Part of Your World (from The Little Mermaid)

Is this the best “I Want” song of all time? Host writer/composer David Rackoff dives deep (sorry) into this fantastic Alan Menkin & Howard Ashman creation. The craftsmanship of this emotional, funny, charming song is quite a remarkable… what’s the word? Oh yeah. Feat.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Nothing Like Broadway podcast.
I am your host, writer, composer, David Rackoff, and this is season two.
So this season, every other week, we are going to pick a song for musical theater and pick
it apart like we're doing today.
And then on the off weeks, we're going to have some sort of a short podcast, like three
to five minutes about either rhyming or the history of Broadway or whatever else.
We're going to experiment a little bit with that format.
All right, so today we are looking at part of your world from The Little Mermaid, which
originally was not actually a Broadway show, but it became a Broadway show, but it still
is an incredibly influential musical theater type song.
Let me give you a little background about where Disney movies were in the late 80s when
The Little Mermaid came out.
So prior to that, for like 20 years or something, Disney animated movies had been not good.
For my entire childhood, there was like not a single really good Disney animated movie.
Like, it really is hard to explain now because it seems like they just come out every couple
years and they're either amazing or pretty good or somewhere in there.
But it really was not the case.
Like there was just all these crappy movies and I'm sure some people love them.
But it was like, it's like when Arby's comes out with a new sandwich now and you're like,
see a commercial for it and you're like, okay, like whatever, maybe if I'm in the neighborhood
and I'm hungry, I'll get it.
But like, I'm not excited.
That's what it was like when Disney would come out with a new animated movie.
All of my childhood memories of Disney animated movies are from movies that had been made
like 50 years prior, like, you know, when they re-released Snow White or Pinocchio or
whatever.
Like that's all we had as far as good Disney animated movies.
And it was, I mean, to the point where when The Little Mermaid came out, before it came
out, it was just like everybody was like, whatever, who cares?
Is there a garbage piece that's going to come out this year and something else garbage
will come out in a couple of years?
And it turned out to actually be great.
I remember seeing, I think I was in high school and I remember seeing the cover of Newsweek
magazine that had the best Broadway musical of the year is a Disney animated movie or
something like that on the cover.
And at the time, Newsweek was a really big deal.
And it was just such a shock because you're like, what?
Disney animated movie being good at all, let alone being like a good musical, insane.
And so it was really, really the cause of Disney's all of a sudden being really good
and having, you know, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Mulan, just a million,
all everything that's happened since then Aladdin and then all the not so good life
action remakes.
But, you know, that is like tens of billions of dollars of revenue, but also just like
good stuff that came out.
You can quibble about like it's Mulan, not as good as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which
is not as good as the Lion King, like whatever.
But they're all like valid good movies.
And most of them are like Broadway musical style musicals, which even like in the really
old timey golden age of like, you know, Snow White and Pinocchio, like the songs from that
were good, but it wasn't like great musical theater storytelling.
And then all of a sudden Little Mermaid in I think the late eighties came out and it
was like a good movie and like a good musical.
And that comes down to two people.
And that is Howard Ashman and Alan Menken.
Alan Menken is the composer.
He's composed a ton of Disney movie musical scores, plus a bunch of Broadway scores.
And Howard Ashman, who is the lyricist of Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.
And he had some lyrics in Aladdin.
He passed away from AIDS in the middle of all of this sort of renaissance, which is,
you know, incredibly tragic that we lost this one of the greats, I think, of musical
theater lyric writing.
And who knows what he would have done had he had a longer life.
He really was, I think, the key to why all of a sudden Disney animated movies had decided
to embrace the art form of really well-crafted musical theater storytelling.
And this song, Part of Your World, is kind of the epitome of it.
Like that's kind of where when you're watching the movie or when I was watching the movie,
you're like, oh, whoa.
And so one of the things that we haven't really talked about on this podcast are the decisions
that songwriters make before they ever write a word or a note of a song.
And it's things like the rules they set up for themselves.
For example, are we only going to use perfect rhymes?
