RUN AWAY WITH ME : Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, California
It’s daunting to dive into a song that everyone knows. The “hit”. Will the song survive explication? Will explaining it will make it less good? I channel my inner fangirl, pretend I’m not myself (the person who ran through all of the various options of how the lyrics could play out, who knows all the other forks in the road of the lyric), and I realize the answer is “no”. So as the creator, I take a deep breath and say, ok, my tumbleweeds, you asked for it.
Literally. I conducted a super formal poll this week on Twitter and over 200 people voted and 40% wanted to know more about “Run Away with Me”. Trust me, i was with the “Last Week’s Alcohol” camp. LWAers, I’m coming for you.
I think the reason I feel hesitant about this song is because I feel like I’ve said all of it before. I’ve taught it in master classes. I’ve written countless emails to college seniors who have decided to use it for senior showcases. I’ve watched videos of senior showcase mashups like this pairing with “Prelude to an Angry Young Man” by Billy Joel to showcase a young man’s dancing abilities.
“Run Away with Me” has been around the block. It’s had its fair share of interpretations. What could I possibly say that you don’t already know?
“Run Away with Me” was a song without a hook when it first appeared. I remember Brian playing a truly relentless melody on my aunt’s piano. The scansion was something like this:
“Let me be your ride,
let me be your home,
Let me be your favorite place
We can make a life,
we can find a road,
we can drive like life is a race.
Texas in a car,
Kansas on a bus,
long as it’s highway and us.
Throw away the key.
Run away with me.
I found it exhausting - this relentless energy of someone who is determined to connect. It was catchy as hell but busy and unappealing when you put words on it. I put together some dummy lyrics (we learned about those in “Say the Word”) to prove that the music didn’t work as well with lyrics on it. (These are not those lyrics. I mocked these up from memory. The rhythm really was very catchy.)
Brian cleared it out. He asked if a version that went like this:
“DA da DA da DA da da DA”
felt any better. It did. And that’s how we found the scansion that ultimately became,
“Let me be your ride out of town.
Let me be the place that you hide.”
It did feel better. It felt doable. I didn’t have the same instinct that I had towards “Say the Word”. I didn’t hear the music and cry. But Brian knew that he’d hit something sticky and he was determined to find where this song fit in the show. He was determined it was for Adam. He thought it came late in the show - an 11 o’clock number. He knew nothing else.
When we found the phrase “Run away with me” the song clicked in for me. I don’t remember a lot about the process of coming up with the hook but I remember a lot about writing the lyrics.
I discovered Adam’s voice in writing this song, but it also felt like it already existed. There was something I always knew and loved about Adam. It was borne of watching boys in college who were in love with my supremely complicated and high strung female friends. It’s not to say they weren’t smart - some of them were very smart - but they weren’t molded the way my female friends were. I was surrounded by women who had chosen, at 18, to go to an all-women’s college. That requires a certain kind of cognition about the world around you. Many of these women dated men but were loud, proud feminists. They were grappling with their relationship with romance, with being “swept off your feet”, with the uneasy comfort of feeling protected by a boy who can’t protect you because you are too smart to believe that such protection exists.
Writing Adam, and this song in particular, was an act of grieving for the kind of girl I would never be. I would never fall for easy romance like the kind a sweet boy like Adam would offer me.
WHEN IN DOUBT, TAKE A SHOWER
I hit my first real flight of inspiration - a visit from Elizabeth Gilbert’s “genius” (if you haven’t watched her TED Talk, do) - as a lyricist in this song. You can also call it getting lucky.
This song is the reason I believe in taking showers when you’re stuck. It’s a more concentrated formula of my general antidote for “writer’s block”, which is something I refuse to acknowledge. Acknowledging writer’s block is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Its existence is in your mind to begin with, so your conjuring of it confirms its existence. My mom calls it “gathering periods”. Everyone has times when they need take in culture, writing, inspiration. You can’t ONLY write. You won’t have anything to write about. Sometimes you have to breathe and take in other people’s creative output.
