The New Yorker Radio Hour - With “The Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Takes on Another New York Story

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Since the blockbuster success of his musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda has been busy: acting, directing, and composing for Disney projects, including the upcoming movie “Mufasa: The Lion King.”  But his new project is more personal, and a throwback in the best sense. Working with the playwright Eisa Davis, he has reimagined a movie from his childhood as a concept album.  “The Warriors” is a cult classic released in 1979. “The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island, and they have to fight their way from the Bronx all the way back down to Coney Island in the course of the film,” Miranda tells David Remnick. The film reads as a nineteen-seventies period piece, but Miranda and Davis find a classical dimension to it. “The tale is an old tale. Sol Yurick, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, based it on the Anabasis, which is a soldier’s account of trying to get back home from war” in ancient Greece. “It’s this mythic story. . . . It doesn’t get more clear than that as a plotline.” To tell that story in song and rap, Miranda brought together a cast of legends including Lauryn Hill, Nas, Marc Anthony, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and more. If releasing a concept album, meant to be listened to straight through, seems like a stretch for 2024 audiences, Miranda is unfazed.  “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. And it was the idea that wouldn’t leave me alone.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm 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. But his new project is kind of a throwback in the best possible sense. It's a concept album. And what he's done is reamember.

imagine a film, the 1979 cult classic The Warriors, which I love back in the day. And he's re-invisioned it as a song cycle. To do it, Miranda brought together a cast of legends including Lauren Hill, Nas, Mark Anthony, 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. And Miranda tells the story in song, along with his writing partner, the actor and playwright, Issa Davis. Hey, how are you? Hello, I'm great.

Nice to see you. So in 1979, the Warriors comes out. I saw it then. Yeah. You guys saw it when? I saw it probably in 1984. That's respectable. A friend's older brother had the VHS.

Yes, and I saw it in January of 2022. More recently. Yes. Well, for those folks who don't know the story, So why don't you tell us what the story is? Yeah, well, just kind of set things up. 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, you know, multicultural men in the film

who are called up to the Bronx, to Van Cortland Park, for a truce meeting, a peace meeting that... Yes, that, yes, the music by Barry DeVorgon. Yes, that amazing synth. Open a long time. Yeah. And everyone around the city, not just this one gang from Connie, but all these gangs and all these amazing outfits,

go up to Van Cortland 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. Nobody is wasted. nobody. That is a miracle. And miracles is the way things ought to be. Dig it! Can you dig it?

And then Cyrus is assassinated. The person who assassinations Cyrus blames the warriors for doing so. And the warriors are? The warriors are a gang from Coney Island. And they have to fight their way from the Bronx all the way back down. to Coney Island in the course of the film. Yeah. But then the tale is an old tale. Like, it's Saul Eurek, who wrote the novel the movies based on, based it on the Anabasis,

which is a soldier's account of trying to get back home from war. Tell us about Anabasis, Linh, the Greek sourcing for this novel from 1965 by Saul Uruk. Yeah, I mean, it's this mythic story. It's a story about these soldiers who are fighting their way through enemy territory to get back home. Like, it doesn't get more clear than that as a plot line. It's Homeric. And 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 you know, my parents when I was born, my parents lived in NYU housing. They were NYU grad students. And so I still went to nursery school down in the village, even though we had moved all the way

up to northern Manhattan. So I would take the A train from West 4th Street to 200 street every day. You were living in the heights? Yeah, yeah, we're living, yeah, and commuting from the village for nursery school. And I remember just tracing the arc of the warriors. And I knew I lived closer to where Cyrus spoke than to where Coney Island was. And so there's this mix of the mythic and the specific. I mean, when I watch this, I love seeing the New York I grew up in.

I love seeing Grace Papaya at 72nd Street. I love seeing the Wonder Wheel. Still there. I love seeing the Wonder Wheel at the top of the movie. And so, you know, it really created my first mental map of the New York I hadn't seen yet growing up at the top of Manhattan. And we've written 26 songs basically musicalizing this story. The opening song, we decided to have an MC from each borough represent that borough. Who do you got?