Are we going to have everything scanned properly?
Are we going to have this song help tell the story?
Are we going to have this song help express the character?
And these seem like obvious sort of fundamental things that you should always do, but like
go see a show on Broadway right now and you can see not everyone has decided to do these
things and it's hard.
Like it takes a lot longer to write a song once you have decided that you're only going
to have perfect rhymes and perfect scans and the song has to move the story along and the
song has to express the character.
Like it's just it's really hard.
It's like you're placing a bet on yourself that, okay, I'm going to make the rules harder
for me and then I have to achieve those goals or fail at those goals.
But usually once you've decided to set those boundaries out, it just takes longer and it's
harder and it takes people of more skill and more training.
But it still is doable or it's you're not the right person for the job.
So they had decided before they wrote this to make this like classic, classic, Roger
Hammerstein style Broadway craftsmanship goodness.
So when I saw this movie, I think I was in high school.
I was really like, whoa, this feels like a really good song from a really good score
from a really good show.
And I was sort of shocked until I then learned that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken are the
people who wrote Little Shop of Horrors, which I was a huge fan of.
And then I was like, oh, this makes sense now.
Because Little Shop of Horrors also was based on a property that was sort of not a well-regarded,
it's not like the original black and white Roger Corman Little Shop of Horrors movie was
good.
It was like a piece of garbage in like a fun campy way, but it was done in like a couple
days.
And so the fact that they had off, off Broadway where it started, decided to put high level
craftsmanship into this property.
And then it became Little Shop of Horrors, which is amazing.
Makes sense that they were like, OK, I know Disney movies have just been having like garbage
songs if they have any songs, we're going to now put high level craftsmanship into the
score for this movie musical.
And so it made sense that I was like, oh, the Little Shop of Horrors guys are doing this.
That's so cool.
And it is so cool.
And so that basically, in my mind, is what turned Disney movie musicals and kind of movie
musicals in general around.
And part of your world is the song where they really get to show off.
So it is called An I Want Song, which we've talked about a billion times on the show.
You probably know what it is.
And this is a classic I Want Song.
This is sort of almost the I Wantiest I Want Song because it is the protagonist expressing
early on in the show what their desires are at that moment.
Often they will discover that what they really originally wanted isn't really what they wanted.
But it lets us get on board with the main character's journey, right?
Because a movie or play or novel is usually about a protagonist who wants something and
then there are obstacles and then they either achieve their goals or they do not achieve
their goals.
So in the context of the show, just to sort of state the obvious, it is Ariel, the little
mermaid, wants to be a part of the human beings' world.
And that expresses her character, that she wants something, that she's a, because she's
literally a princess.
And so she could have a very cushy, comfortable life just where she is.
But she actually is like, no, no, I want more.
In fact, it's a lyric from the song.
She wants more and we can all relate to that.
It's because if she were just like a complacent princess, it would be like, who cares?
Like, I've got everything I need right here.
You know, like I'm pretty enriched and happy to be where I am.
No, no, she wants more.
She wants to be a part of this exciting world.
And it's sort of funny because if you're in the audience watching this movie, you are
a part of that world and you're like, hey, it's kind of similar to what you've got going
on there.
It's not that exciting, but it really lets us tap into what she is feeling.
And it's, you know, about coming of age and adolescence.
And so it accomplishes driving the plot, expressing her character.
And then it's also just very entertaining.
Like when you think about, I want songs in musicals, they're not usually funny.
Like, you know, like somewhere over the rainbow is a really good example.
It's a, you know, gorgeous song, obviously, but it's not funny or something's coming
from West Side Story.
It's another great song.
What part of your world does is it takes an I Want song, keeps the beautiful
yearningness of it, but also makes it funny.
So all of a sudden we are like super duper in love with this character and with this
movie. And again, it's hard to overstate if you were watching this cold at the time,
how you just had no expectations.
Like it was probably like, let's just kill a couple hours of the kids and go see
whatever a piece of crap Disney's put out this year.
