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[0:00] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Hi, I'm Jennifer Ashley Tepper.

[0:02] Joe Iconis: And I'm Joe Iconis, and you're listening to The ALBUM Podcast on the Broadway Podcast Network. This episode is about the song, Find the Bastard, which is from the musical Blood Song of Love. And on the album, it is performed by the original cast of Blood Song of Love.

[0:29] Joe Iconis: Find the Bastard is the theme song from the Spaghetti Western rock and roll musical. And I think it also really encapsulates a lot of my feelings about art and family in general. So listen for a nice deep conversation about all of those things.

[0:51] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: So yeah, very exciting thing to listen to if you've enjoyed the album and really thought about why the songs appear in the order that they do and how, you know, the album relates to the Iconis and family live shows.

[1:12] Joe Iconis: Yeah, this is a good one.

[1:26] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Let's talk about Find the Bastard.

[1:30] Joe Iconis: I like how you said those words very clear.

[1:35] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I try to speak clearly and eloquently.

[1:41] Joe Iconis: It's really a beautiful thing that this album, which is very much, you know, made up of songs that are not from musicals like that, you know, it's there's so many standalone songs on the 44-track album. But there's this like really special moment near the end of the album where there are several songs from musicals that get, you know, featured back to back. We haven't gotten to the last track yet, but the four songs before the last track are two songs from The Black Suits and then two songs from Blood Song of Love. Was that, you know, can you talk about why you chose to do it that way?

[2:17] Joe Iconis: I think that it's, I don't, you know, I don't think I specifically chose to, you know, kind of like dead end the track list of the album in selections from these two musicals. But I think thematically it just kind of made sense. And I think it's like, yeah, you know, whether it was like a subconscious thing or what, I don't know. But I feel like, you know, it's all good. It feels so much like as much as it's specifically about the characters in The Black Suits. It feels like a larger story. It feels like it's really connected to me and the people I work with and my own thoughts on music and family and art and all that stuff. And so it felt like a, you know, a culminating kind of song. And so it just sort of felt natural to put it, you know, towards the end.

And then energy wise, it kind of felt like, oh, find the bastard as much as lyrically it's so much, you know, tied to Blood Song of Love. It also, you know, is about being on a mission and it's, you know, and it's another one that feels really tied to like the larger ideas of my myself and my family. But then it's like, you know, just personally, Black Suits and Blood Song are such formative experiences for me. And I've met so many, you know, people through those shows who have been the people who are closest to me in my whole entire life that it's it just kind of like it felt it felt inevitable. I feel like the end of the album is just like this absolute, you know, like circus of love and people and shows. And it feels like, you know, it's like the album's version of like Kumbaya, like people sitting around a campfire, you know, crying and singing songs to each other.

[4:18] Joe Iconis: And so find the bastard is the I call it the theme song of Blood Song of Love, Blood Song of Love, which is my rock and roll spaghetti Western musical that played Ars Nova in 2010. And, you know, Blood Song is inspired by spaghetti Western movies like Once Upon a Time in the West and Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. And in Blood Song, the lead character, the sort of Clint Eastwood type is not like a man who's, you know, who's on a mission to, you know, to win the money, you know, that's in the bank of the town or he's not really on a mission to like, you know, do a lot of the other, you know, politically motivated or criminally motivated things that often happen in spaghetti Westerns.

But he's a musician and he is, you know, traveling on the road forged by his heart and his brain and his guts and his life and his beloved have been taken away from him. And so he's on this mission to get his woman back from the clutches of Lococo Gio, who's his sworn enemy, who is a musical artist who is the exact opposite of the musician. Lococo Gio is corporate and dastardly and evil and the musician is good and pure.

[6:00] Joe Iconis: And so Find the Bastard is like his theme song. And yeah. And as much as it's like about the stuff that Blood Song is about, it's, you know, it feels like autobiographical to me. It feels as autobiographical as any other thing I've ever written in the show. Blood Song, Find the Bastard comes at the end of this very long opening sequence that tells the whole back story, the origin story, if you will, of the musician. And it's like we hear the refrain, I'm going to find the bastard, get my woman back and be with her again beneath the setting sun. We hear that refrain a couple of times throughout the course of this, what's like an almost 20 minute sequence. And then we finally get the full song at the end of the sequence. And here on the album, it's sort of just that ending, you know, full song. And it's a song that we do in concert quite a bit because, yeah, it just feels like it's, you know, it's a bop and it it's a connector in some way.

[7:05] Joe Iconis: It's also interesting to me because, you know, much to my chagrin, like we've never been able to do, you've never done like a 44 song concert. So in figuring out the best order, like artistically for the songs on the album, you know, they're not necessarily coming in concert order or anything like that. But towards the end, it sort of seems like, oh, like because the emotional core of so many of the concerts is made up at the end by Last on Land and by, you know, maybe it's all good. It's sort of like the album is more mirroring a live concert towards the end of it.

[7:40] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, I mean, did you think like, oh, sort of like the beginning of the album also sort of starts out like you might start out a concert and then the end. But like, did you give any thought to that?

[7:51] Joe Iconis: Yeah, I think that it's I think that I naturally respond to set lists, whether it's a live thing or a recorded thing that start out with a bit of an explosion in some way and then have a lot of peaks and valleys throughout and then rev up into another explosive ending, I like I like a.