So we have Chris Rivers, who is, you know, an incredible MC and also, you know, son of the legendary Big Punisher, the first Puerto Rican rapper to go platinum and one of my MC heroes. He plays the Bronx. We have Nass, representing Queens. We have... Also, executive produces the album. Yes, because as much as I love Warriors, he loves it twice as much. We have Cameron representing Manhattan. We have, of course, Ghostface and Riza from the Wu-Tang Clan, representing Staten Island, as they have for so many years. And then we have Buster Rhymes representing Brooklyn and introducing the Warriors since that's their home borough.

So, Lynn Manuel, the whole wide world knows you for Hamilton. But, of course, before that is in the Heights. And I wonder how In The Heights relates to the Warriors in your mind, either just thematically and in your kind of creative universe. Yeah, well, 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. And you know that, given the publication you work for. But, you know, in The Heights was my first musical.

I started writing in college. It was the classic, write what you. you know, I thought, I live in the most musical neighborhood I've ever been in. So that seemed like a great place to set a musical. And then imagine my surprise after reading Ron Chernow's book. Cherno's biography of Hamilton. Yeah. So much of it took place in New York.

Right. That, like, oh, Burr lived on a 162nd Street for a year. And that, you know, there was a cabinet meeting in Washington Heights before, you know, the capital relocated to Philly and then D.C. the fact that the entire story was just a few layers of topsoil underneath the city I'd grown up in and then with Warriors it was a chance to go to a totally different era

and 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 but do talk about the music in the original score of the Warriors

because most of our listeners will not recall it or know it. Yeah, no. It's very particular. Incredibly, like, of its time since intro, but you've also got this beautiful rock song in the last scene by Joe Walsh

called In the City. In the City. And, uh-huh. I forgot that Joe Walsh was on that soundtrack? Yeah. Yeah, the finale. Wow. When they're walking down the Strand.

Yeah, when they've made it. they've made it to the sea. And so, you know, but again, like, for us, New York in the late 70s was a musical playground. So, you know, there's a gang in the South Bronx in the movie called The Turnable A-C's. In the movie, there's skinheads. In the 70s in New York, Fania was revolutionizing salsa music, and all those musicians lived in the South Bronx. Hector Lavo and Willie Colong.

And, you know, it's such a South Bronx story. So we took the license to write like a salsa tune for that gang and basically made New York our musical playground. Warriors? You wonder. I mean, that was really the first thing that we did as collaborators was we just started giving each other playlists and, you know, really wanted to go after the diversity of genre. And so on the album, we see all of the songs that, you know,

sort of were inspired by what our playlists were. So, you know, we've got this salsa tune and we've got, you know, rock and we've got R&B. And then we have metal that shows up there as well. And something that was really important to us as well was having Shensia, who is our DJ. In the movie, it was Lynn Thigpen who played the DJ and kind of kept track of everything. Yeah, hey bumpers. I know, it's so perfect to do that in here on their mic in the studio. There's a radio station that figures into the plot. It's how they put alerts out about the Warriors' movements around the city. It's also a handy dramaturgical device

To let you know where you are in the city And they actually put that in After the fact when they needed A little bit more continuity Exposition Well let's listen to a clip from the film Great 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 Grammacy Ritz It's a special for the Warriors That's that real live bunch From Connie

And I do mean the Warriors. Here's a hit with them in mind. There you in the world. There you go. It's never been as menacing as in this context. Yeah, that's such a great montage in the movie. Where does this figure into the whole story?

It was useful to the filmmakers, and it was useful to us as well. Yeah. What Shenzia does is she really, really animates the fact that, you know, there are these really strong Jamaican roots to hip hop. And in a lot of ways, you know, 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. Got a word on 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 the rise. Little Coney Island crew, they're coming for you.

Warriors, you on the run. You think the film will get another viewing in some way? People go back to the film? I think so. I mean, you know, I think one of the strengths of our collaboration was ESA was coming to it fresh, and this movie was, like, written on stone tablets, in my mind. And I think what we've written is somewhere in between.

Like, I think fans of the movie will totally appreciate the moments they love and the lines they love and that's all in there. And yet, I think that Issa really came at it with a lot of dramaturgical innovation and really opened up. And 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. And in the movie, the thought of peace dies when Cyrus is shot. But Issa'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 sort of put some hope through it in a way that's really, I think, very moving and exciting. 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, you know, they're women and girls, and that Cyrus is a woman. And then what we got to do with that was, you know, just really go after what a specific experience of women fighting their way back, but unarmed, you know, just only having their bodies and their wits.

