Meet Will Butler, the singer-songwriter who makes ‘stereophonic’ Broadway rock

NEW YORK — The task was daunting: writing a song for a moment of transcendence on stage. Make it funny and exciting for a five-piece band. Write in a way that will justify the audience sitting in their seats for two hours before listening to it. And, oh, it must plausibly be a rock hit in 1976.

That was the work of singer-songwriter Will Butler and the musical arrangers of just one of the songs that make up the Tony Award-nominated piece. “Stereo”, a leading candidate at the June 16 Tony Awards.

“It’s like, ‘OK, there’s a lot of things to think about, but let’s just try it out and we just tried it out,” says Butler, who left Fire Arcade in 2022 and features a new band, Sister Squares.

“Stereophonic” is playwright David Adjmi’s story about a Fleetwood Mac-like band in the mid-’70s, recording music during a life-changing year, with personal feuds opening and closing and then reopening.

The music that accompanies the drama includes complete rockers like “Masquerade” and “Drive”, but also fragments and demos as the band reworks the songs. It’s a wonderful slice of funky classic rock for a fictional band made real on stage.

“I was trying to get into their heads. I also spent a lot of my time just trying to make great music, which is a hard enough task. And so I hope that a great song can bear many interpretations – that’s the dream.”

Butler was connected to Adjmi through a mutual friend, and they met at a restaurant about 10 years ago. Butler had just moved to New York and writing for the theater intrigued him. It was a relaxed meeting and they got along well: the two talked about “Moby Dick” for an hour.

Adjmi had not yet written a word of “Stereophonic”. He had the title, a vague concept and wanted it to be set in a recording studio. Over the next five years, Butler would send out “random” demos, like a song someone might write if they listened to Phil Spector all day or one inspired by Sylvester in 1973 San Francisco.

Once the script appeared, Adjmi turned to Butler to fill in the gaps in the song. At one point, Diana, a young singer-songwriter, nervously played a new song for her controlling boyfriend, the band’s de facto leader and guitarist.

What would the sound be like? It could have been a Stevie Nicks-inspired drop, I’m looking at you, more of a Joni Mitchell mystical journey or a Neil Young “Heart of Glass”-type approach. Butler wrote many options, some that ended up on his new band’s 2023 self-titled debut.

He tried to give the musicians a sonic story. They probably listened to Nina Simone and girl groups growing up. They probably heard Glenn Gould and folk music change from Peter, Paul and Mary to Bob Dylan.

Butler credits the entire team—Adjmi, sound designer Ryan Rumery, orchestrator and musical director Justin Craig, and director Daniel Aukin—for polishing and refining the songs. They all have Tony nominations.

“The music I’ve always made is just a really deep collaborative art form. And theater, by its nature, is deeply collaborative,” says Butler.

“We were all going to protect each other and there would be no hierarchy. We were just going to dig into it and work on it until it was good.”

Butler was also able to help the cast understand what long hours in the recording booth are like and helped with technical details – like the fact that it can take an engineer 15 seconds to rewind a piece of music – but left the writing to the side.

“The emotional world is completely true to my experience. I was in a band with my brother for 20 years and his wife for 20 years, and now I’m in a band with my wife and her sister,” he says.

“It’s like you watch it and think, ‘I hate this play!’ This is very real. So the emotional landscape is completely accurate.”

Assembling a cast of actors that could become a rock band was an entirely different task. The show needed a real drummer, as not even a year of classes would be enough. They found an actor-drummer in Chris Stack.

They found a capable bassist in Will Brill and a good guitarist in Tom Pecinka. For the two female members of the band, they lucked out with Julian Canfield and Sarah Pidgeon, who played the piano as children and had beautiful, raw voices.

“We really lucked out with our voices. On the first day of rehearsal, Tom Pecinka, Juliana Canfield and Sarah Pidgeon sang together, and I thought, ‘OK, it’s going to work.’ It felt like they had been singing together for a decade and it was just beautiful.”

Pidgeon says the experience has been a bonding one, and the actors now feel like a band, rehearsing every day and watching their egos melt away. The band was even invited to play at the release party for Butler’s latest album.

“I feel like an athlete every night, like a snowboarder where I’m trying to do somersaults and spins and get my high score and I need to nail the landing.”

Butler, who won a Grammy for Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” and an Oscar nomination for working on Spike Jonze’s “Her,” is now the toast of New York theater. He admits he was a little skeptical after the show opened off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons when the producers wanted to take it to Broadway.

“I didn’t say it in the room at the time, but in my brain I thought, it’s your money,” he says, laughing. “To be a success is absurdly pleasant, like pleasant and absurd. Just crazy.

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Mark Kennedy is in http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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