In this interview, Charlie Sohne and Tim Rosser discuss their collaborative approach to writing songs for musical theater. They begin by solidifying the show's structure through a detailed treatment that outlines the narrative beats. From there, they identify key dramatic moments that will become song moments. Using a BMI‑inspired method, they first brainstorm the song idea and its hook together; Tim then composes the music, often writing the entire song based on the discussed dramatic intent. Because the music maps the narrative, lyric writing becomes straightforward. Tim records a short vocal sketch to capture the emotional shift of the moment. They emphasize that musical‑theater songs differ from pop songs: they must serve specific dramatic functions, so the writers test the song from start to finish to ensure it fulfills its narrative role. They also acknowledge alternative workflows—melody‑first with lyricist adaptation, or modular music that can be re‑lyricized—but stress that their process centers on tailoring each song to a precise theatrical moment.
Chapters
You know, the first step for us is always the structure of the show, and typically, you know, we'll talk for a long time about an idea that we want to turn into a musical, and then at some point it just sort of needs to be solidified. So I'll go— if we're not working with a separate book writer, I'll go back and I'll write a treatment, which is, you know, basically a a 10-page document that just sort of outlines all the beats of the show. And then we'll have another meeting of sorts where we go through and we sort of find in a broad way what we think the song moments are, you know, in looking at all the events of the show. And then I think when it comes to a song, we— and this is a very— this is something we definitely got from BMI, which is you you come up, you talk about it and you come up with not only the idea for the song but the hook of the song. And then more often than not, Tim will go and write music for it. And I think, I mean, what's great is you'll actually write basically the entire song. And if you've talked about it well enough, lyric writing becomes so easy because you have this music that's basically a map of the dramatic moment.
And I'll make a recording where I say, "This is the moment when the thing we talked about will happen," or the change happens, or "This is the moment where they realize the thing," and then this is the quieter responding to that realization. And we've actually experimented a lot with how to do the first step because it's— I think this scariest step. For me, I've realized that unlike writing a pop song where you go, well, here's the refrain, I'm just going to do it as many times as feels right to get the ratio of the song down, a musical theater song's requirements are so different from that. And if you don't know exactly what you need the song to be able to do, you can't even just write a refrain. Because you don't know if it'll be flexible enough to do the job you need it to do or to make the changes happen that you need to happen in the song. So that's why I've taken to— I literally will just beginning to end write the thing and then say, is it working?
And there are people who do it other ways. So, and we've definitely tried that, you know, where they'll, you know, you'll get like a melody that's like a verse and a chorus. And then, you know, and then it's sort of the lyricist job to take that and turn it into a moment. Or even there are times where, you know, I think certain people write in a way where you can almost, you know, if you need to in development, you can take a piece of music from one place and you can put it somewhere else and you can sort of re-lyric it. The thing that's cool about musical theater is you're writing for a moment, and the thing that makes those songs not just you know, pop songs that are existing within a structure is that like they're very specifically tailored. And I think that comes from our, like, the process. And that process is—
Probably both realize that we both need to give it 110% and make sure that we're doing our best work and making it work.
