Making Things is Hard #1: Joe Iconis

"Most everything I've written, I've written in unexpected moments. Or I've written it when I'm not trying to."

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Today is the first interview in what I hope will be a long and fruitful part of Slow Dopamine: talking to people about their creative process, with a focus on moments when they’ve struggled. Because most of what we witness on social media is people’s shiny successes, I am perpetually comforted by reminders that making things isn’t easy for anybody.

Somehow I constantly forget that the reason that writing and other creative endeavors are so worthwhile is because they are hard. As much as ChatGPT wants you to believe otherwise, there are no shortcuts when it comes to making the real shit. It’s the ultimate cliché, but the journey truly is the destination, and the highs and lows of pushing through that are incredibly fulfilling. Some of that sweet slow dopamine, know what I’m saying? (I promise I’ll stop referencing the name of my substack soon.)

Joe Iconis is not only one of my all-time favorite musical theater writers—he’s also a close friend and collaborator. He wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical Be More Chill (book by Joe Tracz, adapted from the YA novel by Ned Vizzini), and he’s also known for his fantastic Iconis and Family concerts (many of which I’ve performed in), filled with stand-alone songs that you can find on his epic 2022 album, Album.

Joe’s co-written many other incredible musicals, including The Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical (co-written by Gregory Moss, ran at the La Jolla Playhouse last fall), Broadway Bounty Hunter (co-written by me and Jason SweetTooth Williams), Love in Hate Nation, The Black Suits, Bloodsong of Love, and The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks. He tends to write about outcasts and weirdos and other people who don’t usually get written about in musicals, and his songs are always funny, specific, story-driven, and incredibly catchy.  

One of the fascinating ironies of Joe’s journey is that, though he thinks of himself “as someone who’s relatively old-school when it comes to the creation of art,” generally preferring paper and pencil to apps and software, and though he often writes about longing for the past, when music was something you could hold rather than stream, some of his biggest successes have come because of the internet.

Whether it was YouTube videos of his concerts getting his name out there starting in 2006—based on just a few videos, the song “Blue Hair” was such a popular choice for teens auditioning for college that it was put onto a Do Not Sing List by professors tired of hearing it so often—or the social media fan frenzy for Be More Chill two years after its 2015 regional production at Two River Theater, that eventually propelled the show to Broadway, Joe’s work has connected deeply with young people who were only able to learn about him through the internet. 

“So I feel like social media has come to me multiple times in my career,” Joe says, “and it’s more about me meeting it and then trying to participate in it than it has ever been about me trying to go after it. And that continues to be the relationship I have with it as far as my own stuff goes.”

Joe and I talked over Facetime. I condensed and edited our conversation for your enjoyment.

Joe! Hi! Let’s start simple. What are some of your favorite moments of your creative process?

If I’m talking about writing a musical, I love when I have a sizable amount of it written. Where it feels like, Okay, this is something that hangs together, where there are scenes and songs. And so maybe it’s once I’ve got, you know, forty pages. That’s the first time usually where I’ll have the spark of like, Oh, this is cool. Up until then, it really feels overwhelming, and it feels like work.

That’s the moment where it feels real. Like, Oh I’m making something. Like, this isn’t just flotsam and jetsam that I’m just…

Yeah! It’s the moment where it becomes not bullshit. It’s not something I’m talking about making, it’s something that actually exists. And when people say what are you working on, I can say, This thing. There’s 40 pages of it!

Assuming it’s not too painful, I’d love if you could recall a specific struggle you’ve had with something you’ve written, and then talk about how you found your way through to a final something. I actually have at least one thing in mind because you’ve told me that writing the 2022 song “Album” was a struggle. Since the final product is something I love, that I know you’re proud of, that’s one that came to mind to demonstrate this idea of pushing through a creative struggle. 

Cool, yeah, I think that’s a great example. When I decided that I wanted to call the Iconis and Family album Album, I was like—let me back up actually. Part of the idea of this 44-song album of all these Iconis & Family songs was that I wasn’t going to worry about writing any new material. It was during the pandemic that I hatched the plan to make this, and during the pandemic that it was recorded, so I was like, I’m not going to write anything new for this piece of work because I already have so many songs that are unrecorded—I didn’t want to put pressure on myself to write anything new because it was also really hard for me to generate new material during the pandemic.

