A Conversation with Brett Boles

We speak to Brett Boles about Sondheim and songwriting

It was really great to speak to Brett Boles recently! Brett is an award-winning musical theatre songwriter and music director. A HUGE number of people know Brett as the creator of The M Tea, which across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube reaches hundreds of thousands of people with short, dynamic videos that demystify the songwriting process and help us to understand why we love the songs that we love. Just click the names of each site above to find his page on each platform! Brett has also created The M Tea Songwriting Studio for those wishing to dive deeper into the craft. We talked about all this and more, and our conversation begins below:

It’s really great to talk to you. Was theater always in your bloodstream?

Music always was, for sure. I was playing piano at two years old, so that was always a thing. And then I remember at seven years old, my dad was playing the Les Mis CD in his car, and I heard “Castle on a Cloud.” And for me, that was magical. That was the first moment I was like, “Musicals are really cool!” And then from there, I started performing a lot, so I was an actor and a singer and all that. I went to a performing arts camp in seventh grade, which got me really into performing. And then in high school, I started writing musical theater type things, and the rest is history.

And did Sondheim come much later for you, or did you have a similar “Castle on a Cloud”-like moment with his work?

It definitely came later. I just didn't get it as a kid, and really, it wasn't until college when I started really appreciating it. And then after college, joining the BMI workshop in New York and going through that whole thing, I just had a whole new appreciation for his level of craftsmanship. I became obsessed, as any theater writer is probably going to be obsessed with Sondheim.

You have a recent video where you look at “Giants in the Sky,” and it's a perfect encapsulation of what you do so well. It's a song I must have heard 1000 times, and you're pointing out the “in between” of the F♯ rather than the A♭ or the F—and I’m hearing it with new ears. It’s so great! Were you always looking for those little nuggets?

Believe it or not, I didn't really start looking that deeply into all of these things until I started making videos about them. I've always appreciated the craft, but I never really had a reason to dig that deeply into things until I started doing this for people. And all of a sudden, as I'm teaching, I'm learning, which is awesome. It’s given me a whole new appreciation of Sondheim’s craft. And of course, reading his books years ago, that was a huge insight. As a musical theater writer, I think those books are required reading. But yeah, until I really started teaching the craft of songwriting, I didn't delve as deeply into that stuff. But I'm really glad I started to do that, because I'm finding all sorts of things now that I probably knew existed but never really looked for specifically before.

And what have you learned about what people are hungriest for, or respond to the most? Have you been surprised by which videos have really taken off, or perhaps provoked particularly memorable comments?

I think in general, the one thing that I've learned about what people want as I've done this is that they're tickled by being able to hear music in a different way. They love to have their ears opened to things that—to use the Stephen Schwartz lyric—they never knew they never knew. A lot of times, my musical theater stuff doesn't do quite as well in terms of numbers of people viewing them as the Disney stuff does. I'm a Disney fan, obviously. I love Alan Menken, I love Stephen Schwartz. But I know that by going to the Disney world, I can bring more people in. That's something that they have a more immediate reaction to, because they've seen the movies. Not everybody has seen Sunday in the Park with George, but everybody's seen The Little Mermaid, and a lot of people have seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame. So those are ways in for me, because once I bring people into my world, then they're there and then I can get them hooked on the musical theater stuff. They've already learned something, and so now they're eager to learn more, regardless of whether it's Disney or Sondheim or Meredith Wilson or whoever else.

There's such a clarity about the way you present things in your videos. Is your goal always to be inclusive of people who don’t, say, read music or play piano?

Yes, totally. From the very beginning of this whole thing, I did not want to only cater to people who understand musical jargon and music theory speak. I didn't want to limit the number of people I could reach that way. I think being a high school teacher really helped me with being able to crystallize things for people in a way that was digestible and manageable and accessible.  I'm super passionate about equitable access to things. And my whole thing is that if you are interested in this, you should be able to learn about it. There's going to be a point at which you can't really go any further unless you have a certain level of knowledge, but there's plenty to learn without necessarily needing that. And in my songwriting program that I run for songwriters who are really interested in delving deeper and deeper into that, I can use my music theory speak and my jargon with all those people, and that's fine. But for the vast majority of the people that I reach on my socials, they shouldn't have to know that stuff. And there is a point at which music can start to become a little bit more opaque and a little bit less accessible to people when they don't have that level of experience or knowledge. But I always try to explain things in a way that most people can understand, regardless of whether they have that education or not.

I’d love to know a bit more about the songwriting courses you mention. It’s such a vast world to explore, and there must be so many different routes into it. What’s your approach?