That said, deadlines are deadlines and you’ve got to get your work done. Rather than say, “I’m spent / I’ll never write again”, you say, “I need a shower.” Or I need to vacuum. Or I need to go for a run (I should say this - I never say this). I had spent the morning chipping away at the chorus and the second verse of this song, when I stopped to take a shower. While I was washing my hair, I came up with the entire bridge - lyric and music and rhythm and everything. It appeared to me like a glorious all-inclusive vacation to Hawaii.
I wrote it down, dripping water on my bedroom floor. Sometimes you get lucky.
Above is a little cheat sheet. If you ever want to sing this song and you don’t want to screw up the words, I suggest you look at it. Musical Theater singers don’t always think about song structure and that’s a shame. It’s a tool in your tool belt (like learning to read music - or at minimum learn how to fake it - I’ll save that soapbox for another day). Without understanding structure, you’re stuck memorizing a song from start to finish and you’re bound to screw it up. With song structure, you can look at the way it’s built and say, OH, look at the sections that are the same. Look at the ones that are different.
Most importantly, if you ever have to sing this song and you have a music stand - THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE THE MUSIC IN FRONT OF YOU - write down on a piece of paper in massive letters:
TEXAS
ALABAMA
MISSISSIPPI
CALIFORNIA
I cannot tell you the number of top-rate performers I’ve given this advice to. The ones who do it, never go up on lyrics. The ones who don’t ALWAYS DO. Trust me. It’s the least I can offer after not giving you a single bit of help in the lyric itself. It’s not alphabetical or even east-to-west. (My personal way of remembering is that Texas and California are easy to remember and the middle two are in alphabetical order. I’ll give a prize to someone who comes up with a good pneumonic - (Tell Adam M[?] C[?]??). It is just the worst. Don’t be proud. Be smart. WRITE IT DOWN.
It’s not entirely my fault. In my first draft, the lyrics to each chorus were the same. You can thank Joe Church, Brian’s composition teacher (and my de facto composition teacher while Brian was at NYU), for the devilishly hard lyrics in the choruses. He pointed out (and I do think he was right) that the character needed to keep upping his ante over the course of the song. I think it’s one of the song’s great charms.
I went back and looked at the chorus again and it’s a weird one. It’s not like looking at baby pictures. I’m not embarrassed by this song but could I make the decisions I made back then if I were writing lyrics for this now? Look at this crazy rhyme scheme!
By “crazy rhyme scheme”, I mean almost-no-rhyme scheme; I mean barest possible minimum rhyme scheme. Please give me the pleasure of enumerating the rhymes for you:
Kerouac / back and key / me.
How is that ok?? Why does that work?? I’ll tell you. It’s two-fold. 1. character. 2. proximity.
Here I go again. Broken record. Write in character.
Adam works in his dad’s tire shop. He’s not literary. He’s not “smart”. This doesn’t mean he’s an idiot. Emotionally, he’s swimming in the depths. He’s empathetic. He’s kind. He’s generous. He’s really just about everything a person could ask for but he’s not a brainiac.
If you had the unabashed pleasure of seeing Jay Armstrong Johnson perform Adam in The Mad Ones, you know what a breath of fresh air Adam is. He has a beautiful soul, but he’s the butt of jokes. Sam loves him but she doesn’t take him particularly seriously. When he says “I’m not good with words”, it’s important that you believe him. He’s not. But he’s trying. He’s trying to meet her where she lives. He’s using her references. He’s speaking her language. He’s a foreigner in a foreign land.
Making him a “rhymer” would be all kinds of wrong. He’s not witty. He tries to be. He says things like “Texas in the summer is cool”, which a Tumblr fan from Texas pointed out is just not true. But Adam’s nervous. He’s trying. He’s saying things that are lame. He can’t say “Texas in the summer is cool” four times over the course of the song, because he realizes that it’s not true as soon as it comes out of his mouth. It was a dumb joke. He has to try new tactics. His tactics aren’t working.
