens all in about a three- or four-week period, where I’ll just go into the zone. A lot of musicians talk about that. I think Bruce Springsteen said that no matter what’s going on in your life, it’s important to keep that one little radar up, because you don’t know when the universe is going to hit you with stuff to write. I really stuck to that concept, and I just waited, and waited, and waited. I would write little things, and record them on the voice memo on my iPhone, little scattered ideas. Then it came.

Last summer I was just sitting around, doing my thing, and then all of a sudden I picked up my guitar and boom! The obvious thing would be to put pressure on yourself, like, “Is this record going to be good? It’s the follow-up to 27 years of Ween, and now I’m doing this—what if it sucks?” When I finally got to the point where my subconscious could free itself of that, and it took a while, the songs started coming. I’d go into my room—the typical fucking artist thing—and scream and play my guitar, then come out six hours later, frazzled hair, not showered. My wife and son would look at me like, “Oh hey, he’s out. Do you want any food?” And I’d be like, “Aaaagh, gotta go back in!” That’s how I worked.

I’m thinking, “If I get one song, at this point in my life, that’ll be fucking amazing for me and my journey.” That one concept led to a whole record. I’m really proud of it, and really grateful I wrote it. It’s stripped down, no bells and whistles to it. I just wanted to go in, pay attention to the songs, get ’em on tape, and then move on.

No matter what goes on, I’ve written the songs that I love. They’re not very complex. I like to keep the words simple so they’re not too identifiable, and so they’ll last longer. I’d like to think that a kid could listen to it, or a bunch of old bums gathered around a trash can fire keeping themselves warm, they would both fully get it.

One of the things I’ve wanted for years, especially during the last five or so years of Ween, was more honesty. For me, it wasn’t getting sincere. We’d just put on our token songs that were kind of goofy, like “My Own Bare Hands.” Toward the end, it was just kind of…mundane. It would distract from the best parts of Mickey’s and my music.

This record is very autobiographical, it’s like a journal for me of things that I was really into in the last year or so… spiritual things and severe, gut-wrenching love songs.

That first song, “Covert Discretion,” is absolutely typical of me. There’s always been a whole bipolar thing going on with me: I’m pretty shy, or soft spoken, and then there’s the other part. A friend who does astrology told me, “You’re a Pisces, you’re totally water, and then you’ve got this fire planet.” A lot of stuff at the end of Ween was just brutal. I have to write about that stuff, or else I feel like I’m not being honest. If this is a song that calls for fucking brutal honesty, then the most important thing is to do that, and take it so far over the edge. That’s what people love about Ween, they love the honesty and not being scared to go there.

I was susceptible to hard-core addiction because my personality is that way. I think a lot of addicts, serious addicts, have that. They go full throttle and then they are coming down and they are trying to deal with it in a quiet way. It’s typical: I was either fuckin’ naked with a cowboy hat on looking for cocaine all night or I was just completely quiet in my room. And that’s a scary way to be.

The most wonderful thing about recovery is that you learn to maintain a steady way of being. There is always stimulus, whether it’s positive or negative. Buddhist philosophy really dives deep in to that: You sit with it, you meditate on it, and you let it pass. It is really difficult because you’ve never done that before. In the early stages of recovery, I’d have to go up to my room and just sit there in so much fuckin’ agony and just wait, recognize it, and let it pass. I had this mantra: Just be accountable. I wanted to be accountable for more than a week. It seems so simple, but it’s easier said than done.

In rock music, you don’t have to be accountable for anything! Laughs. It didn’t matter as long as I got on stage. For many years, I was fooling myself into thinking that I was going to lock myself away in my dressing room and help myself, and I never did because deep down I wanted to party just like everyone else was.

I think if this album sounds more derivative in certain ways it was because I was more clear-minded. I leaned on music that I loved. There’s a lot of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, XTC, and David Bowie—the things that I hold dear. The whole point of this record was to chill the fuck out. For some reason something made me want to record doubled vocals on almost the entire album, which is awesome. I’ve always had this weird desire to conquer and make perfect double vocals. To get spiritual on you, I really let the universe dictate how this whole thing was going to turn out.

If the music sounds like something I’m influenced by, I accept that and try to make it as sincere and honorable as it can. If it’s going to sound like John Lennon, I’m going to fucking make it sound like John Lennon. I’ll never say, “Oh, this kind of sounds like a Lennon song, so I better make it sound different.” That’s not the way I look at music. I consider myself as kind of a vessel of all these beautiful things that I’ve always heard, and I let it go through me. Of course, it always has my stamp on it, my creativity, but it honors what I love.

Fortunately, I’ve had the ability to never think too much about where I’m going. In Ween, my thing has always been: It doesn’t matter what kind of song it is or where it goes as long as it’s a good song. That’s what Mickey and I always adhered to.