And, you know, just facing all of the obstacles along the way and I worked on a show called Justified City Primeval, which is adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. And something that he said in adaptation is that you can just hang it up the host text and strip it for parts. And 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, you know, how like black girls on the playground, you know, doing a little roll call, you hear that Warrior Cipher track, the third track, you know, we're going, ah, shika, ah, ah, shika.

And that's something that I used to do as a kid, right? And then that, again, is also part of what gives birth to, you know, what we know of as hip hop as this international cultural force. Oh, please, you know my style. ESA Davis with Lynn Manuel Miranda talking about their new album, The Warriors. We'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Lynn Manuel Miranda, who you, of course, know as the creator of Hamilton, along with Pulitzer Prize finalist, Issa Davis. On a new album called The Warriors, Miranda and Davis have reimagined the occult classic from 1979 as a song cycle. And they describe the album to me as a love letter to the film rather than as a remake. So 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? Sometimes the fashion gave us clues as to what the music would be. You know, I think that having the gang on skates that we meet in Union Square, move up to 96th Street, you know, we also know that like Paris's, the events of Paris is burning are taking a place around this time. There's this amazing queer nightlife subculture happening.

And so we made that the house of hurricanes. and had this incredible moment with this gang. But I 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. I was going to ask. This is not a preface to the movie.

No, not at all. No, not at all. On the contrary, it's a love letter to the movie. And it was so freeing to basically find the music that would create the story in your head. 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. No, to me, I was adapting the film. Like, it was, for me, I was, you know, we were picturing our own version of this movie. And do you think you need knowledge of the film in your head when listening to the album? No, not at all. That's been the fun litmus test

in playing it for people. I like playing it for diehards of the film and seeing them nod at the references. And I like playing it for people who have never seen it. Yeah, I played it for this one young person who was like, who called me. What counts is young, Linmoa?

Like 20-something and, like, produces a podcast. There it is. And it never heard of the movie. The producers the podcast part was what now. And she turned to me and she said, I googled this after you played it for us and like, they're dudes? How does it work if they're dudes?

Which means we did our job because it means the warriors in our telling, you know, we sort of carved out our own lane that is not, you know, I think the pitfall of a lot of adaptations is you're waiting for that part you like from the movie to happen. And to be the same thing. Yeah, and so I think this has lots of, like, if you were a fan of this movie,

you're going to love this album, but it also carves out its own lane as a companion piece. And let's just point out, Lauren Hill, yes. performs a song called If You Can Count, which features Cyrus, a.k.a. Lauren Hill. Let's hear a little bit of that. After all these years, it's so great to hear her.

It is. It's so great to hear her. And she performs only rarely. And tell me a little bit about why she's the right Cyrus for the album. I think... I mean, she might be the right thing for everything. We had no plan Bita. We didn't. We were just like, it's her or, you know, nobody. You know, we just had to have her. And it's because she is truly one of the greatest emcees and greatest singers that ever grace this planet, you know.

She's in everyone's top five emcees, you know. The Miseducation of Lauren Hill is a classic album that, of course, you know, recently Apple Music named their number one album. And she just has a kind of authority. She has a kind of gravitas. And I think that, you know, she as Cyrus asking for this call for peace is exactly right. It's exactly right.

And we had to have that. She had a complicated career. She has. And why did she say yes other than your enormous talents and powers of persuasion? I mean, when you just played that clip, I turned to Issa off mic and was like, it's real. It's like, we still can't believe that miss him. They'll sang a song we wrote, you know. Yeah.

Because even more spectacular than the fact that she said, yes, you know, she's one of the great writers as well, one of the great songwriters. So that she, you know, basically the way it happened was I met her manager at a social function. And her manager mentioned that she had admired Hamilton. And I said, great, because do I have a pitch for you? It didn't take long. It didn't take long. And I carefully crafted our letter to Miss Hill of like why we thought she was. was why she was our only choice to play Cyrus on this album.

And so I would just text the manager every week, just, hey, you have the tracks, let us know when she can get in the studio. And 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 drop box. And it had all the vocal files. And she had created these additional choral arrangements with background vocalists that she had added on top of. of what we had sent her. Unbidden. It just happened.

