David Remnick: Since the blockbuster success of his musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda has been more than a little busy. He's acting, directing, composing for Disney projects, including the upcoming Lion King movie. His new project is a throwback in the best possible sense. It's a concept album.

Speaker: Yes, right. [unintelligible 00:00:24].

David Remnick: What he's done is reimagine a film, the 1979 cult classic The Warriors, which I loved back in the day. He's re envisioned it as a song cycle. To do it, Miranda brought together a cast of legends, including Lauryn Hill, Nas, Mark Antony, members of Wu Tang and many more. To be clear, The Warriors wasn't originally a musical, though it's got a great soundtrack. It's an action movie about a gang that's fighting their way through New York City. Miranda tells the story in song, along with his writing partner, the actor and playwright Eisa Davis. Hey, how are you?

Eisa Davis: Hello.

David Remnick: Welcome.

Eisa Davis: [unintelligible 00:01:02]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Great.

David Remnick: Nice to see you.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: How are you? Good to see you.

David Remnick: In 1979, The Warriors comes out. I saw it then. You guys saw it when?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I saw it probably around 1984.

David Remnick: All right, that's respectable.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: A friend's older brother had the VHS.

Eisa Davis: I saw it in January of 2022.

David Remnick: More recently.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

[laughter]

David Remnick: For those folks who don't know the story, why don't you tell us what the story is just to set things up.

Eisa Davis: Since it's something that's fresher for me, for those of you who don't know, when I saw it in January 2022, I was really taken by this group of multicultural men in the film who are called up to the Bronx to Van Cortlandt park for a truce meeting, a peace meeting that--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: [unintelligible 00:01:58]

Eisa Davis: Yes. The music by Barry De Vorzon. That amazing synth--

David Remnick: Opening montage.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

[MUSIC - Barry De Vorzon: Theme From The Warriors]

Eisa Davis: Everyone around the city, not just this one gang from Coney, but all these gangs and all these amazing outfits, go up to Van Cortlandt park and hear Cyrus give this amazing speech about how to create peace with all of the gangs in the city ceasing fire, stopping to fight.

Cyrus: Nobody is wasting nobody. That is a miracle, and miracles is the way things ought to be. Dig in. Can you dig in?

Crowd: Yes.

Eisa Davis: Then Cyrus is assassinated. The person who assassinates Cyrus blames The Warriors for doing so.

David Remnick: The Warriors are?

Eisa Davis: The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island. They have to fight their way from the Bronx all the way back down to Coney Island in the course of the film.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Then the tale is an old tale. It's Sol Yurick who wrote the novel the movie's based on, based it on the anabasis, which is a soldier's account of trying to get back home from war.

David Remnick: Tell us about anabasis, the Greek sourcing for this novel from 1965 by Sol Yurickk.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's this mythic story. It's the story about these soldiers who are fighting their way through enemy territory to get back home. It doesn't get more clear than that as a plotline.

David Remnick: It's Homeric.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: What I loved about the movie was it was filled in with the specificity of the New York I was growing up in. I remember when I was born, my parents lived in NYU housing. They were NYU grad students. I still went to nursery school down in the village, even though we had moved all the way up to Northern Manhattan. I would take the A train from West 4th Street to 200th Street.

David Remnick: You were living in the heights and then was commuting--

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, commuting from the village for nursery school. I remember just tracing the arc of The Warriors. I knew I lived closer to where Cyrus spoke than to where Coney Island was. There's this mix of the mythic and the specific. When I watched this, I love seeing the New York I grew up in. I love seeing Gray's Papaya at 72nd Street. I love seeing the wonder wheel--

Eisa Davis: Still there.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Still there. I love seeing the wonder wheel at the top of the movie. It really created my first mental map of the New York I hadn't seen yet growing up at the top of Manhattan. We've written 26 songs basically musicalizing this story. The opening song, we decided to have an emcee from each borough represent that borough.

David Remnick: Who do you got?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We have Chris Rivers, who is an incredible emcee, and also son of the legendary big punisher, the first Puerto Rican rapper to go platinum, and one of my emcee heroes. He plays the Bronx. We have Nas representing Queens. We have--

Eisa Davis: Also executive produces the album.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, because as much as I love Warriors, he loves it twice as much. [laughter] We have Camron representing Manhattan. We have, of course, Ghostface and RZA from the Wu Tang Clan representing Staten Island, as they have for so many. Then we have Busta Rhymes representing Brooklyn and introducing The Warriors, since that's their home borough.