What I'm most focused on teaching my students is the concept of prosody. That is, the concept of all parts of a song working together to tell the same story. And it all comes from a storytelling perspective. I find that the easiest way in, the easiest way to start, is with lyrics, because people have a much more concrete understanding of language and how that works. Music is a little bit more ephemeral, but lyrics are a really good way in. So I start simply with sense-bound writing, making sure that people are getting used to using all sorts of sensory imagery in their lyric writing, because that really helps draw a listener in and really makes them feel like they're part of the world. So a lot more showing, a lot less telling. And then from there, we start to explore song structure, and we talk about how we use rhymes in a song, which is different in a pop setting than it is in a musical theater setting, so I always have to make sure that I'm threading the needle there. So we go into structure, we go into rhyme types, guiding the listener’s ear through a lyric. And then we start to explore melodic contour and how melody and lyrics connect together, and how we can make sure that they're both working together to tell that same story. We do a little bit of ear training, just to make sure that people are up on their Roman numerals, their I, IV, V, VI—all those chord progressions and whatnot. And we talk about stable pitches and unstable pitches, how the 2, 4, 6 and 7 tend to want to pull onto other scale degrees, so they do assignments where they're writing using those unstable pitches to lend instability to a lyric, instability to a melodic line. I try to give everybody the building blocks that they need to be effective storytellers through song.

And you’re teaching people and talking about these things on a daily basis, which is famously the best way to clarify and augment your own understanding of a subject too. Have you found the educational side of your work helpful in your own writing?

Absolutely, yeah. You hear all the time that the best way to master something is to teach it. And I feel like the more I teach, the better I get. That's also why, in my program, we have our community calls, our group calls, so that we can give each other feedback. Because the more we practice giving feedback to people on their work based on the things that we're learning, the better we get at incorporating all that stuff into our own work. That tends to be one of the things that works even better than the video modules, even better than me giving feedback on people's work. People giving each other feedback makes them better writers.

It strikes me that you must have had a good amount of contact with a really rich variety of theater happening around the US. Do you have a general sense of how healthy the the picture is for musical theater around the country, beyond Broadway?

That’s a very interesting question. The Broadway thing is a commercial enterprise. It has to be about, “How can we make sure that our investors are going to make their money back?” And that's important. I mean, it costs a lot to mount a show. It’s costing $20 million to get a show from nowhere to opening night on a Broadway stage. And that's just getting it there, regardless of keeping it open and running. So there can be a hesitancy to push audiences beyond what they're comfortable with, because the fear is that people won't come to see things and things won't make money. Taking chances on new work is very rare because, again, the chances of making money on people who are unknown—unless you have a major star in the thing—is unlikely.

Other places around the country are really good places for new work, because I think people do want to see that stuff. And when you're not talking about millions and millions of dollars at stake, it's a little bit easier to do things that are outside of New York. And I do think that for writers now, Broadway used to be the only thing. It was Broadway or nothing. And I think that's over now. Off-Broadway, where there's still a bunch of experimental things going on, I think that's a really healthy environment. And smaller shows can do really well there, and writers can get exposure who may not otherwise have it in a place like that. As long as you can get an album recorded, you can get things licensed and use social media to get word out about things. Social media can help a lot.

So it's complicated and a little convoluted, just because of the commercialization of everything in New York. I'm hopeful that at some point the pendulum will swing the other way. The other part of the issue is that a lot of the stuff that's getting produced now in New York is written by songwriters who aren't musical theater songwriters. And I'm not saying that that's wrong or bad or anything, but there's an element of craft that gets lost because you have people writing for this medium who don't know anything about the medium. And when that happens, and more and more people are paying for tickets to come and see this work, in their mind, now that's musical theater—and so a lot of the craft is falling by the wayside. That is something that I do worry about a little bit.

But also, I think when you see Merrily We Roll Along, for example—when you see stuff in New York that is written by writers who know what musical theater is, how it works, and what craft is—I think people really appreciate it. They see it and they go, “Oh, that’s different. And better!” And there's a reason the craft was developed the way it was developed over many, many, many decades: because that’s what works.

Are there any projects of your own in the works that you’re able to talk about?

Yeah. My collaborator Natalie Tenenbaum and I—she's a world-class pianist and composer, who’s freaking phenomenal—we have a musical adaptation of Benjamin Button. I know there's one in London right now, but we have one as well that we've been working on since 2013, so it's been a long time coming! I also have a show called Time Stops, which premiered down in West Palm Beach, Florida, a couple of summers ago, so we're in rewrites for that. I've got a musical I can't really talk about that I'm working on with an Emmy award-winning TV personality. And I have a couple of interesting meetings lined up in LA, so we'll see what that ends up bringing my way. But those are the projects that are immediately in the works!

Again, you can follow Brett on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube by clicking the name of each platform. And if you’re interested in The M Tea Songwriting Studio, simply click here.