Sunday, April 18, 2010

"Next to Normal" The Original Broadway Soundtrack


It took me about three days to get through this album going to and from work in my car. I have found that I actually focus on the music better while driving in my car. Perhaps it is contributed to the fact that I can't escape the music...or something like that. Anyways...

First off, let me say that the music is satisfactory. The style reminded me of a Jason-Robert-Brown-meets-Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-meets-Rent vibe, if that's even possible. The one thing that surprising within the first 30 seconds of the album was the presence of explicatives. There was no explicit lyrics content sticker on the album, so I found that rather surprising and odd. Some of the songs were satisfactory, and it will probably take another listen-through to figure out how much I really like the show (and whether or not I will actually want to see it), but for now these are my thoughts on the music.

The story itself very much reminds me of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House if you think of the role of Nora being played out as a bipolar woman who is trying to figure out why her memories are gone and how she has this unnerving feeling that she has another child that her family isn't reminding her about. It plays out very much like that, and it is from that fact I find my hesitation to even see the show. Doll's House was rather depressing and dumb, in my opinion. However, I suppose that it is a good exploration of our society's obsession with calling every manic-depressive outburst a chemical imbalance and to fix it accordingly with meds.

It's definitely something to think about. Until then, I go to work and try to motivate myself to things I want to do instead of being tired all the time.

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