This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Joe Iconis: Hey there, I'm Joe Iconis.

[0:03] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: And I'm Jennifer Ashley Tepper, and you are listening to ALBUM PODCAST.

[0:17] Joe Iconis: On today's episode, we're going to be talking about my song, Party Hat, a.k.a. I wanna put a party hat on my cat.

[0:26] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: There's more to mine and Party Hat than you might think. And so we can't wait to have you listen and put on a party hat and make a meme.

[0:54] Joe Iconis: So Party Hat is definitely like a favorite of many people. I feel like I see more online memes about this song than maybe any other. It's very memable.

[1:10] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, what inspired Party Hat? Start at the beginning.

[1:19] Joe Iconis: Okay, so Party Hat is a song that I had the hook of in my head for years and years and years and years. And I literally, without any context for the song, had the line, I'm going to put a party hat on my cat in my brain for years and years and years. And I always felt like, oh, I should write a song based on those two lines that I have. And originally, there was another two lines after that, short ones that were a completion of that thought, which was, I'm going to put a party hat on my cat and pretend I have a friend. That was like the completion of the thought. But I always preferred the I'm going to put a party hat on my cat to the finisher of that thought. And so I tried a few times to write the song.

I never could. And then we were doing a concert at the Beechman in the summer of 2012. And I thought, oh, I want to write a couple of new tunes for this concert. And it was, I believe it was the concert that I first premiered, Fell in Love in Juby Hall, aka I was a Teenage Delinquent exclamation point and Slide Whistle. I think we were all done at this concert. But Party Hat, I knew I wanted to do a duet.

[3:07] Joe Iconis: Oh, no, that's a lie. That's a lie. I sat down to write it and I wrote it. I don't know why I was on Long Island, but I was in my family's basement on Long Island. And that's where I wrote this tune on the same piano that I would later write a good majority of the song album just 10 years earlier. And I started writing it. I came up with that first verse, I came up with the setup, and then the chorus. And then I got to the part of the song where the woman stops singing. So she sings the, she comes up with the idea, I'm going to put a party hat on my cat. Then she gets excited about the idea and sings about her golden dress and all that and French perfume and all that. And then I was kind of like, okay, I feel like this has run its course, this person coming up with this idea.

Oh, I know how I'll fix my problems. I'm going to put a party hat on my cat and it's going to be so great. And it's kind of like, now what? And because I had mentioned the neighbors earlier in the song, because there's that line, you know, the neighbors will peek through their windows. I was kind of like, oh, maybe a neighbor will knock on her door and say, what's going on in there? And they'll strike up a conversation and, you know, she'll find this like human connection. And so I kept going down that path and it just kept feeling not correct. And it kept feeling like, oh, this is not really what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to say like, if you're lonely and depressed, like all you need is, you know, is to find like romance and you'll be fixed.

And so it wasn't working. And then I thought, oh, maybe we should just hear from the cat and get this whole situation from the cat's point of view. And as soon as I had that idea, as soon as I had the spark of that idea, it was just like, oh yeah, that's what it is. It was like a fully formed thing. I think I wrote the rest of the song in like two seconds. It immediately clicked into place.

[6:06] Joe Iconis: And as I was writing it, I had been thinking about MK Lawson, who is an amazing actor, choreographer, director, and she was in my musical Blood Song of Love. And I had been thinking about her when writing the character of the woman. And then as soon as I thought about this cat character, Eric William Morris, my frequent collaborator and great friend, popped into mind. And I just finished it out thinking about the two of them. And yeah, that's like the nuts and bolts story of how Party Hat came to be.

[6:40] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: It's funny to think about it in terms of Blood Song of Love, because of course, you know, Eric William Morris and MK Lawson were like romantic leads, for lack of a less reductive term, hero and heroine of that. And these are just very different roles that you wrote them like, you know, shortly after that touch on totally different kinds of talents that you know, they have as actors.

[7:04] Joe Iconis: Yeah, for sure. And you know, so much of the song, like I, you know, because so many people know the song now, the sort of like, the surprise of it is gone. But when I first wrote it, I loved the idea of when, you know, when Eric enters into the song, I think certainly at the first few performances, and still sometimes when people don't know the song, everyone always assumes that that person, when they speak, is going to be a neighbor or is going to be, you know, some character who is going to like save this woman. And so the idea is that, you know, just finished eating some friskies is the thing that lets you know that this is actually the cat and not some human being who's now entering the song.