In his perfect world, he would have sung “run away with me” once, and Sam would have said, “Ok” and they’d go. In a perfect world, he wouldn’t have to say anything. He would fix her flat tire. He would work hard to make her comfortable. But he’s living in the planet of Sam’s grief. Her empathy is turned off. She hadn’t thought of Adam and what he wanted or needed or how he was trying to connect to her in a long time. She’s whirling in the new information that he would be change what he wants (stability, to run his dad’s business) for her. She doesn’t know how to respond and so he’s left floundering in a sea of his own words.
Hot tip. If you want to make it ok that you’re not rhyming a lot, rhyme close together. I am getting so much mileage out of “Jack Kerouac, looking back”. After five lines of no rhyme, you get two rhymes 3 syllables apart. Internal rhymes make up for writing a character who isn’t clever. It allows the writer to still exert some control over the lyric, some order in the face of a character’s chaos. In terms of character, it gives a sense of someone gaining momentum. Adam’s finally gaining traction. After five statements that go nowhere -
“Let me be your ride out of town. [new thought]
Let me be the place that you hide. [new thought]
We can make our lives on the go. [new thought]
Run away with me. [new thought]
Texas in the summer is cool. [ new thought]
We’ll be on the road like Jack Kerouac
looking back, Sam, you’re ready, let’s go anywhere. [building on that thought]
Get the car packed and throw me the key.
Run away with me.”
The first rhyme (Kerouac / back) is an indicator that he’s heading somewhere. He’s finding some textual rhythm. By the end of the chorus, he’s managed to put together a bit of a thesis - a little serve and return (key / me).
It gives him the courage to go on in spite of Sam’s silence. The whole song is about Sam’s silence. It’s about him getting so caught up in it in spite of her lack of response, trying to build a vision for what they could have together. You’ve been there, right? Those moments where it feels like if you just keep talking, you won’t have to face the possibility that you won’t be met halfway?
Time and time again, I read comments on YouTube and elsewhere: “I wish my name was Sam. I’d run away with you.” It’s essential that Adam’s desire for Sam is genuine and romantic and that his enthusiasm is infectious. You have to want her to want to go. But in the context of the show, you have to know that it will never work. She will never be able to say yes to him. She doesn’t know that before the song begins but by the time it ends, his fate is sealed. This isn’t actually a song about romance. Not for Sam. For Sam, who we’ve spent the last 75 minutes examining, this moment is filled with dread. You’re watching someone you love say all the things that make it impossible for you to be together.
I remember - after writing this song - having dinner with a guy I was dating. He wanted to take our relationship to the next stage and I met a simple question he asked me with silence and panic. He said “I just wanted you to say that we’d work out any of the problems.” I didn’t realize until he said it that I was creating hurdles for our relationship because I didn’t want to stay in the relationship but I also didn’t have the heart to tell him that I wasn’t thinking about forever. I was looking for my exit strategy. Just because you’re not right for each other doesn’t mean that you want to hurt the other person.
Of course the irony is that that’s exactly how you hurt someone. Sam is a classic introvert. She keeps everything to herself. She processes in her head (that’s the whole show). The sequel to The Mad Ones would be a whole hell of a lot of uncomfortable silence-filled conversations with the ones she leaves behind.
“ROMEO IS CALLING FOR JULIET”: A NAIL IN A COFFIN
You’re Adam. You’re not a brainiac. You say “Romeo is calling for Juliet” and you mean that you love her. You mean that she’s your soulmate.
Now you’re Sam. You’re analytical and literal and literary. You hear “Romeo is calling for Juliet”. You hear that you’re star-crossed, that you’re doomed.
Adam doesn’t know that when he says it but he feels the failure of his metaphor. All of his metaphors build a case against him. He talks about On the Road because Sam loves that book, because she romanticizes driving across the country, much like Sal does in On the Road. But Sal’s journey is solitary and obsessed not with Mary Lou (or any of the other women Sal sleeps with) but with Dean, his best friend. Sam is the same way.
