A Quote by Stephin Merritt

Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.
It seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theater… it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.
The funny thing is, because I was doing a lot of theater when I was a kid, and a lot of that was musical theater, as I got older I became more interested in acting as a separate entity and music as a separate entity, like songwriting and production and recording and playing music.
It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.
When I wanted to audition for a dinner-theater junior troupe in my hometown, I needed to have a piece of musical theater music to sing. I wasn't sure what I wanted to use. My mom and dad suggested that I sing 'Edelweiss' because I knew it from the music box.
Irish music in the local pubs was my first exposure to musical expression, and I feel like Irish music is very close to musical theater because it is always telling a story.
I'm trying to fuse popular and commercial music and just make very creative music. It's popular music: it's everything for everybody.
When I was younger, I definitely thought musical theater was sort of more pure than film. I used to say I'd never go to film because we had to get it right the first time in musical theater. But then, of course, I started doing film and realized I loved it. Keep in mind that I was 8 years old when I said that.
I'm not into music - the only music I like is musical theater, but I have every Ween album.
I grew up doing theater and music, and in fact, I spent more time doing theater, and I'd do music when I could.
I was interested in a whole range of music that I used to play, popular music -- particularly American music -- that I heard a lot of when I was a teenager," "I think at a certain point it dawned on me that myself playing this music wasn't very convincing. It was more convincing when we played music that came from our own stock of tradition. ... I certainly feel a lot more comfortable playing so-called Celtic music.
I feel a vocabulary in my music that is coming from popular music. Popular music is like the mother of all languages.
My knowledge of popular music more or less ends in 1972.
I think as this generation of electronic musicians goes on, popular electronic music will be more and more accepted. It's gonna get less confusing. You know, most people called rap stupid when it started, and it was one of the most innovative music forms of its time.
I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the theater the minute I graduated from college having not pursued it! So I went back to school and got a degree in music and began working in musical theater.
I would love to do stuff on camera. That's what I want to do. It took me a really long time to feel confident as an actor. I think, also, because there's a weird stigma about musical theater where we treat the men who do musical theater differently than we treat the women in musical theater.
I really think that people who want to think more serious have to go and watch theater. Theater is a very sterilized art form. Not as much as music, but very close to music.
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