David Remnick: Lin-Manuel, the whole wide world knows you for Hamilton. Of course, before that is In the Heights. I wonder how In the Heights relates to The Warriors in your mind, either just thematically and in your creative universe.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think I could write about New York for the rest of my life and never get bored because there are so many New Yorks inside New York. You know, that given the publication you work for. In the Heights was my first musical. I started writing in college. It was the classic 'write what you know.' I thought, I live in the most musical neighborhood I've ever been in. That seemed like a great place to set a musical. Then imagine my surprise after reading Ron Chernow's book.

David Remnick: Chernow's biography of Hamilton.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. So much of it took place in New York, that, like, "Oh, Burr lived on 162nd street for a year? There was a cabinet meeting in Washington Heights before the Capitol relocated to Philly and then DC?" The fact that the entire story was just a few layers of topsoil underneath the city I'd grown up in. Then with Warriors, it was a chance to go to a totally different era. The fun for us in crafting the score was there's the score that the movie gives us, which is this amazing synth rock score that we nod to many times, but there's also all these other subcultures happening in New York in the '70s.

David Remnick: Do talk about the music in the original score of The Warriors because most of our listeners will not recall it or know it. It's very particular.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: An incredibly of its time synth intro, but you've also got this beautiful rock song in the last scene by Joe Walsh called In the City.

Eisa Davis: In the City.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: In the city and uh-huh.

David Remnick: I forgot that Joe Walsh was on that soundtrack.

Eisa Davis: Yes, the finale.

David Remnick: Wow.

Eisa Davis: When they're walking down the strand of Coney Island.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: When they've made it to the sea.

David Remnick: Yes.

[MUSIC - Joe Walsh: In the City]

Uh-huh

Oh-oh-oh

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Again, for us, New York in the late '70s was a musical playground. There's a gang in the South Bronx in the movie called the Turnbull AC's. In the movie, they're skinheads. In the '70s in New York, Fania was revolutionizing salsa music. All those musicians lived in the South Bronx. Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón. It's such a South Bronx story. We took the license to write a salsa tune for that gang and basically made New York our musical playground.

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

Warriors: you on de run

El mundo te mata la esperanza

El mundo te mata la esperanza

Y cuando el mundo te mata la esperanza

Solo queda venganza

Imagína una guagua de escuela, llеno de tipo armao'

Un montón de boricua furioso, bien еncojonao

Quieren matar las mujeres que dicen mataron su doña

Y a mí me montaron al frente, a cantar su canción

You can't leave the Bronx alive

Only the strong survive

Eisa Davis: That was really the first thing that we did as collaborators, was we just started giving each other playlists and really wanted to go after the diversity of genre. On the album, we see all of the songs that were inspired by what our playlists were. We've got this salsa tune, and we've got rock, and we've got R&B. Then we have metal that shows up there as well. Something that was really important to us as well was having Shenseea who is our DJ. In the movie, it was Lynne Thigpen who played the DJ and kept track of everything.

David Remnick: Hey, boppers.

Eisa Davis: Yes, hey, boppers. I know. It's so perfect to do that in here on the mic in the studio.

David Remnick: There's a radio station that figures into the plot. It's how they put alerts out about The Warriors' movements around the city.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's also a handy dramaturgical device to-

David Remnick: I bet.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: -let you know where you are in the city at any given point.

Eisa Davis: They actually put that in after the fact when they needed a little bit more continuity.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Exposition.

David Remnick: Let's listen to a clip from the film.

Eisa Davis: Great.

[MUSIC - The Warriors: OK Boppers]

All right, now,

For all you boppers out there in the big city

All you street people with an ear for the action

I've been asked to relay a request from the Gramercy Riffs

It's a special for The Warriors

That's that real live bunch from Coney

And I do mean The Warriors.

Here's a hit with them in mind. There you go.

Eisa Davis: No where to run.

[laughter]

David Remnick: [unintelligible 00:10:33]

[MUSIC - The Warriors: Nowhere to Run]

Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide

Eisa Davis: No where to hide.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's never been as menacing as in this context.

Eisa Davis: That's such a great montage in the movie, ooh.

David Remnick: Where does this figure into the whole story?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It was useful to the filmmakers and it was useful to us as well.

Eisa Davis: Yes. What Shenseea does is she really animates the fact that there are these really strong Jamaican roots to hip hop. In a lot of ways, this is an album that's a love letter to the film, but it's also a love letter to a moment in the cultural origins of hip hop.

[MUSIC]

Got a word and the waves breaking from the station, Boppers,

Ears open we in a condition

Truce is broken, peace meeting go heavy

And Cyrus, the one and only dead to the world

The rain it fall and vengeance upon their eyes,

Little Coney Island crew, they coming for you

Warriors, you on the run.

