Hi, I'm Tom Kitt and I'm here at Playbill to talk to you about the genesis
of the song “Drum Circle” from the musical The Visitor.
Give it a try
Just hit that simple rhythm.
When we started running The Visitor, we did our first reading,
I believe in the summer of 2014,
and the ”Drum Circle” wasn't in the draft at that point.
We knew it was this big set piece in the musical.
Anyone that's seen the film, it's a beautiful moment
where Richard Jenkins, who plays the character of Walter,
goes up to Central Park and joins this beautiful drum circle.
And so so we knew we wanted to capture that moment.
I get this question a lot.
What comes first?
The music or the lyrics?
And if I did
the calculations, I'm not sure where I would.
I'd like to think it's 50/50, but
in this case, the “Drum Circle”
We agreed that I would take a stab at the music first.
I remember we were up at the Vineyard Arts Project and Martha's Vineyard.
We were there as guests of The Public Theater, and we knew that
we wanted to use that time to really move ahead with The Visitor
and tackle some key moments. And one of them was the “Drum Circle”.
And I remember very clearly I was sitting and I have these
these beautiful, spacious dance studios and
they're just very picturesque and it's really inspiring.
I was also up there with Fying Over Sunset, and so I just remember
I usually just start sitting down and trying to think of a vamp
and I just started playing around with this.
Now, that was the original key that I wrote it in, but the key in
the musical ended up being a half step down in B major.
So that that started to develop that
changed the bass a little bit.
So now I'm somewhere I have to figure out a chorus, what can I land in?
And then I started playing around with this.
I love the suspension, the resolution
and all of this suspension
resolution was coming out of a place that I knew that the “Drum Circle” had to be
this open hearted
moment of this this wounded individual who's who's coming into this world
and getting a sense of what it is to live again.
He's been mourning the loss of his wife.
He's been shut down.
And this is going to be a major theme in our show.
This idea
that there is a circle that you can join, that there's there's always community.
There's we are all these these great forces of energy.
And we need to be welcoming.
We need to feel the rhythm of our lives and the rhythm of connection
and awakening. And the “Drum Circle”
was certainly a key
moment in this, and it gets reprised at the end of the musical as well.
So I was looking for music that was going to feel openhearted,
that it was landing in something that felt like a discovery.
Now I know that the second verse needs to be a little bit of a step up,
so there's more rhythm.
But then getting back to that chorus
lyrical again
and there's a B section.
all feeling like celebration
and a key change
And for the show, knowing
we were going to have all this great percussion in there, that becomes
sort of a break down section where the percussion leads.
What I do and I when I create at first, especially knowing that I want to
give Brian something to write from,
I just start making up sort of
what I call dummy
words or syllables that he can record and just know what the scanning is.
So I started writing, da da da da da da
da da da da da da da da da da da.
Da da
da da da da da da da da da da da da da.
And then when we get to the chorus da da da da da da.
Da da
da da da da
da da da da da da da.
And that becomes this.
So you join.
The circle,
and so you play so clear so true.
And so you join the circle
and it joins you.
for tomorrow.
So that's how a song really gets created.
If I go first, I create music, I try to give Brian a melody line
that he can work from and and then you realize the full composition.
Certainly the song evolved through the rehearsal period,
especially when we started to incorporate this brilliant company.
But really the song that's in the show is very similar to that first
sort of burst of inspiration that happened at the Vineyard Arts Project.
That’s how we joined the circle
That’s how we’re strong
You understand
Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you so much, Playbill, for having me.
And you can find the recording of the “Drum Circle” as well as the entire score
on The Visitor cast recording, which is available anywhere where you stream music.
We just recorded it in the spring, put it out in June.
I'm so proud of it.
Hope you will listen to it.