On "Make This World Better"

    For much of Magpie's Song's development, the War Story was a much looser adaptation of the myth of Hou Yi, Feng Meng, and Chang'e. In this early stage, Apprentice was instead Demagogue, who used the reign of the suns to build up a following, Archer among them. Wife was not only sick, but pregnant with the couple's first child. (I've long struggled with how to justify and stay faithful to Chang'e's mythic passivity while rendering her as a full and realistic person. I'll be the first to admit that sickness and pregnancy was overkill.)

    I had early drafts of a song where the Demagogue arrives to town and whips the workers into a warmongering fervor. Here's a taste of of "Too Hot":

BROTHERS, SISTERS, I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL

MISTREATED AND BROKEN, CRUSHED UNDER LIFE’S HEEL

I’M ONE OF YOU, I FEEL YOUR PAIN

LEND ME YOUR EAR AS I SING MY REFRAIN...

WHEN I FIRST CAME TO TOWN I MET A MAN

WHO USED TO MAKE A LIVING OFF MANURE,

WHEN DROUGHT KILLED CROPS, HE KILLED HIS ANIMALS,

SO NOW HE AIN’T GOT SHIT AND HE’S DIRT POOR

    (I ended up reusing that joke in "Ten Suns". Nothing else from this song survives to the show.)

I’VE SEEN HIS KIDS, THEY’VE RESORTED TO CRIME,

STEALING TO BUY THEMSELVES TIME

ARE THESE THE FOLKS YOU WANT TO MEET?

IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT TO SEE?

THE GROUND HOLDS FIRE TO OUR FEET,

YOU ALL ARE LUCKY YOU HAVE ME!

LIKE IT OR NOT,

IT’S TOO DARN HOT!

    This version of the War Story was quite rich, particularly the decision whether to shoot the final sun. On the one hand was the Demagogue, who was exerting fascistic pressure and appealing to Archer's sense of civic duty as a soldier. On the other hand was Wife, pregnant, impelling Archer to confront and empathize with the Emperor's fatherhood. The more I worked with this adaptation, however, the more I was confronted with the essential storytelling question of "why". Nothing beyond fiat drove Demagogue into the story, or motivated his action, and so nothing Demagogue did felt like it had weight or legs.

    One of the reasons I set out to write a mythic adaptation is because I could guarantee that my source material really worked. In a few short lines, myths and fables establish world-sweeping stakes and test the extremes of human emotion and psychology. If I failed to musicalize them, dramatize them, make them compelling, the failure was on mine as a craftsperson. At times like these, when I had written myself into a corner and imposed myself too strongly on these stories, I made pilgrimages back to the stories. Without fail, the answers were always there the whole time, and stripping away my contrivance helped the stories speak in all their compact clarity and infinite depth.

    It was just so with the War Story. Starting virtually from scratch, I made Demagogue back into Apprentice and removed the pregnancy. This made the piece cleaner and gave it a much-needed sense of direction in the Apprentice's psychological transformation. The song spot once occupied by "Too Hot" now became an ideological confrontation between the idealistic Apprentice and the jaded Archer. And once I had that situation, I had "Make This World Better".

    Well, that's not true. I wrote one really shitty, overly abstract and poetic draft at that song spot before this one. But "A Soldier" is long since lost to the back woods of Google Drive, as it deserves to be...