So I then decided that I wanted to call the album Album, and as soon as I decided that, I was like, “Oh man, I can’t call the album Album and not have a song called ‘Album’ on it.” In my initial conception I was like, “I don’t know what I want it to be, but I love the idea of having it be the shortest song on the whole album.” Because the album itself is so massive, over three and a half hours long, and so many of the songs are so long in and of themselves, which is something that I think is a hallmark of lots of my songwriting. So I thought ok, I’m going to write this tiny little baby song called “Album” that will be the shortest song on the whole album. Gonna be really simple and maybe it’ll start it or end it, or whatever.

So I set out to write it and my goal was—we were gonna start recording the album in a couple of months from whenever I started trying to write the song “Album.” And so I was like ok, well I just need to finish it by the time we’re in the recording studio recording. Because the recording sessions were a really complicated map of who was coming in when, instrumentalists and vocalists. It was insane. Seventy people during the pandemic as vaccines were coming out, it was really, really crazy. So I started writing it and it just wasn’t coming in the way I wanted it to come. So I was screwing around, and I was working on Long Island at my family’s house, in the basement on the piano that I had had since high school, that I’d written many early, early songs on. I kind of came up with this hook of “An album’s not forever,” which I really liked a lot. I came up with that whole first verse, this idea of what the word “album” means and the googling of it, sort of this song about writing the literal song that the listener was listening to.

I got to the end of that verse and got through the album’s not forever, and I kind of was like: Oh shit. This song’s gonna be so long. It was the ultimate—you know, it sometimes sounds so cheesy when writers talk about, like, “The characters just spoke for themselves. The work told me what the plot was going to be.” But that literally is what happened. I set out to write this really simple song because that’s what I thought in its heart it wanted to be artistically, but also I just wanted to be done with it. There was just so much to do, and I had to meet my own self-imposed deadline, so I just wanted it to be short and snappy and that’s it, but I just couldn’t do it. Because the way the song played out, I then realized this is gonna be like a three-parter. That’s what the structure is gonna be. So then I couldn’t write any more of it after that first verse.

So I came back to it months and months and months later—

Wow.

Yeah. And the second time I started working on it, I think we had just finished recording. So it was like, okay, I didn’t make the deadline, and I decided then that this will just be a simple piano song. So I’ll be able to record it separately, and it won’t involve any other musicians; it’ll just involve me on piano. So I came back to it, and I wrote this whole second verse about the photo stuff, and it became a little bit more about me, and a little bit more autobiographical on its surface. Also around that time, I was thinking about the album artwork, and what I wanted that to be, and I liked the idea of the word album, a photo album being a part of the album artwork, which then turned into what the artwork is, which I like a lot. So then I wrote that second verse and I couldn’t go any further with it. So I got stuck. I didn’t know where the final verse was going to go. I kept trying to return to it over the subsequent months—

How much time did you really have, though? I guess ‘cause the album was coming out months and months later?

Yeah. We recorded it from February 2021 through May 2021. Then the mixing and editing went from May until October. And then the album was supposed to come out in January, but ended up coming out in June. But let’s say I started writing the thing in January 2021. I came back to it May-ish 2021. I then couldn’t finish it and so, it was really in my brain, on my mind. I went to this hotel I love in Greenport, Long Island called the Soundview. I was supposed to go there with my wife, Lauren Marcus, and she got covid. So we were meeting there because I was coming from somewhere. So I was just there and she got covid in our apartment in the city. And she was like, I guess I’m just gonna stay here and have covid and you should stay away from me. So I was just by myself at the Soundview in Greenport, and I ended up finishing the song there.

Did you have a keyboard? Or you just wrote it sans piano/keyboard?

I did not have a keyboard. I wrote it sans piano/keyboard because if I kind of know the melody, I can fill it in in my brain. But they have a piano in a piano bar at the hotel, so I went and I used it during the day. But it was after I already wrote it. So I wrote it and then I played it for the first time at this piano in the Soundview.

But what’s so crazy is—so this was over the summer, so it’s like a 7 month writing process of this song in multiple locations. And I finished it in a place that’s like the movie version of where a writer would finish working on a song like this. I literally finished it in the morning, on a beach, staring at the water, with f*cking seagulls flying past. I can say with certainty I have never ever finished or really written a song on a beach ever. Other than that one. I do not write or finish material ever in a picturesque place, like a postcard, but I did for that one. And I actually feel like it infected the song itself. And it infected the end of the song. The song is really specific and it gets really macro—it lets itself get a little sentimental at the end, in a way that normally I’m really averse to and kinda scares me. But I sort of let myself go there. Sometimes I listen to the song and think I can’t believe I wrote a song with the line “Dreaming is forever” at the end. But I think it works. Because it was such an epic journey to push through that song and to get to the end and because of the literal place I ended up when I finished writing it, I think it all added up to what the song is, and I think you can feel it in the song.