David Remnick: You think the film will get another viewing in some way? People go back to the film?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think so. I think one of the strengths of our collaboration was Eisa was coming into it fresh, and this movie was written on stone tablets in my mind. [laughter] I think what we've written is somewhere in between. I think fans of the movie will totally appreciate the moments they love and the lines they love, and that's all in there. Yet, I think that Eisa really came at it with a lot of dramaturgical innovation and really opened up. It could also be this, I think, chief among them being the fact that all these gangs are lured to the South Bronx with the promise of peace.

In the movie, the thought of peace dies when Cyrus is shot, but Eisa's found a way, really beautifully, to keep that promise alive. The fact that that's what got us out of our neighborhoods in the first place, and put some hope through it in a way that's really, I think, very moving and exciting.

Eisa Davis: Something that came up as we were adapting this was the idea that I could be really irreverent with it and really go after the sexism that's there in the film, the homophobia that's there in the film. It was Lynn's idea, actually, to have the gender swap where The Warriors, as a gang, are a femme gang. They're women and girls, and that Cyrus is a woman. Then what we got to do with that was just really go after a specific experience of women fighting their way back, but unarmed, just only having their bodies and their wits, and just facing all of the obstacles along the way.

I worked on a show called Justified: City Primeval, which is an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. Something that he said in adaptation is that you can just hang it up the host text and strip it for parts. I feel like that's something that I got to do again here with Warriors is really just reach for what was important to me about women in this particular experience, and also thinking about how Black girls on the playground doing a little roll call. You hear that Warriors’ Cypher track, the third track. We're going, ah-she-ca! ah-ah-she-ca. That's something that I used to do as a kid. Then that, again, is also part of what gives birth to what we know of as hip hop as this international cultural force.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis: Warriors’ Cypher]

Ah-she-ca! ah-ah-she-ca!

Ah-she-ca! ah-ah-she-ca!

Ah-she-ca! ah-ah-she-ca!

Warriors, Warriors, show 'em whatchoo gah!

I'm cochise, oh please, you know my style

I'm always ready with the verses and i'm versatile

David Remnick: Eisa Davis with Lin-Manuel Miranda talking about their new album, The Warriors. We'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis: Warriors’ Cypher]

Cuz i'm the youngest 'n the prettiest, they call me fox!

Suckas kick rocks cuz we're number one!

Cleon: shot the moon, cold cocked the sun!

David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who you, of course, know as the creator of Hamilton, along with Pulitzer prize finalist Eisa Davis. On a new album called The Warriors, Miranda and Davis have reimagined the cult classic from 1990 1979 as a song cycle. They describe the album to me as a love letter to the film rather than as a remake. For now, it exists only as a record, although I can't quite believe it's not going to be on stage or on film before long. There's so much fashion, just out and out fashion in the film version, since the movie is so visual. Did you rely on different styles of music throughout the album to evoke some of this sense of style and fashion?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Sometimes the fashion gave us clues as to what the music would be. I think that having the gang on skates that we meet in Union Square move up to 96th Street. We also know that the events of Paris Is Burning are taking place around this time. There's this amazing queer nightlife subculture happening. We made that the house of Hurricanes and had this incredible moment with this gang. Also, what was freeing about doing this as an album is I really think it's a love letter to the movie in a real big way. I would never dream of remaking this film.

David Remnick: I was going to ask.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: To me, this film is--

David Remnick: This is not a preface to another movie?

Eisa Davis: No, not at all.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: No, not at all. On the contrary, it's a love letter to the movie. It was so freeing to basically find the music that would create the story in your head.

David Remnick: You weren't tempted at all, either one of you, once this project had hit its stride to say, "Now I see this as the soundtrack of a film or something on stage."

Lin-Manuel Miranda: No. To me, I was adapting the film. We were picturing our own version of this movie.

David Remnick: Do you think you need knowledge of the film in your head when listening to the album?

Eisa Davis: No, not at all.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: That's been the fun litmus test in playing it for people. I like playing it for die hards of the film and seeing them nod at the references. I like playing it for people who have never seen it.

Eisa Davis: Young people.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. I played it for this one young person who called me--

David Remnick: What counts as young, Lin-Manuel?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: 20-something and produces a podcast.

[laughter]

David Remnick: There it is.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: He's never heard of the movie.

David Remnick: The produces a podcast part [crosstalk].

