Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. What do the albums Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and Hadestown have in common? They started as concept albums and became Broadway shows. Even Hamilton, the mixtape, started out as music, but made its way onto the stage. If history repeats itself, Lin-Manuel Miranda might soon have another hit musical on his hands. Lin, along with collaborator Eisa Davis, have taken on a cult-classic film, 1979's The Warriors.

Like the movie, this concept album is about a Coney Island gang who must fight their way back from the Bronx after they are framed for the murder of a respected gang leader. Except this time, you'll hear that the journey plays out in song. It's a musical after all, and instead of testosterone-laden young men, in this adaptation, the warriors are women. Here's a taste from the very first track. This is Survive The Night.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Survive The Night]

Alison Stewart: Warriors features collaborators like Nas, Billy Porter, Ms. Lauryn Hill, and Broadway superstars like Philippa Soo, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and more. If you want to gather up your own gang of ruffians to check it out together in person, tonight, Lincoln Center is hosting a silent disco-style listening party of the album. It will be hosted by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis, featuring appearances by some of the album's star-studded voices.

That's part of their Summer for the City event series. Head to lincolncenter.org and click on "Summer for the City" to learn more. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis joined me for an All Of It listening party when the album first came out. Ahead of tonight's silent disco at Lincoln Center, let's listen to my conversation about it with Lin and Eisa.

[MUSIC - Interlude jingle]

Alison Stewart: All right, Lin, a friend emailed you with the idea for a Warriors musical, and you said, "I love The Warriors. It'll never work. Here's why." What were your reasons then, and what made you decide to revisit the idea?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: [chuckles] My reasons then were, first of all, I saw that movie when I was way too young to see it on a friend's VHS, and it was just inscribed on two stone tablets for me. I was just like, "It's untouchable." Also, I think the action movie part of it scared me, was action movies and musicals are always fighting for the same storytelling real estate. We're going to fight and/or sing in various combinations over the course of the evening, but he incepted me.

Thanks to Phil Westergren for sending me that email, because it was bubbling in my head for a few years. I finished Hamilton, and I got on the other side of that whole experience, and then it was taking up all this real estate. Then I think another part that interested me was when I mentally made the gender flip of The Warriors as a female gang. It's such an agro testosterone movie that just recasting them suddenly made every plot point more interesting or compelling to write about.

I love writing for women's voices. Encanto was a masterclass in writing for lots of different women's voices, and so I said, "I need someone smarter and cooler than me to help me write this." Then I would call Eisa Davis. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: That would be Eisa?

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Why did you say yes to this project?

Eisa Davis: I mean, come on. Lin. [laughs] Yes, that's number one, and this is someone that I have known for years. We first met when Passing Strange and In the Heights were both off-Broadway, and then came on Broadway, 2007, 2008, so we've just been playing around in the same sandbox for a while. We both have this deep, aesthetic kinship when it comes to having a hybridity of genre and bringing hip hop, and, in Lin's case, bringing all of the Latin traditional music, onto the stage, places that they've never been.

I, of course, had to say, "I want to hang out with this person," where it's never a "half glass full, half empty" with Lin. It's always a "cup runneth over," and how do we share that with people? I also was really stunned by the film. I'd actually never seen it, even though I'd known it to be so important and crucial to the culture, particularly hip hop culture, particularly New York culture. I just was stunned by the fact that there is this unbelievable promise of peace that Cyrus offers to all of these gangs in the city.

That's abandoned in the film, and, in a way, I wanted to see if there was a way that we could draw that idea through to the end, not in a moralistic way, not in a way that was preaching, but just allowed for--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Keep the idea alive, yes.

Eisa Davis: Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: Why do you like to write for women's voices? That's an interesting--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Oh, it's so much more fun. I think part of it is, subconsciously, I'm always trying to write the best school musical possible. I fell in love with theater not by seeing shows, but by being in the school play. When you have a really good school play, there's lots of parts for everybody, and there's lots of parts for women because they audition, to guys, at an 8:1 ratio. I remember trying to convince my friends who were guys, like, "Please don't play basketball. Come audition for the musical. We need dancers." Yes, I guess that's my answer. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: The movie is all about the '70s. What was interesting about New York in the '70s that you wanted to bring forward?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think the fun about writing musicals set in New York, which this is my third, fourth go around doing that, is that there's so many New Yorks inside New York. Setting it in 1979, obviously, from the perspective of 2024, allowed us to play with all the different musical subcultures that were happening in '79 at the time, not just the ones represented in the film.