The foremost thing is just writing music, and I’ve been very lucky to have 25 years of that under my belt. The Ween audience is very loyal and they’re great. I want to keep making music for them. I don’t want a big, bombastic career. I’ve been through that. If people want to come, they come. If they don’t, they don’t. I want to do great live shows, because I love performing, and I hope to write songs and maybe have other people pick them up, and make a living off of doing that.

But we’ll see. I have to pay the bills. When I lost Ween and decided to get sober, I had to embrace the fact that my income was going to be a tenth of what it was, but it was still worth it. I really believe if you do the right thing and you make yourself accountable and available, then good things will happen.

Aaron Freeman Jacob Blickenstaff

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Contact: Gene Ween Grows Up

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Be Still, My Heart: Beyoncé As Rosie the Riveter

by AngelitaGabriel Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Beyoncé, a whisper of perfection in an otherwise cruel and inhumane world, posted this photo of her as Rosie the Riveter to Instagram.

Beyoncé has become somewhat of a feminist hero recently, putting overtly feminist lyrics into her songs, and making genuinely heartfelt public statements about women’s rights. In January, she wrote an essay about income inequality. On the other side of the pop star aisle there is Lana del Rey who is more interested in Tesla and “intergalactic possibilities.”

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Be Still, My Heart: Beyoncé As Rosie the Riveter

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For God’s Sake, Stop What You’re Doing and Go Buy Tickets to See Nick Cave

by KristinMHHH Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Nick Cave at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater on July 8 Michael Rosenthal

Most concert reviews are ponderous, so I’ll keep this one short: The quirky, passionate Australian musician Nick Cave, who was profiled in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine if you care to read up on his latest doings, basically just renewed my faith in rock and roll—a concept that this scrawny, sexy, histrionic, 56-year-old love child of David Bowie and Tom Waits and something much darker more or less embodies.

Regardless of whether you’ve kept up with his oeuvre (I certainly haven’t) or can even name any Nick Cave songs, he’s a fabulous performer whom you need to see before you die—or before he does. Last night, during his second sold-out evening at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, the audience was smitten as Cave bounced around the stage like a gothic scarecrow, styled out in his signature dark suit and black velvet, taking full advantage of his rich voice and theatrical tendencies.

Reaching into the front rows, and occasionally throwing himself halfway down into them, Cave connects intimately and powerfully with his audience, leavening lyrical intensity with dark humor: Within the twisted landscape of “Higgs Boson Blues,” Cave croons: “If I die tonight, bury me / In my favorite yellow patent leather shoes / With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat / That the caliphate forced on the Jews.” On the contemporary track “We Real Cool,” he sings, “Wikipedia is heaven / When you don’t want to remember no more.” And if you’ve never heard Cave’s unique take on “Stack-O-Lee” or “Stagger Lee” (or however you choose to write the name of the old murder ballad), well, yeah. It’s not much like the other hundred versions you might have heard.

Cave’s talented band, the Bad Seeds, is a marvelous cast of characters to boot, especially the guy I’m calling the Mad Fiddler (and flautist, guitar, keyboard, and mandolin player). All wild hair and long, scraggly half-gray beard, he attacks his violin like some deranged fiddler on the roof. Together the Bad Seeds highlight Cave’s quieter moments with subtlety, exploding with their bandleader when the time is right into mad catharsis. Rock and fucking roll at its finest. Tour dates are here.

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For God’s Sake, Stop What You’re Doing and Go Buy Tickets to See Nick Cave

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There’s a Satirical, Naughty Musical About the Clinton White House Opening in New York. Listen to One of the Songs.

by JaimeLevering Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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If the musical-theater community could find it in itself to create a cantata telling the story of a Twitter war between Paul Krugman and the president of Estonia, then surely a musical about the Clinton administration couldn’t have been that far behind.

On July 18, Clinton: The Musical will premiere at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. (The festival has previously hosted such successful productions as Next to Normal and Altar Boyz, prior to their respective Broadway runs.) The book for Clinton was written by Australian writing duo and brothers Paul and Michael Hodge, and music and lyrics were penned by Paul Hodge. An earlier, shorter version was nominated for best new musical at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and a subsequent incarnation was mounted at London’s King’s Head Theatre the following year.

The idea for the musical emerged out of a Hodge family outing. “My family and I went to go and see a musical in Australia about an Australian politician, back in 2006 or 2007,” Paul Hodge tells Mother Jones. “And after the show, my dad said, ‘Oh, it was good, but politicians don’t make good subjects for musicals. The only politician who would make a good subject for that would be Bill Clinton.’ And I said, ‘Of course!'”

Clinton, a two-act musical satire, covers the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. According to Paul, the music ranges from more traditional American musical styles to burlesque to 1990s pop. As for comedic influences, Paul cites Arrested Development, The Simpsons, and 30 Rock.

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