And I think that because, you know, MK and Eric had sort of like just played romantic leads, to use your reductive term, in a musical, I think that was like kind of even, you know, that sort of expectation of this being a different type of song was even greater. You know, when it was first premiered, and that idea that like, you know, sort of defined the expectation of what a song like this, you know, might normally be is something that has stayed with the song and all of its, you know, future iterations and performances.

[8:29] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Um, do you ever imagine like an adaptation for the screen where, like, is someone, is it a CGI cat? Is it like we're watching the Andrew Lloyd Webber movie? Is it like, like, how does this get adapted to another media? I've always wondered.

[8:48] Joe Iconis: Yeah, I like whenever I think about it, I think about a real cat. Like, I never think about it in like a whimsical way. Like, I think that it's like a very, very sort of like, naturalistic, you know, interpretation of the thing. Like, to me, Party Hat is not like a cute song. You know, I think that a lot of times people sort of perceive it as this like, you know, sort of like cutesy, you know, like a whimsical, cartoony thing. And while it certainly has elements of that, to me, it's like a pretty, it's kind of serious. Like, to me, I've always said I thought the song is about the things that we do for people that we love. And I think that the relationship that the woman has with the cat is really meaningful.

I think it really is. And I think that in the song, you know, the cat, while being, you know, kind of an asshole, really recognizes how much this person needs him, and recognizes how good this person is to him. You know, it really feels like a song that's about two people.

[10:13] Joe Iconis: Two creatures, yeah, two creatures. Fully, fully, fully recognizing what the other means to them. And to me, I actually relate it really strongly to, you know, the songs or

[10:31] Joe Iconis: Musicals that I've written where it feels like the central relationship is a friendship or it's a non-romantic love story, right? So like I'm thinking about like, you know, Jeremy and Michael and Be More Chill and or like, you know, the musician in Banana and Blood Song of Love. I've written so many shows or, you know, Chris and John in Black Suits where it's like it feels like they are like love stories. It's just not necessarily a romantic love story and it's sort of like a friendship or something in between. And this is one of those songs to me. And you know, whenever I work on this song, because people do, you know, sing it a lot in like master classes and things like that, I always talk about how I think that at the top of the song, I feel like the woman and also like the gender of either creature in the song is like I think can be anything.

I originally wrote it as like a woman and a cat who was like a cis male playing that cat, so that's the terms that I'm using, but it can kind of be anything. But in the song, I think the woman at the top, I think that she has sort of racked up a whole bunch of awful interactions with fellow humans at that point and I think that it's just one of those nights when like she just needed a win and she didn't get it and she's finding herself in a really, really awful place and she's, you know, she's alone or she feels alone in her apartment. And I think that her night could go a whole bunch of different ways and I think that when she says, "So instead of feeling blue, I know just what I'll do," I actually don't think that she knows that she's gonna put a party hat on her cat in that moment.

I feel like the thing, I feel like she could say ten things after "I know just what I'll do" and I think that like, you know, one of them could involve harming herself in some way. I think one of them could involve harming someone else in some way, you know? I think that there's a version where like the woman in Party Hat could, you know, do what like Kevin does in the song "Kevin." I think there's like so many different things and I think that like by some miracle, she just happens to lay eyes on her cat who's, you know, probably staring at her with like mild disdain and in like a split second she remembers that she has a party hat lying around and she's like, "Oh, I'm gonna do that," and then I think that that, you know, the miracle is that she has that thought instead of other thoughts and then it sets off a series of events that I think gives her some joy which then leads to some hope. And I've always liked to think that the woman's life turns around after the events of Party Hat.

[13:47] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: When you said "feels alone," it really opened up some possibilities and creeped me out a bit because I never thought that in the world of this song there was anyone else in the apartment. And now that you're talking about different possibilities, I'm like, "Oh, I guess there could be other people in this woman's home." Also, have you ever given any thought to like why she has the party hat? Like where it came from? Or, you know, like this lonely woman, like had a birthday party at her place? Question mark? And that's where the party hat's from. What's the canon response to that?

[14:24] Joe Iconis: Amazingly, I haven't really thought about it and no one has ever, ever, ever asked me that ever in the history of this song, which I have talked about more than other songs. Yeah, I, you know, really appeals to a lot of people, but especially cat lovers. I feel like people who have a cat really, you know, I understand why you get a lot of notes about this song. It's, yeah. But I do, I'm so, yeah, I wonder where the party hat came from. You know, it's like I, every, I immediately had three different ideas and all of them are terribly, terribly sad. Not the obvious though. I don't think it's like a child who used to be there who's not there, but it's like I feel like either she, you know, she was like the shoot through, she like, you know, offered to throw a party for her nephew and then like nobody showed up, so she had all these party hats, or she, she like worked at a nursery school and got fired.