Yeah. And 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 Miss Lauren Hill and we're immortals.

But it was definitely bidden. I mean, we were praying, we were asking, like, you know, just can we give you our first unborn child? You know. And we were slowly finishing the rest of the album. Is the whole creative process

through email? I mean, you're sending it back. In fact, that's pretty much the only one that was through email. We kind of, I remember reading about this last. But with her, it's all that way. Yeah, with her, exactly. Like, she was the wizard behind the curtain. Like, we never got to meet her.

So you never got to meet her. Yeah. I mean, I'd met her before in the past. Somehow that makes it cooler, doesn't it? If she calls for a meeting in the Bronx, I'll go. I'll be there. And so, with the exception of Ms. Hill, we were in the studio with everybody. So we went to Staten Island to go record Ghost Space.

We went to L.A. to record Rizza. We really went to meet people where they are. A lot of people came and met us at Atlantic Studios. And again, like selfishly as songwriters, like 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, who's the producer of the album.

And he lives in Nashville. And 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. You know, on a cast album, you're pressed for time and you're recording it between eight shows a week. And it's a precise scheduled piece of work. 100%, whereas we actually got to explore the sound of what this is first and foremost. So it takes a while.

Yeah. Yeah, we spent pretty much this year recording it. Yeah. Let me ask you this. It can't, it's wonderful to have a gigantic success like Hamilton. in all kinds of ways. First line of the obituary, no matter what I do. Fair enough.

But 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? Yeah, I mean, 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.

And it was the idea that wouldn't leave me alone. And similarly, with Warriors, that's a movie I spent 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. Pitched you this idea. Yeah, he said Warriors, the Musical. He had gotten the job working for, his name is Phil Westgren. He'd gotten a job working for the producer of the film, Larry Gordon. And I wrote him back in email in 2009 saying, here's why it could never work.

And most of my objections were just about action sequences and songs fighting for the the same real estate. But that email... What does that mean? Songs for the same real estate? Well, 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 at work. Which is which you get? You're my liege may vary. And so, for me, you know, that to me was like, you know, I've never really seen a convincing fight sequence in a musical. It's always kind of Jerome Robbins. Robbins, dance ballet. And so, you know...

Until outsiders. Until outsiders last year, which actually had incredible fight sequences. Right. Props to them. And so, but again, that idea kind of was in my head. And 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. That was the thing. Yeah, that was the thing. And we've been working on it and we have some ideas. So, again, I chase the ideas that don't leave me alone, the ones that just keep coming back around. And 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. 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 this extended sequence, all the way down. Which runs how long? It's like 81 minutes.

So that's a healthy, lengthy thing. I joke that we've built a new Zoya trope. It's like a thing people do. Look through this slot. Yeah. We're very excited about it. If only this had been the soundtrack for Megalopoulos. Oh, my goodness.

But it's a love letter to the concept albums of the 70s that I grew up with when, you know, Jesus Christ superstar. Tommy. Tommy. The Lamb lies down on Broadway by Genesis. Right. And then there are even hip-hop. concept albums like Prince Paul had an amazing album called A Prince Among Thebes. But you think you're going uphill asking people to listen to 80 odd minutes of music as opposed

to four minutes, four minutes on Spotify? I think there was a ritual that people had in watching the Warriors on VHS, which is how Lynn saw it. You know, it's like, oh, it's Friday night. Let's like throw that in and watch it again. And I think there is an appetite to see something like that or listen to something like that, you know, and we want people to listen to the album in that way. I totally get that, but it's going to come at 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. Yeah, again, not interested in a movie. I mean, we're both theater artists, so I'd be very interested in exploring what the stage version of this would look like. So you're not close to that? We have literally no plans. But I will, but I'll tell you. You know, 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. And I watched... And I watched the front row start to know all the words better than I did. Like, 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.

So they would listen to the album top to bottom. And so, you know, for me, this is like, Well, 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.

It was. I remember. It's like now we all have the same thing that we've been working on for the whole time, and that feels wonderful. Well, it's a wonderful thing, and I really appreciate your being here. Thanks so much.

Thank you. Thank you. That's Issa Davis and Lynn Manuel Miranda. Their new album, The Warriors, just came out. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Redneck. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barge, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.