And you watch it and all of a sudden, like, you know, your kids are entranced,
you're entranced and you are just like at a really good musical.
You are on board for this character's journey.
So the music for the song, it's Alan Menken.
So usually that means that it's sort of poppy, sort of beautiful, really effective.
You know, it's not like crazy dissonant, like, you know, some song time stuff is,
but it really gets the job done.
And this song is all about the four chord.
So like in a regular C major scale, that would be the F chord.
And there's something sort of like yearning about that chord.
It's something you do as a composer sometimes.
It should just be like, you know what?
Kind of playing around on the piano, seeing what sounds good.
Somehow the F chord in this song is really calling to me.
So I'm just going to use that a lot.
And in fact, they do.
So the whole intro for this song basically sort of avoids the home chord
until all of a sudden you are in the I want more and then I want to be where the people are.
All of a sudden we are now at the home chord.
It's hard to establish what the home key is when you haven't heard your home
chord for the first, I think, 30 bars of this song.
But when we hear it, we know it.
So I'm just going to play the part of the song where it goes from,
but who cares? No big deal.
I want more home chord.
And it's just like it's a hug.
So let's look at the first just two bars, actually, of the song proper.
So I want to be where the people are.
So I want to be is the root note.
And then people are is the fifth degree of the scale, which you've talked about before,
first, fifth, good scale, easy and pretty.
And then you have the I want to see when I see them dancing, walking around
and those what do you call them? Oh, feet.
Feet is on the two, the second degree of the scale, which is a leading tone,
which basically makes you you don't want to land there.
You want to keep going like if it had been what do you call them?
Oh, feet.
All of a sudden, you're like at a stopping point, whereas when you go,
what do you call them? Oh, yeah, feet.
You know, you want to go to the next part of the song, which is very exciting.
It sort of keeps the momentum going.
One thing about this song that I always think about it, and I'm sure you think
about is there's something called a counter melody, which is basically not a
melody that anyone is singing.
It's just a melody in the accompaniment and the piano
or the orchestra, and it is iconic.
This is one of the most iconic, I would say, counter melodies in all of,
you know, musical theater writing, and I will play that right now.
Right. You hear that and you instantly know what it is.
And what's so exciting about it is it's like bubbles, you know,
it's just like what is it? It's one, two, three, five,
which is basically it's like a regular major chord, add two.
But it's the four chord of the scale that it's in.
But that doesn't really matter.
What really matters is that it's just like they're going right.
Like you can hear the bubbles going up.
It's so perfect.
And so I mean, it's iconic.
I hate to overuse that word, but it really is iconic.
So let's look at the end of the chorus, which is up where they walk, up where they run,
up where they stay all day in the sun.
I'm going to play that.
And so what it does is at the end of that phrase that I just said,
it plays the minor chord instead of the major chord,
which is what it would be normally in that key.
And it's just really cool having a minor chord substitution on that four chord
that is up where they stay all day in the sun, which is the four note.
But we are now going from the major four chord to the minor four chord,
which just leaves us feeling like all of a sudden it's like the hill beyond the hill,
which we've talked about before, which is where you solve one problem.
But then all of a sudden you see, oh, shit, there's an even bigger problem.
Beyond that, which is what the song is basically about, right?
She's like, hey, everything would be great if I'm just a human.
And the actual case is things get much more complicated once she starts trying
to achieve this goal of being part of their world.
And so having it go from her singing the four note, going from the major four
chord to the minor four chord is just a really cool way of letting us know.
It's not going to be as easy as you think.
And I was looking at some other songs that have a four chord minor
borrowed from a different key and like creep across the universe.
And Friends in Low Places are three that I just sort of found.
And it's fun because those are all songs about someone basically being
where they shouldn't be, right?
Like creep is, you know, I don't belong here.
Across the universe is you're in sort of a weird trippy space.
And Friends in Low Places is where he goes to like a fancy party
and is like the guy who doesn't belong there.
It's such a cool musical idea to let us know that she doesn't belong there
and it's going to get a little bit dark.
