Melissa Errico Has a Valentine For New York City

Singer/actress Melissa Errico had great success with her 2018 album Sondheim Sublime on which she sang 15 Stephen Sondheim songs including Loving You (from Passion, a musical she appeared in as Clara at Classic Stage in NY), Move On (from Sunday in the Park with George, a musical she appeared in the Kennedy Center Sondheim Festival in 2002) and With So Little to Be Sure Of (from Anyone Can Whistle).

That last song proved to be almost a meditation on our lives during the first year of the COVID crisis. Sondheim’s words perfectly summed up the uncertainty of the time. It was during the pandemic that Errico had the inspiration to do a different album of Sondheim’s songs. One that celebrated the city that she and the composer both lived in: New York City. That album, Sondheim in the City, gets released on Friday and starting today Errico begins a a five-night stand at Birdland Jazz Club in New York in a show entitled A Manhattan Valentine.

Last week I spoke with Errico about her passion for Sondheim’s work, her various collaborations with him over the years and what she learned most from her time with him. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview (which is chockfull of wonderful stories and observations about Sondheim and herself), please go here.

When did the desire to do a second collection of his material start bubbling up within you? 

I think I always knew that I was going to spend much of my life turning to him. I don’t know that I was wanting to record [another album] until the pandemic happened and I turned to him yet again in another crisis. Sondheim Sublime is a very inward record. It’s a lyrical record. I was going through a hard time in my own life. I just keep turning to Sondheim. I think that he is probably the greatest source for me of wisdom and courage. Sondheim worked with me on the creation of that. He had ideas for it. He knew what I was working through. He knew what I was feeling about his work. He was a little embarrassed by the word sublime, because I think he felt it was so spiritual and maybe corny. I think he said it was camp. 

Now the pandemic happened. We lived through that. Maybe we’re coming out of this terrifying time. I was thinking about New York City. I was thinking about how everybody was leaving New York during the pandemic. I was thinking I want to recommit to New York City; it gave me everything. When Sondheim died, the ideas of New York were so rich in my head. When he passed I worried for New York. I thought about his New York. He made New York for me. And for so many of us, he defines it. And he’s a great poet himself of New York. I felt like everything is there again in Sondheim for another chapter of my life. 

There are going to be people who are going to be surprised by some of the material on this album, because I don’t think many people have heard Dawn or Nice Town, But. For those who don’t know, Nice Town, But came from one of his earliest works in the 1950s called Climb High that never got finished. Oddly, he didn’t write about that song in his Collected Lyrics books. What was your process of discovering other songs that maybe the world doesn’t know that would fit the story and the narrative you have in this album? 

Nice Town, But, you’re going to have to wait for the vinyl. That’s not going to come out on the 16th. We’re going to have 14 songs. That is a coda of juvenilia of his youth. That is not going to come out just yet, but I’m thrilled that I’m going to be singing it live at Birdland. It’s a brilliant piece of his youth and it is meant to just be a humorous and energetic finale to all the thoughts that I put into the more classic songs.

But I open with an unusual song which is on the first release, Dawn, which was [for] an unproduced film [Singing Out Loud]. It’s a wonderful song that nobody knows and I’m super excited for people to hear it. I hope that it acts [on the album] as a new beginning of a New York waking up. What is New York at dawn? It’s quiet, but it still hums with life and promise. 

I hope that that means there’s a whole lot of material that we still haven’t heard that we will get to hear, either from you or from other people throughout the years ahead.

There’s more things. I put some cut music on here as well. Music cut from musicals. Jazz fans always love the alternate take. Like Chet Baker did this or Charlie Parker did this one that they didn’t put on the record. I have the same obsession with cut songs and there’s some beautiful cut music from Follies that I included here: Can That Boy Foxtrot? We’ve heard it, but it’s not the most common song. And It Wasn’t Meant to Happen, which I think is a masterpiece.

I think in his Collected Lyrics Sondheim said that was his attempt to do a Cole Porter true pathos song.

