Hello Beautiful People,
This next Q&A is with the one and only, ZZ. Aka Zack Zadek.
NO INTRODUCTION IS NECESSARY – we’ll just dive right in.
MM: First thing first, can you pinpoint the moment when you knew you wanted to write musicals?
ZZ: I wish I could be like one of those people who can remember every single day of their lives in exacting detail, and I could be like “It was Thursday the 16th! I was wearing a blue shirt!”. It all kind of started because I wouldn’t stop singing around the house, and in school and pretty much everywhere as a kid. I started off performing in musicals in community theatre when I was a young kid (my first show was in kindergarten, I played the starring role of “Lollypop Guild Member #5” in the Suffolk JCC Production of The Wizard of Oz) and fell in love with musicals from then on out. At the same time, I was a classical pianist as a kid (which was never really my passion) and instead of practicing what I was supposed to, I would rebel and make up my own songs. At some point in late middle school I had a moment where I realized “wait a minute…someone has to write these shows” and the lightbulbs went off and I realized writing musicals could mix all the things I loved together.
MM: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote? If so, what was it?
ZZ: I do actually! I wrote classical pieces as a kid on the piano, but in 7th grade there was this New York State Contest called Reflections where they give kids a prompt and tell you to make a picture, or a photo, or a song, whatever. So the prompt was “My Favorite Place is…” so I wrote a song called My Favorite Place. It won the contest and was absolutely god awful and featured such a lyrics as “I see you in my dreams” and you couldn’t torture me enough to show it to you.
MM: Of all the character’s you’ve created – is there any one in particular that is closest to your heart?
ZZ :Wow Megan way to bust out the Sophie’s Choice of questions. This is a hard one. I really feel a deep kinship with all of my characters – writing musicals takes so f*cking long…and you end up spending so many years and years with these imaginary people that you actually feel like you know them in some oddly real way.
I will say that Harvey from 6 has a very special place in my heart because he is a neurotic Jew trying desperately to balance his career with deeper meaning in NYC (which I know nothing about…obviously). The other one might be the main character in a new piece I’m writing called Deathless, who is is an eighteen year old girl named Hayley who is trying balance a family crisis with very different new world, and she also loves indie rock music. And while I am in fact, not an eighteen year old girl, I just want to give her a hug and tell her it’s all going to be okay.
MM: Can you describe your writing process for our readers?
ZZ :Coming up with the ideas for story and songs is a long process where I pretty much just think about those things all throughout my daily life.
Sometimes, I will have an idea for a song and rush to the piano or my computer and it feels like the song is already written and I just have to spit it out as fast as possible because it’s just already in my brain and completely finished like some kind of weird voodoo magic. Those are the exciting ones.
The other way is not very glamorous and usually involves me walking in giant loops around my apartment. I’ll be working on a particular beat of a story, or a particular lyric or melodic moment – and then after I sit and stare at my blank screen for a few moments, I’ll get up and begin a giant loop where I walk back and forth through the same rooms over and over singing or talking to myself like a crazy person.
Then I’ll sit back down at the table, or at the piano and stare some more at the blank screen. This will most likely lead to me playing a clip of a movie or a song that pops in my brain, and is probably completely irrelevant to what I’m doing, but it all seeps in there. Then I’ll get up and pace in some more giant loops.
And after doing this for a while…finally I will have some burst of thought that I’ll rush to type into the screen, or play on the piano. And then rince and repeat…
MM: What comes first – the music or the lyrics? Or does it vary?
ZZ: Most of the time, it’s both at the same time. I’ll have a phrase or a melody in my head that I’m starting with, and after thinking about it for a while, the other element will start to fill itself in. I start with titles a lot too. Structure is also something that will come first, especially if I’m writing something for a score – I’ll have a map of what I want the song to accomplish, both story wise and where verses and choruses and motifs will fit together.
That being said, there are songs where I’ll write all of the music first and then set lyrics to it, and even more rarely, vice versa. It depends.
MM: Just for fun, if you could only pick five albums to listen to for the rest of your life, what would they be?
ZZ: This is terribly hard Megan, why are you doing this kind of torture? These are in no order…
-A Rush of Blood to the Head – Coldplay (but honestly, their entire discography)
-When The Night – St. Lucia
-Ben Folds Five – Ben Folds Five
-Room For Squares – John Mayer
-My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West
MM: Just for fun, what books are permanently on your bookshelf?