But then, of course, at the end of the song, everything resolves
and it leaves us excited about what's going to happen next.
Let's take a look at the lyrics for this song, because I think this is where
Disney really recaptured their movie making magic and like musical theater
making magic at the time.
A lot of musicals were like the Les Mis, Phantom and stuff, which are, you know,
great shows, but they're not about the lyrics.
It's not like you've got Cole Porter or somebody and all of a sudden now
we've got Cole Porter or somebody here writing these great lyrics.
So this story, this in the song, see, that's a very telling Freudian slip there
as I was saying this story, it's a song, but it's telling a little story.
So first she's setting up her space.
Look at this stuff.
Isn't it neat?
Wouldn't you think my collection is complete?
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl, the girl who has everything?
That's sort of setting the table that like, OK, she's a princess, but she's not
happy with a life of luxury.
What she wants are the exciting, strange things.
Look at this trove.
Treasures untold.
There's not just great little alliteration there.
Trove treasures told.
How many wonders can one cavern hold?
I mean, you're already getting the kind of euphony, which is where something
sounds good to the ear either because of assonance or consonance.
And here it's wonders can one cavern hold.
It just sounds so lovely.
The previous line was Trove treasures untold.
It's very like and now it's wonders one cavern hold.
And so all of a sudden very gooey and sort of legato in the lyrics.
So I've got gadgets and gizmos aplenty.
More alliteration.
Who's it's and what's it galore?
You want thing of my bobs?
I got 20.
But who cares?
No big deal.
And then what kind of song is this?
It's an I want song.
I want more.
And then again, she says, I want to be where the people are.
I want to see want to see him dancing.
So in this I want song as a sort of way of like reminding us that I want
songs are a thing that you should have in a musical.
All of a sudden now Disney is taking the craft of musical making seriously
because of Howard Ashman.
He's putting I want like three times in a row there just to like remind us.
Hey guys, this is musical theater.
This is not just some dumb movie that we are putting out every couple years.
And then it's I want to be where the people are.
I want to see want to see him dancing.
Walking around on the what do you call it?
Sorry, just lost my place.
What's the next word?
I bet you said feet.
I bet you listening said feet.
Right.
It's like a little game, which is so much fun.
So flipping your fins, you don't get too far.
More alliteration.
Legs are required for jumping, dancing, stumbling along on.
God, I just lost my place again in my notes.
And what's the what's the what's the next line?
Street.
I bet you said it.
Right.
So that's something we should talk about, which is one of the things when
you're rhyming, if you're doing too much rhyming, especially if it's like really
rhymed in a ballad, which this is, you can get into a trap where the audience is
sort of a little bit trying to guess what the rhyme is going to be, which is not
like a fun place to be.
Normally you don't want the audience out of their heads of the story and the
character of the song and thinking about like, oh, what's he going to rhyme with
this?
But so what the song does is it plays with it in like a meta sort of way.
And it's like a guessing game.
And you get to take a second and try and guess what it is, which is just incredibly
fun.
It's like a little game.
Not only is this that I want song that expresses character and helps tell the
story and set the stakes for the movie.
It actually has like a little guessing game.
And because like a children's movie, kids can play along.
So you can try to guess what it is the first time you hear it.
And then the next 10,000 times, sorry, parents, that they play this song, they
know and they get to say it before Ariel says it.
And so it's like a fun game where like the kids get to play along.
It's hard to wipe your memory and remember the first time that you ever heard
this song, but like that is fucking clever.
Right.
It makes it almost children's like a children's birthday party game that we
as adults can also play and also makes us appreciate the fact that like somebody
is yearning for a feat and a street like this really regular, I mean, literally
pedestrian feet are literally pedestrian.
And that's something that she wants that we have.
So we can be like appreciative of like, oh my gosh, I have these things.
So this verse here, what would I give if I could live out of these waters?
So first of all, it's internal rhyme with give and live.
What would I pay to spend a day more internal rhyme in the same exact place?
Warm on the sand.
Bet you on land they understand that they don't reprimand their daughters.