There is a gang in the South Bronx, and I am very aware that Fania was revolutionizing salsa music in the '70s, pretty much out of the South Bronx, so I got to write the best Fania impression I could for that. Ballroom culture was happening. We're setting the table for Paris Is Burning and that incredible subculture, so we get to write to that. It was like this open-world playground of all these different genres and subcultures.

Eisa Davis: I grew up in the Bay Area, but I remember that moment when Rapper's Delight came out. I remember exactly where I was, and so there's this way in which hip hop is really exploring and exploding in 1979 when the film comes out. In a lot of ways, our album is a love letter to the film, but also a love letter to the origins of hip hop.

Alison Stewart: I watched the film last night. It was so good.

Eisa Davis: It's beautiful, right? Isn't it? [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: I forgot.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Wasn't New York gorgeous in it?

Alison Stewart: It was gorgeous, and every-- [crosstalk]

Eisa Davis: Yes, those rain-slicked streets.

Alison Stewart: All the outfits that they all wore-

Eisa Davis: Yes, Bobbie Mannix. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: -spoke to different parts--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: The one really well-behaved gang that puts tokens in so that no one's jumping the turnstile.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Yes, so good. I'm speaking with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis about their new concept album, Warriors. Let's listen to The Warriors who are introducing themselves. This is Roll Call from the album.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Roll Call]

Alison Stewart: As you're writing the album, do you have a visual of what you're writing about?

Eisa Davis: You want me to answer that?

Alison Stewart: Yes. [laughs]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I do because, honestly, I write very filmically, and that's the fun and challenge for my collaborators. When I was writing the Battle of Yorktown for Hamilton, I was picturing a literal battle out of Yorktown. Then the fun is, when you're doing a stage piece, bringing it in to collaborators to translate that. With this, the fun was the musical landscapes that we were playing in.

Eisa Davis: Yes. I think it's case by case, but I feel like the number one thing was just the sonic aspect of it, and that we wanted to create the visual through what the lyrics were. Something that I think was also really amazing about this collaboration was that Lin was just really, really open to all the things that I had to offer. I'm also a composer, so both of the tracks that you just played are ones where we collaborated musically. That also, to me, is a huge part of being able to envision something, is what the sound does to your body. What it makes you feel like, how it makes you shake, and that actually creates the scene as well.

Alison Stewart: How did you deal with the idea-- I guess, it's exposition that has got to happen a little bit because this is a little-- It reminded me of a podcast. I know that's really weird to say, or the one that Daphne Rubin-Vega did. Do you remember that? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Oh, yes, I do know what you're talking about. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it reminded me of that. Listening to a podcast and having to follow the story along, and you have to deal with all the exposition. How do you do that while also retaining your creativity?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. Creativity abhors freedom. We love a restriction. We love a limit and like, "We need to get from A, B, to C, and we also have to hit this." That was the fun of it, was, again, you're musicalizing what are essentially action sequences. When we're writing Leave The Bronx Alive, it starts as this slow salsa because, in my mind, in the movie, the bus is slowly patrolling this train station and guarding it. Then, when The Turnbull ACs see The Warriors, it turns into this fast-paced merengue, and now they're on the hunt. We're all doing Peter and the Wolf, but we're really trying to translate action into music.

Eisa Davis: Yes, and I think the short answer to it is that there's no time for exposition in this particular narrative. Everything that you learn, you learn on the go, and as they're fighting.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, there's no time for seven "I want" songs for The Warriors.

Eisa Davis: Exactly. Right, there's no time to stop and feel. [crosstalk]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We're going to meet them and learn about them as they're on the run.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of Leave The Bronx Alive.