Lin-Manuel Miranda: She came to me and she said, "I googled this after you played it for us, and they're dudes?" [laughter] How does it work if they're dudes? Which means we did our job because it means The Warriors in our telling, we carved out our own lane that is not-- I think the pitfall of a lot of adaptations is you're waiting for that part you like from the movie to happen.

David Remnick: And to be the same thing.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. I think this has lots of-- If you were a fan of this movie, you're gonna love this album, but it also carves out its own lane as a companion piece.

David Remnick: Let's just point out Lauryn Hill performs a song called if you can count, which features Cyrus, aka Lauryn Hill. Let's hear a little bit of that.

[MUSIC - Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis: If You Can Count]

Can you dig it? Can you dig it?

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Remember what you had to do to earn your block

Dead any and all invaders, keep the neighbors on lock

Tag up every nook and cranny, spray cans non-stop

Make a mission of the competition so your clique is on top

Imagine what i had to do to stay on top

Baddest bitch in the biggest town, shut 'em down, open up shop

Now imagine what we could do if you and your crew

Got with me and my crew, if we, we only knew

We are bigger than the mob!

What?!

We are bigger than the cops!

What?!

David Remnick: After all this years, it's so great to hear her.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It is.

David Remnick: It's so great to hear her. She performs only rarely. Tell me a little bit about why she's the right Cyrus for the album. She might be the right thing for everything.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We had no plan B.

Eisa Davis: We didn't. We were just like, "It's her or nobody." We just had to have her. It's because she is truly one of the greatest emcees and greatest singers that ever graced this planet. She's in everyone's top five emcees. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a classic album that, of course, recently Apple music named their number one album. She just has a kind of authority. She has a kind of gravitas. I think that she, as Cyrus, asking for this call for peace is exactly right. It's exactly right. We had to have that.

David Remnick: She's had a complicated career.

Eisa Davis: She has.

David Remnick: Why did she say yes other than your enormous talents and powers of persuasion?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: When you just played that clip, I turned to Eisa off mic and was like, "It's real." We still can't believe-

David Remnick: That she did it?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: -that Ms. Hill sang a song we wrote. Even more spectacular than the fact that she said yes ,she's one of the great writers as well, one of the great songwriters. Basically the way it happened was I met her manager at a social function, and her manager mentioned that she had admired Hamilton. I said, "Great, because I have a pitch for you."

David Remnick: It didn't take long.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Eisa and I carefully crafted our letter to Ms. Hill of why we thought she was-- why she was our only choice to play Cyrus on this album. I would just text the manager every week, just, "Hey, you have the tracks. Let us know when she can get in the studio." It wasn't until earlier this year that we, instead of getting a text back saying, "She's in Brazil, she's in London," we just got a text that was a Dropbox. It had all the vocal files. She had created these additional choral arrangements with background vocalists that she had added on top of what we had sent her.

David Remnick: Just unbidden, it just happened.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. It was both in the spirit of what we had written, and also she had added these layers that we could never have dreamed of because she's Ms. Lauryn Hill, and we're mortals.

[laughter]

Eisa Davis: It was definitely bidden. We were praying. We were asking, "Can we give you our first unborn child?"

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We were slowly finishing the rest of the album. We were just--

David Remnick: Is the whole creative process through email? You were sending back and forth or were you in a studio together?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: No. In fact, that's pretty much the only one that was through email. I remember reading about this last.

David Remnick: With her, it's all that way.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: With her, it was--

Eisa Davis: With her, exactly.

David Remnick: Interesting.

Eisa Davis: She was the wizard behind the curtain. We never got to meet her.

David Remnick: You never got to meet her?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes.

Eisa Davis: I'd met her before in the past.

David Remnick: This somehow that makes it cooler, doesn't it?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: If she calls for a meeting in the Bronx, I'll go. [laughter] I'll be there. With the exception of Ms. Hill, we were in the studio with everybody. We went to Staten Island to go record Ghostface. We went to LA to record RZA. We really went to meet people where they are. A lot of people came and met us at Atlantic Studios. Again, selfishly, as songwriters, when you write a piece of theater, you write it and then you cast it.

Whereas with this, I really wanted to explore the musicianship of the people I was working with. We spent two weeks with our third partner in crime here, Mike Elizondo-

Eisa Davis: Mike Elizondo.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: -who's the producer of the album. [unintelligible 00:22:23] We just played with his band for two weeks to create all the songs before we got all the vocalists, which never happens on a cast album. On a cast album, you're pressed for time and you're recording it between eight shows a week.

David Remnick: It's a precise, scheduled piece of work.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: 100%. Whereas we actually got to explore the sound of what this is first and foremost.

David Remnick: It takes a while.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. We spent pretty much this year recording it.