ZZ: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien…The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker…No Exit by Sartre…The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Nightime by Mark Haddon…Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson…The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene…The Power Broker by Robert Caro…Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows by JK Rowling…The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald…Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller…Finishing the Hat/Look I Made a Hat by Sondheim…
MM: Just for fun, what sound do you love and what sound do you hate?
ZZ: I love the sound of Staples. I don’t know why…but something about the gentle whir of an office supplies store is very calming.
I hate the sound of people biting ice cubes. Are you people out of your mind?
MM: Just for fun, if you were stranded on an island, what television shows
and movies would you want to have available to you?
ZZ: -LOST (I realize the island pun, but it’s my biggest influence of everything)…
-Seinfeld
-Curb Your Enthusiasm
-The Office
-Breaking Bad
-Synecdoche, New York
-(500) Days of Summer
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
-Midnight in Paris
-Groundhog Day
-There Will Be Blood
-Rushmore
-Lost In Translation
-Ratatouille
-The Shining
-Moon
Well if we’re being honest, if I was stranded on an island, I’d probably take CNN to try to stay in contact with the outside world…but you get the point.
MM: What is the best piece of advice you’d give to a student in high school and/or college who’s looking to pursue a career in the
entertainment industry?
ZZ: I would say, do the thing you want to be doing. Like actually do it. If you want to be a filmmaker, make some films. If you want to be a songwriter, write some songs and have people sing them. If you want to be an actor, go out there and audition and be in stuff. Don’t just plan on how you will, don’t just watch others, but actually go do the thing.
I think a lot of people wait to actually do the thing they want to do, and before you know it a lot of time has passed…but hey, to each his own.
MM: What reasons would you give to a school board and/or politician for preserving arts education programming in schools?
ZZ: There are five bajillion reasons. Besides the fact that it helps kids with absolutely everything else, and builds confidence. There is no future of people who both create and care about consuming art if it’s not taught in schools. Why be alive in that world? It’s quite literally just as important to humanity as math, or history, and there is no way to know if it speaks to you if you are never exposed to it.
MM: Time for shameless self promotion! What’s next for Zack Zadek?
ZZ: Who the hell is that?? Well in the world of musicals, I have a few shows that are in full force right now: My show 6 which is being workshopped with the truly visionary Sheryl Kaller…The Crazy Ones which is about Steve Jobs and the creation of the first Mac has some absurdly exciting stuff happening in the next few months…a wacky comedy called The Role of a Lifetime that I wrote with my buddies Randy Blair, Tim Drucker, and William Berlind…and my brand spankin’ new piece called Deathless which is very personal to me and I’m in the heat of writing right now.
I’m also working on co-writing a bunch of songs in the pop music world, a screenplay…and you and I have a little exciting project coming up real soon, no?
MM: Yes! We do! But more on that later. Who is/was your greatest teacher?
ZZ: I have had so many really important teachers – I truly feel like it is a sacred profession. I think I couldn’t feel more indebted to, or thankful for teachers – it’s impossible to create anything without having people to show you the path. And I am very much still a student – I may have graduated college and be done with my formal education, but beyond anything else in life, I want nothing more than to always be learning and always studying.
It would be insane to say one greatest teacher, I owe them all so much, but my chorus teacher in high school, Danielle McRoy made me think I had a shot at doing this crazy thing, and my composition teacher in college, Joe Church, really made me work to find what my voice was as a composer. Duncan Sheik, Charlie Rubin, Josh Safran, Amund Bjørklund, Bob Power, Nick Blaemire, Maury Yeston, and Andrew Lippa are all people who took me under their wing to show me so much about the craft of writing, which is so invaluable.
But I think just as invaluable are the psychology and history and science and literature teachers that I’ve had – you can’t write a damn thing if you don’t have people to teach you about the world. I never want to be locked in a bubble of only thinking about music and theatre – I want to learn about the world, and it’s teachers who are the ones who can begin to illuminate it.
TWT readers – go visit zackzadek.com for more info. And follow him on The Twitter. And The Instagram.
Ya hear?
Good.
Live, Love, Learn,
Megan &