So that's four rhymes of an and word, right?
Bet you on land they understand, but they don't reprimand their daughters.
Bright young women, sick of swimming, more internal rhyme, ready to stand, which is
sort of a fifth rhyme for the and things of the technically stand and understand.
Or is not a rhyme, it's an identity.
But still, you've got four or five rhymes of one sound, which is really hard to do
and pretty rare.
Like you've got to kind of go to Sondheim to get that kind of a rhyming like
rhyming two things with the minimum, obviously, or else it's not a rhyme.
Three things gets harder.
Four things gets much harder.
And five things, if we want to count, stand and understand as a rhyme, that's really rare.
Like you've really got to go to like, you know, into the woods or something
to find that kind of crazy rhyming.
Wait a minute.
There's another rhyme that I just noticed for the and.
So normally on that verse, the next verse, it just starts on the downbeat.
Here there's an extra word and.
So the word and is actually a fifth or sixth, depending on how you want to
count it, rhyme warm on the sand, betcha on land they understand that they don't
reprimand and then bring women, sick of swimming, ready to stand and and then
we're in the next verse.
Amazing.
Jesus.
The next verse is where the whole show, I keep wanting to say the word show.
But it's a movie.
Really all of a sudden takes everything up a notch emotionally and ready to
know what the people know, ask them my questions and get some answers.
What's a fire and why does it?
What's the word?
Correct.
Burn.
And so what's so exciting about that?
First of all, it's kind of cool.
I never thought about it.
Like, yeah, you're right.
You would never see fire if you were underwater.
Like fire is something we see all the time.
That's amazing.
If you're underwater, you really wouldn't have that.
But it also is this coming of age passion thing, right?
And so all of a sudden now it's not just a little girl who's like, hmm,
I wonder if there's more forks above the sea or like if there's shoes or whatever.
It's like all of a sudden, no, no, she wants to find her passion, both, you know,
romantically, but also just for life, like her zest for life.
And so that's her becoming like a young woman.
That's basically like a coming of age burn.
And all of a sudden now her motivation isn't just curiosity.
It's like driving exciting passion.
And like that's kind of, you know, cool and progressive also for like to have
like a, I don't know how old she's supposed to be, but like a young girl being like,
no, no, passion is something that I am excited to discover.
And it just really makes the whole thing more adult and more like grander.
And then when that happens, the music swells and gets much more exciting.
And so this is, you know, sort of when people ask like, what comes first,
the music and the lyrics and the answers usually that it's some sort of
intertwined combination.
I would imagine that for this, Howard Ashburn probably came up with the lyric,
what's a fire and why does it, what's the word burn?
Alan Menken.
And then later the arranger and the orchestrator took that as a clue, right?
Like when you're orchestrating a song, you're not just orchestrating the music,
you're orchestrating what the person's saying, what they're feeling.
And so all of a sudden when you have a lyric like that, what's a fire and why
does it, what's the word burn?
You're going to like swell it up and you're like, as like the musicians on the team
are like, ooh, that's like a little clue that now we can really amputate
up to and it sort of works in tandem.
Which again is why music and lyrics are so intertwined and you really can't say
completely that this person is entirely responsible for the lyrics and this
person is entirely responsible for the music because that music as well
probably wouldn't have happened unless you had that really strong word and sort
of change of perspective into going to, why does it burn?
And then all of a sudden you swell at the end of the song and then it comes
back down to out of the sea, wish I could be part of your world.
And so performance wise, one of the really smart things that they did when
they were voice casting a little mermaid movie is they got Jodie Benson,
who was like a, just an established Broadway actress and singer rather than
getting a famous person or like a pop singer or getting one person to sing
the voice and one person to speak the lines.
In this movie, they made the really smart choice of taking Jodie Benson,
who somebody Howard Ashman had worked with before.
And there's something about having somebody who is an actor and a singer
and who can do both things at the same time.
With a song like this, you really wouldn't be able to have one person
be the speaking voice, one person be the singing voice, because so much of this
is sort of in between singing and speaking and you want it to be the same
person and you want that person to be able to make choices that are true
to the character in that moment.