Eisa Davis: Yes.

David Remnick: Let me ask you this. It's wonderful to have a gigantic success like Hamilton in all kinds of ways.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: First line of the obituary, no matter what I do.

David Remnick: Fair enough. You're still young, and are you able to work on the next thing and the next thing without self consciousness or concern about that hanging on your shoulders?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think what's interesting about Hamilton is that no one I talked to thought it was a good idea when I was writing it, but I could see it. It was the idea that wouldn't leave me alone. Similarly with Warriors, that's a movie I spend a lot of time watching. I had a college classmate who actually pitched me this back in 2009 after my first show In the Heights.

David Remnick: Pitched you this idea?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes. He said Warriors, the musical. He had gotten a job working for-- His name is Phil Westgren. He'd gotten a job working for the producer of the film, Larry Gordon. I wrote him back an email in 2009 saying, "Here's why it could never work." Most of my objections were just about action sequences and songs fighting for the same real estate. That email--

David Remnick: What does that mean, songs for the same real estate?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think porno movies, action movies, and musicals are all fighting for the same story, real estate. When you can't talk anymore, you sing, you fight, or you fuck. It's similar structure.

David Remnick: Which is which again?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Your mileage may vary. [laughter] That, to me, was like, I've never really seen a convincing fight sequence in a musical. It's always Jerome Robbins dance ballet.

Eisa Davis: Until Outsiders.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Until Outsiders last year, which actually had incredible fight sequences props to them. Again, that idea was in my head. Then by the time I'd come up for air after performing in Hamilton for a year and started to actually think about what I wanted to do next, there was a whole section of my brain raising its hand, being like, "That Warriors thing you said no to was actually a very good idea."

David Remnick: That was the thing.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, that was the thing. We've been working on it, and we have some ideas. Again, I chase the ideas that don't leave me alone, the ones that just keep coming back around. I think part of learning your craft as an artist is learning to listen to your gut when it's going, "Over here, over here. There's something here."

David Remnick: You know more than anybody how most people listen to music now. They listen to singles. They listen to songs. The way to listen to this is as this extended sequence-

Eisa Davis: All the way down.

David Remnick: -which runs how long?

Eisa Davis: It's like 81 minutes.

David Remnick: That's a healthy, lengthy [crosstalk].

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I joke that we've built a new zoetrope. [laughter] It's like a thing people do. Look through this slot. We're very excited about it. It moves.

David Remnick: If only this had been the soundtrack for Megalopolis.

Eisa Davis: Oh, my goodness.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It's a love letter to the concept albums of the '70s that I grew up with, Jesus Christ Superstar.

David Remnick: Tommy.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Tommy. The Lamb lies down on Broadway by Genesis. Then there are even hip hop concept album. Like Prince Paul had an amazing album called A Prince Among Thieves.

David Remnick: Do you think you're going uphill asking people to listen to 80-odd minutes of music as opposed to four minutes, four minutes, four minutes on Spotify?

Eisa Davis: I don't know. I think there was a ritual that people had in watching The Warriors on VHS, which is how Lin saw it. It's like, "Oh, it's Friday night, let's throw that in and watch it again." I think there is an appetite to see something like that or listen to something like that. We want people to listen to the album in that way.

David Remnick: I totally get that, but there's going to come a time, if it hasn't happened already, where the world's going to tell you, the market's going to tell you, somebody's going to tell you, "This is fantastic. Let's make a movie."

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Again, not interested in a movie. We're both theater artists, so I'd be very interested in exploring what the stage version of this would look like.

David Remnick: You're not close to that.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: We have literally no plans. I'll tell you, I remember the real watershed moment for Hamilton wasn't actually when we started playing at the public. It was when the soundtrack came out in October.

David Remnick: You started having those closed performance.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I watched the front row start to know all the words better than I did. I watched that happen nightly in real time, which meant they were listening to the whole thing because they couldn't get in the room, but that Hamilton sung through. They would listen to the album top to bottom. For me, this is like, "This is not the oral recording of a thing you can't see." This is the thing we made. It is designed for you to listen to it. You all have the thing we made at the same time, which is enormously freeing for me coming off of Hamilton where it was so hard to get in for a while.

David Remnick: It was.

[laughter]

David Remnick: I remember

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Now we all have the same thing that we've been working on for the whole time, and that feels wonderful.

David Remnick: It's a wonderful thing, and I really appreciate your being here. Thanks so much.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Thank you.

Eisa Davis: Thank you.

David Remnick: That's Eisa Davis and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Their new album, The Warriors, just came out.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.