I believe he rewrote it in his head when he wrote Send in the Clowns. I believe that it has the same meter, a meditative regret. And it’s about denial. Send in the clowns. I’ll be fine. It wasn’t meant to happen. I’m good. But she’s there. And in the song, just as with Send in the Clowns, don’t bother. They’re here. You can really hear the other person is in the room.

What was the process for you in approaching songs that the world has heard multiple times?

Songs like Being Alive, that’s a young person’s song. I have spent my whole life as an ingenue, singing from a young person’s perspective. And in a way I’ve been gradually beating the ingenue out of myself. So I guess I was thinking about what that song is saying. Maybe when I was younger I was thinking, somebody hold me, I want happiness. I would probably have thought, I want that connection. But I think now I realize she’s not asking for happiness. She’s asking for a kind of pain. Someone to force her to feel alive through the kind of armor of sophistication and familiarity that we put on.

There are a lot of people who have a stereotype of New Yorkers being neurotic. Sondheim himself is quoted as saying, “I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear the rumblings beneath the surface.” You’ve created a New York centric album. Do you think there’s a part of Sondheim in the City that celebrates these neurotic people that Sondheim was talking about?

Oh, yes. I think there’s a kind of jaunty, upbeat quality to my record, because I don’t think it’s a sour and cynical world. Actually, I think if you look closely at Sondheim, there’s a kind of ecstatic pleasure in New York; the rhythm of things. I think Another Hundred People is an ecstatic song. Even Everybody Says Don’t. Sure, all these people are blocking you, but step over them. He’s more than satiric and malicious. I say, ecstatic. I think he was excited by the possibilities.

Once you stop trying to make life makes sense in the literal or linear simple way. Because once you’re allowed to be nuts a lot of problems vanish, a lot of humor and love and complication and emotion and style and laughing and nightlife, so much becomes possible. I guess that’s a middle-aged person speaking justifying ourselves.

Do you think there are reasons, other than the fact that Stephen Sondheim has passed, that his work is being embraced so vociferously and voraciously as it is now?

Because it never gets boring. It’s relentlessly interesting. There’s no bottom. It’s so smart and there’s so much love in it as well. And it’s never dated. There’s so many layers. Maybe we need him more now than we used to. Maybe we understand that his talents and his gifts had some difficulties. At a time that wanted something more cheery or simple or commercial – the British wave and everything that annoyed him – he was looking in the mind. Not everybody wants to do that. And I think now we’re really not afraid.

In the liner notes you talk about going to Sondheim’s house when it was on the market after his death. Was that the first time you’d been there?

Yes. Actually, I feel like I’ve been there because I saw that wonderful interview with [composer] Adam Guettel. When I walked in the room, I was so overwhelmed. Oh, my God, there’s the chair. I was so nervous. I didn’t take pictures. I just stood there like, wow.

What has your process of performing Sondheim taught you about who you are as a person and who you are as an artist?

I felt encouraged by him to be a female kind of intellectual person. He encouraged me over a long period of time. I can’t pretend we were intimately close friends. More like a very dedicated, almost a daughter figure. I’ve honored him. My thinking about him so much and applying his stuff for my own personal survival. I find him funny and sexy. And I love going to the shows, even if I’m not in them.

The emails between us were empowering, funny, educational, challenging. He says he hates self-deprecation. That was my most unpleasant quality, he said. So I don’t do it anymore. I don’t think I’ve been self-deprecating today. I try not to. I used to be throwing myself under the bus here and there and he didn’t like that. He said it’s the least attractive quality in all people. He liked to lift you up. He said, Melissa, you’re a lot of things. You’re an actress and a big band singer or a girl singer, like in that old tradition. Keep exploring that. 

We’re trying to learn about ourselves through a master’s music and be respectful and explore it and honor him at the same time as learn. This is me finding myself mid-life. Just don’t press too much. Just be. 

To watch the full interview with Melissa Errico, please go here.