Eisa Davis: Ooh.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Leave The Bronx Alive]

Alison Stewart: There's so many different kinds of music on the album. I was listening to it on the way home, and all of a sudden, there's a rock song, and then there's a salsa song, and there's hip hop. Why did you want to incorporate so many different kinds of music? You could have just stayed with hip hop. What do you think?

Eisa Davis: I think it's because that I, Lin, and our producer, Mike Elizondo, we're all eclectics. We love being able to both love and, also, express, through character, all of these different kinds of styles, and it's because there are so many New Yorks that we wanted to bring that about. I can't imagine this album as one particular-- one single style of music. That would not get at what this is, and you don't hear that in the film either. There are different styles of music that are there.

I think it's; we both have a dedication to diversity, period, when it comes to our storytelling and representation, and-

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's also just fun.

Eisa Davis: -it's so much fun. [crosstalk] We want to play.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: When Eisa thought of the idea to have Luther sound like a screamo metal God, I was like, "I-- Wait." She played me this track, and I was like, "I can feel my grandmothers in heaven crossing themselves on my behalf."

[laughter]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: This is so scary. This is exactly right. It's scary and chaotic and virtuosic, and that's exactly Luther, who's a maestro of chaos. Yes, so it's fun. The fun of writing musicals is that you're getting to match tempo and temperament to character.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: The song that we've all been obsessed with is Quiet Girls.

Eisa Davis: Ooh, yay.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Oh, yay. [laughs]

Eisa Davis: Glad to hear that.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit about this before we play this song.

Eisa Davis: Oh. First of all, we have some treasures of the theater and film, and the screen on here. Billy Porter, Michaela Jaé-

Lin-Manuel Miranda: -Rodriguez.

Eisa Davis: Mykal Kilgore. [crosstalk]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: -Kilgore, who's your favorite Broadway singer's favorite Broadway singer.

Eisa Davis: We were claiming that time, but what we really wanted to do with this was to make sure that we had this queer representation here, and that was something that was supposed to happen in the original film.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. We heard a podcast interview with Walter Hill where he said he had a gay gang, but that was not going to fly with Paramount in 1978, and he cut it from the script, and so we were like, "Oh, this is a sign." We were headed that way anyway, and it was like a ratification.

Eisa Davis: Yes, so this is The House of Hurricane, and they are letting people know that you have to let your flag fly. Let your free flag fly. [chuckles] That's so hard to say. [crosstalk]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: They're on skates. They're on roller skates. Old-school, '70s roller skates.

Eisa Davis: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Quiet Girls.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Quiet Girls]

Alison Stewart: It's so good. That was so good.

Eisa Davis: It's, "Stand clear of the closing doors." [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You have interesting people on the project. You have Nas, Ms. Lauryn Hill, to Colman Domingo, to Amber Gray. What did you like about mixing, first of all, the Broadway stars, the Broadway names, with the hip hop names?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, Colman was in Passing Strange with Eisa.

Eisa Davis: Right, that's my brother.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: They're old buddies, and that was the Heights, Passing Strange crossover was complete when Colman joined us on the project.

Eisa Davis: He's rapping. I mean, come on.

Alison Stewart: That was interesting.

Eisa Davis: Right? We all need-- [crosstalk]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We just take it on faith that he can do everything.

Alison Stewart: "He can do it."

Eisa Davis: Of course.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: He can just do anything. We didn't know if he could do it. We were just like, "Colman, get in here."

Eisa Davis: Right. We were just like, "Come on in." [laughs]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Our Warriors are really all theater stars. Honestly, that began as us just calling our friends to do demos for us. We called a lot of these folks in-- there's a lot of Hamilton alums in there, a lot of just friends of ours. Then, when we heard them all singing together, we were like, "Oh, there's a thing happening. There's a chemistry happening here."

At one point, Eisa finally turned to me and she was like, "What pop star are we going to get that is better than what's happening right now?" And so they fell into the snowball as it rolled down the hill.

Eisa Davis: Yes, and we just love being able to have them centered as the gang and have all of these other folks, whose names you might know a little bit better, at least supporting that--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: From all of these different genres, too.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Let's listen to Still Breathin' from The Warriors.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Aneesa Folds.

