Redemption Song Lyrics Quotes

If I had one night, I'd hold you in my arms, Find redemption, no more contention, Keeping you close. Too long, years gone, Wasted away. One night, our night, Remember this. I won't forget you, No I won't forget you.—Red-Eyed Loons

Paradoxically, the musical Merrily is both very faithful yet rather untrue to its source. To repeat: in the musical, we lose a substantial piece of information about why the hero is so determined to achieve financial independence: to protect himself from the kind of beating he took during his first marriage. No one, we almost hear him cry, will ever own me again! But the musical also improved on that hero, trading the somewhat high-strung Richard Niles for the more fascinating Franklin Shepard, a wonder boy on whom everyone needs to project his or her fantasies. He’s a savior, yes—but of no redemptive power whatsoever, because he’s too self-absorbed to relate to others. Is that why he gave up the very creative vocation of composer for the bureaucratic post of movie producer? Like so many Sondheim shows, Merrily We Roll Along raises more questions than it answers. But raising questions is the theatre’s mandate. It may be that we’re never going to know what drives Franklin Shepard, just as we never quite understand the Franklin Shepards we meet in life. The better we know them, the more they confuse us. One Merrily lyric runs, “It started out like a song.” It always does, doesn’t it?

Writing a good song is not mimicry, replication, or pastiche; it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what they recognize as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, peril, and smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden, shocking discovery. It is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes their own blood, struggle, and suffering in the inner workings of the song.