And so that's something in like some of the later Disney movies and definitely
the live action remakes is by casting either a non-singer or having one
person be the singing voice, one person to the speaking voice.
You don't get that sort of interplay of good voice acting and the live
action movie, The Little Mermaid, which is one of the better ones, but still
like kind of why are you doing it?
But like Halle Bailey is a good actress and a good singer and she's doing both.
And so she's able to put the nuance into the singing and speaking and the sort
of like in between with the what's that word again, feet kind of stuff.
And so having somebody who can really do both is I think really important,
especially with a song like this and not to pick on somebody, but like in the
beauty and the beast movie, the live action remake that was not very good.
Emma Watson, who's a fine actress, is not a good singer.
And so they had to like pitch correct her voice a lot.
And so because of that, all of her singing is very flat and you're not
getting a lot of character, even though she's now singing all the correct
notes because they had to do all the pitch correcting.
A lot of what you're doing when you're a good singer actor is you're sort
of sliding up to notes and not being completely accurate because you are acting it.
And so if all of a sudden you have to pitch correct everything, you're losing
a lot of the nuance of the acting performance.
And so even though Emma Watson is a fine actor, she doesn't come off as being
a fine actor all the time vocally, especially if you listen to the just
like audio recording of it.
It's just so flat and sort of robotic kind of sounding because there probably
were some acting choices she was making, but they get erased when you have
to pitch correct things.
And so this song, part of your world, you could consider it like a 20
billion dollar song in a way because it is what led to more great Disney movie
musicals, all the stage versions that we've had of the recent Disney movie
musicals, You Know, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, the Little Mermaid was made
into a Broadway musical.
I don't think it was very successful artistically or financially they had
them on roller skates, which seems insane to me, but they had Sierra
August, who was great as Ariel.
But this song is sort of a coming of the age metaphor for the character, but
also kind of for Disney, like having this creative resurgence and also just
for anybody for like, if you're going on a big move, if you're taking a
chance, if you are, you know, moving your family for a new job or if you're
starting college, a one more personal thing about this.
So this is a song that I love and looking back on it this week, just to
prepare for this podcast, I'm just, you know, re impressed with Howard
Ashman and Alan Menken and how good the song is.
But it's sort of one of the songs where you kind of forget it just sort of is
like there all the time.
You didn't even like it's hard to remember a time where you didn't know
what the song was.
But coming out of lockdown, I went to Marie's Crisis, which we've talked
about. It's a piano bar in the West Village.
I've talked about on the show before.
And when this song came on, when they started to play this song and everyone's
singing along to it, I don't like, I don't, this is not a song that I really
listen to very often or like think about just because it's so ingrained in my
brain and certainly don't listen to it afresh.
But coming out of lockdown and being in this room with 50 other people who are
all singing along to the song, it was so emotional.
It was one of those things where I'm like, and other people were too.
Everyone just like starts to cry because it was so newly relevant to our
experience of coming out of this isolation and being part of the world again.
It was just really funny.
I was like, I was like, oh, no, am I sobbing because of the little mermaid song?
And then I look around and so is everybody else.
But it's just it's a great song that had huge implications for Disney, but
also just for the craft of songwriting.
Like I was trying to think of better I want songs from musicals, from, you know,
Roger and Hammerstein or like whatever.
And I kind of can't.
I kind of think this might be the best I want song ever, maybe.
I don't know. So this has been the Nothing Like Broadway podcast.
I am writer, composer David Rakoff of the upcoming Off-Broadway musical,
Nothing Like Broadway.
You can follow us at Nothing Like Broadway on Instagram.
On Facebook, you can look us up, Nothing Like Broadway.
If I got anything wrong factually, which is completely possible,
or especially if you have a suggestion for a song for us to break down in the future,
email me, NothingLikeBroadway at gmail.com.
And let's go out listening to a little bit of Alan Minkin and Howard Ashman's
part of your world sung from the original movie by Jodi Benson.