I think a lot about ingenues in the musicals I write. How could I not? It’s a huge trope in musical theater, more in than in any other genre. There are even vocal registers that feel more “ingenue”. I grew up in high school, college, and community theater playing ingenues. I was the daughter, the wife, the literal ingenue in City of Angels.
I also identified with ingenues in movies. I liked them plucky but I always wanted them to get the guy - or, let’s be honest - I wanted the guy to get them.
Now, I only write ingenues when I can turn the idea on its head. Sam is not an ingenue. The story begins when her naïveté has been lost. If we told this story from the perspective from the beginning of her senior year, she would be the ingenue, but we tell the story from her moment before her rebellion. We are chronicling her journey away from ingenue.
Brian and I joked through the rehearsal process that our ingenue is actually Adam. But by definition #2, it’s pretty accurate. Ingenues are often only in the love plot of a musical. They generally have one great song in a show but someone else (a man traditionally) gets to be involved in the multi-plot of a show. Harold Hill pursues Marion, whose role is contained to her utility to his plot - his moral opposite, but Harold is involved in SEVERAL plots. Sarah has her dogmatic beliefs (also a moral opposite to Sky) but it’s Sky Masterson who transforms through his relationship with her and his connection to the gambling plot. Rosemary literally sings about how she will be happy to keep her husband’s dinner warm, while Finch climbs the ladder to success and falls in love in the most perfunctory way possible. (These are all shows that are structurally genius pieces of theater, by the way, they just suck when it comes feminine stereotypes.)
Adam is really happy with their static relationship. He doesn’t actually want anything else. He makes a big sacrifice by trying to imagine what Sam wants, and in order to pull her out of her grief, tries to give it to her. It’s an act of sacrifice and empathy. And he’s right. She does need to run away. Just not with him. And it takes him naming the idea for her to realize exactly what she needs.
Do you see what I love Adam? I wonder if men who wrote female ingenues felt the same way? You’re creating an idealized version of what the other sex should be so that your flawed (read: interesting) protagonist can grapple with the world around them. The exciting thing about creating this character was the attempt to manipulate the audience enough so that the audience would love him as much as I do but feel how deeply wrong it would be for Sam to say yes.
Miscellaneous Questions You Have Asked
Can I (a guy) pretend Sam is a boy and sing this song?
Why not? The “wife” line is a little weirder but I can justify it. There are a couple other pop versions of lyrics that are more generic that might be useful to you if you go that route.
Why are there pop lyrics to this song?
We love this song and we wanted more people to be able to cover it. The use of “Sam” in the lyric feels essential in the show. It makes the lyric feel more insistent. Out of context, it feels a little theatery. I like theater - don’t get me wrong - but the rest of the song doesn’t feel that way so it kind of takes you out of the song if you’re not listening in the context of the show. I like the pop lyrics to the song. You should feel free to use them anytime. Though, in an audition, I’d revert to the original lyrics. Immediacy / theatricality / insistence are your friend there.
Why does Adam say “let me be the place that you hide”?
I got this question specifically from someone when I was soliciting questions. It must have been on Twitter because I can’t find it on Tumblr. I hope that the rest of this post helps illuminate the character broadly enough that this already feels clearer. It’s a problematic idea, isn’t it? It comes back to Adam offering comfort, offering protection, offering something that Sam might want but is ultimately wrong for her.
Can I record “Run Away with Me”?
Yes. Because it’s already been professionally recorded by us, by Josh Young, by Aaron Tveit, and Dwayne Britton (maybe others?), anyone can get the mechanical rights to record through Harry Fox. Huzzah!
Why are there so many versions of the final riffs and release of “Run Away with Me”?
When you get the chance to workshop a song as long as we have, you get to really hone what you want out of it. If you’re in doubt about whether or not you’re singing the most updated version, check out Ben Fankhauser’s version on Playbill. This is the one we went into production with in fall 2017.
Can a girl sing “Run Away with Me”?
Hell yeah. Carrie Manolakos covers it on our live album and it’s pretty sick, and here’s a new video of Emma Hunton’s take on it. You didn’t know how much you wanted this.
