After more than fifty years writing the songs that define Broadway, Sir Tim Rice has decided to grant future songwriters an exclusive window into the creative process. The lyricist who penned such instantly recognizable songs as “Circle of Life”, ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, and “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is now part of a series on BBC Maestro that allows people a glimpse into how the songwriting process takes shape in the hands of a master at his craft. Rice appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to discuss the project.
“If you go to BBC Maestro, then it’s there, and I think there’s something like 20 or 30 different episodes and different aspects,” Rice explained to Berman and Riedel. “You don’t have to sit through the whole thing, but you can sign up and watch one or two or three and take as long as you like. Some of it’s quite entertaining, so I would highly recommend it. One of my golden rules is there are no rules, so be original, if you can.”
In describing the process of writing a Broadway smash hit, Rice points to arguably his best-known song as Exhibit A that even the experts get surprised from time to time. “We never thought that [Don’t Cry for Me Argentina] would be a hit out of context. It was really written as part of a fairly complex story, and ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ was just what this politician lady was saying to her followers. I never thought it would become a catch phrase and a hit, because we wrote the piece as something that was roughly two hours long. It was a story from A to Z, and we hoped that one or two of the songs would draw attention to the whole work, but we never dreamt that that one would leap out and become a hit single all around the world and covered by quite a few people.”
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