Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ ‘Warriors' Concept Album

Title: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ ‘Warriors' Concept Album Foreign.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on 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 to the stage. If history repeats itself, Lin-Manuel Miranda might soon have another hit musical on his hands. Lin-Manuel, along with his 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, but in song, 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]

People of New York!

Crews of the city!

Who rule dis madness?

Hey, boppers

At midnight

There's a gathering after dark

In Van Cortlandt Park

Hey, boppers

Cyrus needs five boroughs to see this through

This means you

Hey, boppers

The truce is on

No weapons but your fists, she insists

Hey, boppers

Keep your radio tuned tight

Time it just right

And you just might

Survive the night

Warriors, come out to playayayayeah

Survive the armies of the night

Warriors, come out to playayayayeah

Boogie down! Who's steppin' bright for the Bronx?

This is the sound of something being born

From the ashes of the Bronx

The siren squeals and the car horn honks

Across the cross Bronx

And what the Bronx wants

Is not a combative retaliatory response

It's a renaissance, with Cyrus tellin' the truth

Underrepresented youths, an unprecedented truce

Don't shoot

Crews travel to the park

And miracles can happen when we gather in the dark

Miracles can happen when we gather in the dark

Survive the night

Alison Stewart: Warriors features collaborators like Nas, Billy Porter, Ms. Lauryn Hill, and Broadway superstars like Philippa Sue, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and more. It's available to stream now. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis join me to discuss it. Here's our conversation.

[music]

Alison Stewart: 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: 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." He incepted me.

Thanks to Phil Westgren for sending me that email, because it was bubbling in my head for a few years, and 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. I said, "I need someone smarter and cooler than me to help me write this." Then I called Eisa.

Alison Stewart: That would be Eisa. Why did you say yes to this project?

Eisa Davis: Come on, Lin. That's number one. 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. 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. 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: Keeping the idea alive.

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 eight to one 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." I guess that's my answer.

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 round doing that, is that there are 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's 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.

I got to write the best Fania impression I could for that. Ballroom culture is happening. They we're setting the table for Paris is Burning and that incredible subculture. 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. 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. I forgot.

Eisa Davis: It's beautiful, isn't it?

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

Alison Stewart: It was gorgeous.

Eisa Davis: Those rain-slicked streets .

Alison Stewart: All the outfits that they all wore-

Eisa Davis: Bobby Mannix.

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: 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]

Cochise

Cowgirl

Fox

Cleon

Ajax

Rembrandt

Swan

Pon de replay

Cochise

Cowgirl

Fox

Cleon

Ajax

Rembrandt

Swan

As far as you can see from the top of the Wonder Wheel

The Warriors are here

Come out, come out, come out, come out

From Coney Island Creek to the Stillwell subway station

The Warriors are here

Come out, come out, come out, come out and play

We keep it safe, we keep it clean

When shit goes down, we intervene

Every summer we go to war with every fly-by-night

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?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I do, because honestly, I write very filmically. 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 in Yorktown. Then the fun is, when you're doing a stage piece, bringing into collaborators to translate with this. With this, the fun was the musical landscapes that we were playing in.

Eisa Davis: 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 have 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. 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.

Alison Stewart: 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: 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: 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 as they're fighting.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: There's no time for seven I Want songs for The Warriors.

Eisa Davis: Exactly. There's no time to stop and feel.

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.

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

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