I love that. How much during those months—you had so much going on, you’re organizing the whole album—but how much were your blocks about that song making you feel anxious or stressed or I don’t know how I’m going to finish it or did you always kind of feel a resolve like it’ll happen?

Definitely anxious and stressed. But the process I went through with that song, and I think it’s the same with everything I do—it’s really anxiety-inducing to be stuck on something, and I’m always like, I’ll do it. I know I’ll do it. And then I’m immediately like, But it’s gonna be really hard. And I’m the one who has to do it. I feel like I both self-soothe and then self-antagonize constantly. It’s a constant cycle. Like I know I will, but something has to be right in my brain, and I don’t know what it is, and I can try as much as I can, but if it’s coming, it’s coming, and if it’s not, it’s not. I’m weirdly not always in control. Or I guess I’m probably never in control of that. I can do things to help get myself to a spot where I’m able to be inspired and work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna come. So it is anxiety-inducing. Which is why I feel like I’m weirdly my least anxious about writing when I’m at my busiest because I have so much going on that it’s harder for me to harp on creative things. The creative things just become these things that I’m trying to slot in, in the midst of all these other issues that are taking up my brain space.

Is that your usual writing process, more free-flowing as opposed to a regimented schedule? And, jumping off that, what, if any, creative wisdom would you offer to others? 

It’s more free-flowing. It’s different than it used to be. That’s the thing that I do find myself thinking about a lot. I feel like I used to be naturally and organically inspired more. I used to just be taken with an idea and find myself at a piano, and I’d spend hours just working through this idea. And it was exciting.

Now, writing feels like work, in both good and bad ways. Because it is my work. It’s my job. Which is not to say I don’t love it, and not to say that I’m not so fulfilled by it, it’s just… Because I think writing itself means something different, and because I have less time in my life, I have less moments when I’m organically, genuinely overtaken by inspiration, and it’s more about fitting the writing into— It’s more about trying to create space for myself to be able to get to a place where I can write. Which looks like different things on different days.

I’m not a writer who’s like, I’m gonna write from this time to this time every day. I can’t do it. I’ve found so often that when I try to be like, Okay this is the week I’m setting aside to work on just this project. And I’ll write it in my calendar, and I’ll be like, I’m gonna do everything I can to set myself up for success to only be thinking about this one project and just write it this week. I feel like every time I do that, it is a recipe for disaster. Where I’ve put this pressure on myself to create this thing, and I can’t create it, and then I get so annoyed at myself for not being able to do this thing I was trying to do, and I cleared the time. That happens to me all the f*cking time.

Because it’s not the way you work. And maybe it’s just coming to terms with that and being like, I don’t work like that. Which it sounds like you have.   

Yeah! Exactly. And I can tell myself— Most everything I’ve written, I’ve written it in unexpected moments. Or I’ve written it when I’m not trying to. Sometimes it just happens. Because I think it’s hard to plan your life around that. It’s easier to be like, This is my week, writing the…whatever musical. So, yeah, maybe the wisdom is to not try to fight your specific process.

I love that. Because it’s very easy, especially in the social media comparing-ourselves age, to feel like, I think I’m supposed to be doing it like this, and really get wrapped up in that. So I think it’s great wisdom.

Yeah. Because there’s so much less mystery around people’s processes for anything anymore, in a way that I don’t usually think about. Whether we want to or not, we just know how things are made, or how people want us to think things are made. Constantly.

Yes. The mystery we’ve lost. It’s hard to quantify and put a value on that, but I think there is. It affects us. It’s hard to put a finger on why.

There should be an app for that.

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So there it is, the first interview. Thank you to the fantastic Mr. Joe Iconis, who did this with me just a couple of weeks before he and Lauren became parents!

As I do more of these, I’d love to know what you like, what moments/questions inspire you, so I can keep pushing in helpful directions with future interviews. So comment if the spirit moves you, or feel free to email/message me directly! Either are great. And so are you. Thanks for reading.

Next week I’ll be sharing some things I like in the first edition of what I’m calling Tyrannosaurus Recs. (Name subject to change.) See you thennnnn