Eisa Davis: Come on.

[MUSIC - Aneesa Folds & Colman Domingo: Still Breathin']

Alison Stewart: What did it bring-- all of those people, what did it do for each other? What did they get from each other?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: What do you mean? I'm not sure I understand the question. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Does that make sense? What did they bring out in each other, whether it's the Broadway star versus the pop star?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, that's a great question because I think the thing that's central to all of these genres is storytelling, and they all go about that very differently. It's a very different conversation with our MCs, who represent the boroughs in the opening number. In hip hop, you write your own verses, you write your own feature. That was a big mind shift for some of them to be like, "No, you're playing a character and you're writing these lyrics."

Busta Rhymes being like, "You are the only person I have let write lyrics for me. I don't let other people write my lyrics." That's a real code-of-honor thing in hip hop.

Eisa Davis: Yes, and it was a huge leap with Ms. Lauryn Hill as well, right?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes.

Eisa Davis: Yes, because of the fact that we got to bring people together in the studio-- one of those really exciting moments was when Stephen Sanchez, who's this incredible, young crooner, was in the studio with Joshua Henry, who's just like-- right? [crosstalk]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I was blown away, legend.

Eisa Davis: Two of these unbelievable throats.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Go look at him singing The Wheels of a Dream. He's rehearsing for Ragtime right now. Did you see that clip this morning? My God. [crosstalk]

Eisa Davis: Yes, he is. No, I haven't seen that, but to see them in the studio together and to see how they have these very different gifts, but very powerful ones, and Stephen was just like, "Wow, you really know how to sing, don't you?"

[laughter]

Eisa Davis: It's really great to be able to have that kind of cross-pollination.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, and they were enormous mutual admirers, so it was great to put them in the room together. It was really fun.

Alison Stewart: What did you listen to? What concept albums did you listen to when you were a little kid?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Jesus Christ Superstar on rotation. There's a Ruben Blades album called Maestra Vida that was this two-part concept salsa album. That was big for me. Prince Paul, or A Prince Among Thieves, is the hip-hop concept album. It tells a guy's entire day of his life. De La Soul is Dead.

Eisa Davis: De La Soul is Dead. Yes, we're big De La Soul fans.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, the skits on De La Soul-- A lot of '90s hip hop albums are concept albums. Even Ready to Die is a concept album. They've got skits and they've got things that hang through throughout, so it doesn't feel like a huge leap for us because we have a steady diet of it. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: We're going to listen to a little bit from Orphan Town. This has one of your Hamilton alumni on it, yes?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Freestyle Love Supreme. Yes, Utkarsh.

Alison Stewart: Yes, Freestyle Love Supreme. Yes, Utkarsh.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Utkarsh. Yes, he's on Ghosts right now, but he moonlights as one of our orphans. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Orphan Town]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: [singing] And someday, The New York Times.

Alison Stewart: Aww.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: [laughs] That's my favorite part of that scene in the movie, is that they actually carry around their own press clippings.

Alison Stewart: Is it, really?

Eisa Davis: Clippings. It was so good.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Before we wrap up, I do have to play a voice that our listeners will recognize from the album.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Leave The Bronx Alive]

Eisa Davis: Are you talking about Bernie?

Alison Stewart: Bernie? Explain to folks who Bernie is.

Eisa Davis: Bernie is the voice of the MTA. That, "Stand clear of the closing doors," comes from her voice, and we are so thrilled. I'm so glad that we got to have-- She makes us legit.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, she did all the MTA, "Stand clear," all of those announcements for years, for the subway system, and we brought her into the studio to record all of our subway drops.

Eisa Davis: Yes, so shout out to Bernie. Thank you so much.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We love Bernie.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis will co-host a Warriors listening party at Lincoln Center tonight at 9:30. Head to lincolncenter.org for more information. Coming up on the show tomorrow, we continue our week spotlighting memoirs and biographies with a look into the life of boxer and Brooklyn-native Mike Tyson. Author Mark Kriegel joins us to talk about his book, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, I appreciate you, and I will meet you back here tomorrow.