[15:31] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Mm-hmm.

[15:31] Joe Iconis: She took up the party hats home. Literally as we're talking about this, my cat is wanting to be fed and throwing things around the kitchen.

[15:35] Joe Iconis: Yeah, I've seen her in the background. It's, yeah, she can, she's gotten really good about knowing how to escalate levels of violence in order to be fed when I'm ignoring her. And you know, but something else that people always ask me is that like there was like, "Oh, is the song about Diane, my cat Diane Kitten?" But I wrote the song two years before I got Diane.

[15:43] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: And I didn't know Diane Kitten could throw things, really.

[16:00] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Wow.

[16:00] Joe Iconis: I wrote the song before Diane Kitten was even born. But in a lot of like, you know, artwork made by fans of the song and, you know, made by myself, Diane Kitten has sort of like become the face.

[16:14] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Oh, yeah, she's become the feline representation of Party Hat.

[16:20] Joe Iconis: Well, you've also, I mean, you've had cats in your life prior to Diane Kitten. It didn't sound like maybe a specific cat inspired the song, but...

[16:27] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, I know it was, it was general, but I have had cats in my life. My first cat that I had growing up was named Spunky and was the inspiration for my AOL email address that followed me into my professional career.

[16:44] Joe Iconis: Well into my professional career, probably too far.

[16:48] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Spunky, you're in good company with that.

[16:50] Joe Iconis: I think we should have some kind of like, there's so much to do a podcast just about theater people's AOL names and earliest emails because I feel like that would be a great, great concept.

[17:02] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I think so too. I'm doing a run of concerts as we film this podcast and so I'm like doing all these invites to people and it always makes me so delighted when I email like a titan of the theater and their email address is like, you know, "no yummy brunch at AOL.com."

[17:21] Joe Iconis: I always have to be very careful in this situation because more than once when having this conversation while hosting an event, I've been like, "And isn't it so funny that so-and-so's email is..." and given out the email address of like this...

[17:34] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: You've seen this happen.

[17:36] Joe Iconis: But it's because there are so many incredible theater legends, especially who are like older who when they first got it were like, "I'll name my email after, you know, the song I'm known for or the show I'm known for," and some of them are very fun.

[17:49] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Party Hat, before we finish Party Hat, we would be remiss to not mention the iconic dance that goes along with this song as performed by Lauren Marcus and Eric William Morris on the album.

[18:01] Joe Iconis: I can pretty much like see the dance in my head as the track is happening. You know, there's a lot of your songs that kind of have dances people know, but mostly it's because of like, you know, moves that a choreographer came up with in the musical version or something like that. And this is an iconic Iconis family song with its own kind of choreography.

[18:21] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: It really is and the choreography just kind of like naturally developed from the song, you know? I think that, and MK and Eric were the first people ever to perform it and they'd sort of naturally found themselves dancing in that first performance of the song and that impulse has only grown and morphed over time. And now I feel like, I mean, I feel like Eric and Lauren Marcus, their sort of choreography is fairly iconic.

[18:50] Joe Iconis: And I feel like I learned what a body roll was because of their performance of the song. I feel like I didn't know what the term body roll meant before seeing them dance Party Hat, but you know, there have been like really great, you know, dancers who have done the song and I feel like they all bring their own spin to it. You know, I'm thinking of like Seth Eliser has been the cat quite a few times and he's such an amazing dancer and then actors who, you know, are not known for their dancing like Jason Sueto Williams or Will Rollin, you know? I feel like so many of the people I play with have portrayed cat or woman at some point and they all bring their own spin to it, their own hot moves.

[19:42] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, should we end this episode by like taking a short break so you can feed your cat? Is that what the universe wants?

[19:48] Joe Iconis: That is literally what I'm gonna do. Yeah, she's just behind me and like staring at me in the creepiest way.

[20:00] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Listen, I can confirm. I know you can't see, but I can confirm.

[20:05] Joe Iconis: Yeah. You're welcome, Diane. It's all for you.

[20:15] 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.

[20:40] Joe Iconis: Album Podcast is executive produced by Liz Armstrong, produced by Dory 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.