[8:27] Joe Iconis: Start and a big finish. And so I think that that's just where my inner compass takes me always. But on Album, because the production of the tracks felt so tied to the studio, you know, one of the things that we wanted to do on this album that we've talked about so much is that we didn't want to make it feel like a live album. We didn't want to make it feel like, you know, someone going into 54 or Joe's Pub and hitting record. As much as I love live albums, live albums, it's just like, you know, all of these songs have existed solely as live recordings. And so people know them from the performances that happened, you know, in rooms. And so this felt like an opportunity to actually do purposeful arrangements and do things to get the official versions of these songs down to do things that we simply can't do live, you know, that we can't have a whole string section or a horn section or a hundred singers.

However, I always knew I wanted the album to capture the spirit of a live show and the eclecticism of a live show. And so the more we worked on tracks and the more the track list solidified, the more it became exciting to think of the album as a whole, by the end, kind of like wearing itself down and devolving into a live show. And so like those last few songs, you know, we even sort of added the sounds of the cast talking like before a couple of the songs like "Amphibian" goes right into "It's All Good" with like chatter, which goes right into "Find the Bastard" with some chatter, which is literally like the cast of the original cast of Blood Song of Love, just like, you know, talking to each other, because I think we wanted it to feel like, okay, you know, we're in a studio and this isn't a live stage thing, but like there are still human beings in this studio and we're still, you know, this family who is, you know, who is together and heartfelt and rowdy and passionate and all those things.

And so we wanted to, like, you know, drop the pretense a little bit at the end of the album. And so I like that it kind of like turns into something that could sort of be confused for a live album by the end.

[10:56] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: You talked about this, you know, the fact that it is the original cast of Blood Song of Love. And, you know, as far as songs that are sung by multiple singers go, I feel like "Find the Bastard" is almost always led by Eric William Morris. But to have, you know, the full original cast back to sing this is really special. I think, you know, that show obviously meant so much to so many people who got to see it. And then the song "Find the Bastard" is always just like a very thrilling, rousing number in concert when the audience is like singing along. As far as a song like this, did you ever think like, oh, in order to do this in concert or, you know, put it on an album, I would need to change some of the lyrics to be less specific to the show?

Like, I know that eventually, you know, you didn't and I think everyone is happy about that. And like, you know, feeling like it's straight from the musical. But is there ever a time when you thought like, oh, I should change this so people who don't know who Violetta is, are hearing like, you know, something that gives them more context, because it's out of the context of the musical? Have you considered that with this song or any of the songs on the album?

[12:01] Joe Iconis: Yeah, I mean, I considered it for most of them. But I think honestly, you know, when I was deciding the songs, you know, in the song selection process, I think I was gravitating towards songs where I wouldn't need to do that. You know, I did it for a couple, but really very few. I think I really tried to choose songs that could exist on their own, you know, and like we've talked about, like these songs are theater songs, you know, they're influenced by pop music or rock music or all different genres of music. But like, all of them are theater songs, you know, all of them are songs that could not be confused for songs that you would, you know, like, hear on the radio or like, or, you know, hear as performed by like a major recording artist.

And so I think the specificity of them, it's, it's, you know, it's understood, it's forgiven. And so like, you know, even songs that were written to be a self-contained thing, like "Ammonia" or "Kevin" or whatever, it's still a lot of information for people to take in. But I think they, you know, they'll go with it as long as the song, you know, plays by its own rules, and is a satisfying experience from start to finish. And so like, for something like "Find the Bastard," I definitely think we're like pushing the limits of what people will take in for a song from a musical that is out of context. But, you know, I think I know from concerts that for some reason, it's a song that people just understand without needing a whole lot of explanation.

And I think, because even though he's, you know, he's dropping names and saying Violetta, it's like, we get this character, we get who he is, we get what he wants. And even though it's really specific what he wants, we can, you know, apply it to our own lives. I think it's really easy to see everything in the song as a metaphor. And, and I think because of that, the specificity of it, all of a sudden makes it universal.

[14:15] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I think it also really helps that within, you know, the genre of the song, like the, it's so focused in on the musician at the very beginning, and you really get his objective. And then, you know, we hear it over and over. It's like musical theater 101. It's really clear what the central point of the song is. So that even if you're like, oh, I need to go look up Blood Song of Love and find out what they were talking about there, you do get what the song is about.

[14:35] Joe Iconis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. And I also like that it's mysterious. You know, I think that it's like, I feel like in, you know, in theater, musical theater, specifically, there's always this, there's always this pressure, or at least there has been, you know, for me to like, over explain things or to make everything like, you know, to answer every question and to, you know, make sure that an audience is always 100% clear about what's going on. And so I think that I've in my writing in general really tried to hone in on this idea of like, I never want to confuse the audience, but I like the idea of letting there be some mystery sometimes. Yeah. And so I think that this is a great example of that. And just a great song, the only song in existence that I ever considered getting a tattoo based on, so congratulations to "Find the Bastard." I do not have that tattoo, but I did think about it.

[15:43] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: There's always time. It ain't over till it's over.

[15:55] Joe Iconis: Hey, thanks so much for listening or watching to my podcast. Do me a favor and go to wherever you just listened to or watched this thing and subscribe or like or give us a great rating or review and then head to bpn.fm/album to find out even more information about this podcast. More ways to watch, more ways to listen, and check out my album, Album. Thanks so much for hanging out. Album podcast is executive produced by Liz Armstrong, produced by Dori Berenstain, Alan Seales, Kim Garris, and the rest of the team at the Broadway Podcast Network. Be sure to visit bpn.fm/album for both audio and video versions of this podcast and to listen to Album.