[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. What did 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 have another hit musical on his hands. Alongside with his collaborator, Eisa Davis, they have taken on a cult classic film, 1979's The Warriors. Insert here. 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. In their version, The Warriors are women. Here's a taste from the very first track. This is Survive the Night.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Survive the Night]

Alison Stewart: Warriors features collaborations with Nas, Billy Porter, Ms. Lauryn Hill, and Broadway superstars like Philippa Sue, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones and more. It is available to stream now. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis join me now for an All Of It listening party. Welcome to the studio.

Eisa Davis: Hey, thank you. Great to be here.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Hey. Thanks for having us.

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: 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. It was inscribed on two stone tablets for me. I was like, "It's untouchable." Also, the action movie part of it scared me. 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. Then he incepted me. Thanks to Phil Westgren for sending me that email. 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.

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 recasting them suddenly made every plot point more interesting or compelling to write about. I love writing for women's voices. Encanto was like 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."

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

Eisa Davis: I mean, 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 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 like 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 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 allowed for--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Keep the idea alive.

Eisa Davis: Yes, exactly.

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

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's so much more fun. Part of it is, subconsciously, I'm always trying to write the best school musical possible. I fell in love with theatre, 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 the guys at an eight to one ratio. I remember trying to convince my friends who were guys, "Please don't play basketball. Come audition for the musical. We need dancers." Yes, I guess that's my answer.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes. 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, this is my 3rd, 4th go round 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'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. 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 [crosstalk]

Eisa Davis: Isn't it?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Isn'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 wear.

Eisa Davis: Bobby Manic.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: The one really well behaved gang that puts tokens in so they say, "No one's dumping the turnstile."

Alison Stewart: It was 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 themself. This is Roll Call from the album.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Roll Call]

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

Eisa Davis: Do you want me to answer that?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I do. 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 bringing it into collaborate. When you're doing a stage piece, bringing it to collaborators to translate that. With this, the fun was the musical landscapes that we were playing.

Eisa Davis: Yes. It's case by case, but I feel like it's the number one thing was the sonic aspect of it. 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 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, its exposition, that has got to happen a little bit? This is a little-- It reminded me of a podcast. I know that's really weird to say. The one that Daphne Rubin-Vega did. Do you remember that? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: 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: The creativity abhors freedom. We love a restriction. We love a limit and we need to get from a, b to c, and we also have to hit this. That was the fun of it. 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 trying to translate action into music.

Eisa Davis: Yes. 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 for [crosstalk]

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

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to a little bit of Leave the Bronx Alive.

Eisa Davis: Oh.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Leave the Bronx Alive]

Alison Stewart: We are having a listening party for Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis for their new concept album, The Warriors, an adaptation of the 1979 movie about a gang fighting their way back from the Bronx trying to get to the Coney Island. Why did it make sense on the record? There's so many different kinds of music on the album. I was listening to it on the way home. 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 I and Lin and our producer, Mike Elizondo, whose birthday it is today.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Happy birthday.

Eisa Davis: Happy birthday. We are all eclectics. We love being able to both love and also express through character all of these different kinds of styles. 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. You don't hear that in the film either. There are different styles of music that are there. We both have a dedication to diversity, period, when it comes to our storytelling and representation.

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

Eisa Davis: It's so much fun. You want to play.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: When Eisa had the idea to have Luther sound like a screamo metal God, I was like-- She played me this track and I was like, "I can feel my grandmothers in heaven crossing themselves on my behalf." 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. It's fun. The fun of writing musicals is you getting to match tempo and temperament to character.

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

Eisa Davis: Oh, yay.

Alison Stewart: Glad to hear that. Tell us a little bit about this before we play this song.

Eisa Davis: First of all, we have some treasures of the theater and film and the screen on here. [crosstalk] Billy Porter, Michaela J. Rodriguez, Michael Kilgore. [crosstalk] We were claiming that time. What we really wanted to do with this was to make sure that we had this queer representation here. 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. He cut it from the script. We were like, "Oh, this is a sign. We were headed that way anyway." It was like a ratification.

Eisa Davis: Yes. This is the house of Hurricane. They are, letting people know that you have to let your flag fly. Let your flag fly. That's so hard to say.

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

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Quiet Girls.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Quiet Girls]

Alison Stewart: That is so good.

Eisa Davis: That is so good.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: [sings]

Eisa Davis: Stand clear of the closing doors.

Alison Stewart: You have interesting people on the project. You have Nas and Ms. Lauryn Hill to Colman Domingo.

Eisa Davis: Yes. Colman.

Alison Stewart: 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: Coleman was in Passing Strange with Eisa. They're old buddies. That was the Height, Passing Strange, crossover was complete when Coleman joined us on the project.

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

Alison Stewart: That was interesting.

Eisa Davis: Right?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Well we take it on faith that he can do anything.

Eisa Davis: He can do it.

Alison Stewart: Of course.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: He can just do anything. We didn't know [crosstalk]

Eisa Davis: We're like, "Come on in."

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Our Warriors are all theater stars. Honestly, that began as us just calling our friends to do demos for us.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We called a lot of these folks in. There's a lot of Hamilton alums in there. A lot of 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?" They fell into the snowball as it rolled down the hill.

Eisa Davis: We just love being able to have them centered as the gang and have all these other folks, whose names you might know a little bit better, release [crosstalk]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: All these different genres, too.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

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

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's folds.

Eisa Davis: Come on.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Still Breathing]

Alison Stewart: What did bringing all those people-- What did it do for each other?

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

Alison Stewart: What did they bring out in each other? Whether it's the Broadway star versus the pop star.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: 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 MC's who represent the Burrows 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."

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. 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 like a real code of honor thing.

Eisa Davis: It was a huge leap with Ms. Lauryn Hill as well. Because of the fact that we got to bring people together in the studio. One of those really exciting moments was when Steven Sanchez, who's this incredible young crooner, was in the studio with Joshua Henry, who's just-- [crosstalk] Two of these unbelievable [unintelligible 00:19:50]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Go look at him singing On the Wheels of a Dream. He's rehearsing for ragtime right now.

Eisa Davis: Yes, he is.

Alison Stewart: No, I haven't seen that.

Eisa Davis: To see them in the studio together and to see how they have these very different gifts, but very powerful ones. Stephen was just like, "Wow, you really know how to sing, don't you?" It's really great to be able to have that process.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: They were enormous mutual admirers. 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 like this two-part concept salsa album that was big for me. Prince Paul with Prince Among Thieves is the hip hop concept album. It tells a guy's entire day of his life.

Alison Stewart: Yes. De la Soul is dead. Yes [crosstalk]

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

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: Freestyle Love Supreme. Yes. Utkarsh.

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

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Orphan Town]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Sunday, the New York Times. That's my favorite part of that scene in the movie.

Alison Stewart: Is it really?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: They actually carry around their own tress clippings.

Eisa Davis: They're so good.

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

[music]

Alison Stewart: Are you talking about Bernie?

Eisa Davis: Bernie.

Alison Stewart: Explain to folks who Bernie is.

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

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

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

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We love Bernie.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: The name of the album is Warriors. Will it be a stage show?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Listen, we're open to it.

Eisa Davis: Yes, that would be cool.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We worked really hard just to make the album, so we're going to soak in people's reception of it, which has been really positive. That's been wonderful to see. The albums we all mentioned eventually turned into shows. Some of them took longer than others. Yes, we're definitely open to it.

Alison Stewart: I had to ask that. My guests have been Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis. The album is called Warriors. It is out now. Thanks for coming by.

Eisa Davis: Thank you.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Thank you, Alison.