Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to the Nathan's and Roncast. This is your host, Michael G. Ronstadt. Today we have a very special interview with Serenity Fisher, and I wanted to ask her a very specific question because she is a masterful songwriter, she's written plays with music, and she's been featured at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival many, many years in a row. And I think there's probably a difference between writing songs for a musical versus adapting songs you've already written into a musical. So we're going to dive into that a little bit. Hold on to your horses, I guess. And without any further delay, here is Serenity Fisher.
[00:01:03] Speaker C: Hello, Serenity.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Hello, Michael.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: So I'm sitting here with my married to Serenity Fisher, who is an amazing songwriter first and foremost, but she also is a playwright. Her stuff has been performed at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival multiple times, multiple years in a row. I've always wondered the difference between writing a play around a bunch of music versus writing music around a play.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: So I wondered if you can give a little background about yourself and let's jump into how you got started putting.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Stories and music together in ways that isn't just singing.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Those are all great questions, Michael. So I have a background in theater, and my whole life I planned on being an actor, at least as far as I can remember.
Actually. I probably already wanted to be an actor, but a big inspiration for me was there was this movie called Problem Child, but it was Problem Child two, and the actress who was in it, who was probably 4 years old, and I was probably 4 years old, and she was getting interviewed and she talked about acting.
And I just saw myself like, that's what I want to do. Anyway, I went to school for musical theater, and unfortunately, as I think happens not so uncommonly, I kind of got turned away from acting by just having a really negative experience in college. But I started writing songs when I was 18. So I was writing songs while I was having that experience, and that gave me kind of a new direction in life, was to pursue that. I always loved theater, though, and I always loved musicals. So it wasn't something that I wanted to just totally give up. And my songs, people would often ask me, you know, if I had a theater background when they would hear my songs because they have a theatricality to them. And when I was in college, I was. I dabbled a little bit with just trying to write scenes, and I was already kind of having a little bit of an interest in maybe writing some plays, but mostly I focused on music. And when I was 19, in between freshman and sophomore year, I got an internship with the no Theater Tribe, as they were called at the time. Now they're NOH Theatre and they are the producers of the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. But at the time it didn't exist. And it was when I was doing my internship that they were starting to plan and scheme about starting a fringe festival in Cincinnati. I think I moved away to California and I was able to come back for a couple of performances of the first Fringe Festival. And there was this really amazing play with puppets, but it was like this play that was for adults and it was really deep and it was really so cool. And so that definitely kind of inspired me. There. There was. When I was in college, there was. There were these student lab shows that students would direct shows. And so this one person directed really abstract and really dreamy and like very little formatting or punctuation or even specific characters. Psychosis 448. That's what it was. And I was so inspired by the directing that this person did of this play. He had a musician playing piano and I think that person pretty much wrote out the score. And that definitely was a huge inspiration for what later became the scoring part of Sophie's Dream. And then I think it was maybe the second year of Fringe Festival. A teacher of mine, Richard Haig, who is a poet in Cincinnati, he did a one man show. And that really inspired me to write something. And I had in mind writing a play that took place in dreams that maybe had a love story element about it. And so I was in this workshop and I mentioned something about this play about dreams that I wanted to write. And a person who I met there, Robin O'Neill, said to me, could we maybe meet up? I'd like to talk to you about that play.
So we met up at a place called Already Cafe. And Robin said, I would really like to be your creative coach and coach you during writing this play and then submitting it to the Fringe Festival, which was huge because if you want to work with a creative coach, it's usually really expensive. And she didn't want to charge me anything, I reckon.
[00:05:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: So Robin had me start off by writing Islands, as she called them. Just little scenes that didn't necessarily have to know where they would be. But that's how the story of Sophie's Dream ended up forming was in writing those islands and then in the coaching. But you asked me about the music part. So it's funny because recently Robin, who went on to become my writing partner, and we write these plays together among Other things that we collaborate on. Recently told me that at the time that we met, she actually didn't know that I was a songwriter. And so I started sending her songs like, I wonder if this song could be in it. I wonder if this song could be in it. And she was like, what? Ah. And she's a. She's. She's a very big fan of my music. I'm trying not to sound braggy. You know, that's always the awkward thing when you're talking about your own music. You're like, I don't want to sound braggy. But anyway, that has always been a part of our process, is I just start sending her songs.
And so Sophie's Dream, I would say there were a few songs in it, maybe that were written for the play, but most of them were songs that I had already written. And unlike some of the future plays that we wrote that had some songs already written where we had to change some of the lyrics to fit the play, I think Sophie's Dream, they largely stayed the same. And that's because Sophie, we wrote to be a songwriter.
[00:06:45] Speaker C: So, okay, that makes sense.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: She could pretty much write the songs that I had already written. And. And Sophie's Dream itself was the. I think it took a long time to kind of come. To Come to this part of it. But I had had this dream in real life that was. I had gone to see this songwriter that I knew, and I. But I was like, in this. It kind of reminds me, for some reason, of, like, the shadier parts of the Cincinnati Zoo, except that we were, like, high up on this, like, bridge. Like, there were all these levels of this bridge, and it was like this beautiful forest, and it was so shady and beautiful. And she was playing this, like, really beautiful, shiny black grand piano on a lower level. And people would just walk around and listen. And that's how you would be in the audience, is you would just walk around these levels of the bridge. And I just remember it being so beautiful. But I never saw her in the dream. At some point in my life, I realized, like, I know that in my head, in the dream, I was going to see this other person, but the voice didn't sound like her voice at all. It sounded like my voice. And I was definitely the person playing in the dream. And it was like this realization that I kind of had to have. And so Sophie has that same realization. So I actually played a part in Sophie's Dream called the Woman at the Piano. And at the end of Sophie's Dream, she realizes that this music she hears in her dream is her all along. So anyway, it was kind of probably the most biographical, in a way, of the shows.
[00:08:18] Speaker C: Well, they say write what you know in the songwriting world.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:22] Speaker C: You know, in a way, or that's a good starting place. And then you can start learning about what other people know and take what you learn. But.
So you had a collection of songs that you sent to Robin and. And what are some of the names of them? I might know some of them, actually.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I definitely do. Fire.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: Okay. We play that with Serenity Fisher and the Cardboard Hearts.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: True.
[00:08:42] Speaker C: Okay, we do that.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Blue Purple Butterflies.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Okay, so two of those.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: I'm sorry. Just Blue Purple Butterfly.
[00:08:48] Speaker C: The first two are on our band's album, so you can actually go hear it right now if you want.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Blue Purple Butterfly, we haven't recorded yet, but it'll be on our next one because we do perform it as a band, and we as a band. Cardboard Hearts. It goes Blue Purple Butterfly into this little section of O's that is called the Tree Muses Awaken, which was these characters that were these in the dreams that were Tree Muses, Olive, Laurel and Willow, and that's when they were waking up inside of the dream. And so we. That's. We always do that part with the band, which I really like.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Well, let me stop at Blue Purple Butterfly. You said that was a standalone song, and you must have changed a few lyrics there. But was.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Were the Tree Muses a standalone piece?
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So actually, I think Blue Purple Butterfly. I'm not entirely sure if the timing of writing it, because I know I wrote it right around the time of Sophie's Dream, so I can't remember if I wrote it for Sophie's Dream or if I just sort of wrote it and then it was like, well, this would work for Sophie's Dream. But, yeah, the Tree Muses Awaken. That was definitely. That little section was definitely written. There's a little piano interlude that was from a musical that is the first one I've ever started, but has never been finished, called the True Story of Andrina Butterwhiskers.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: I want to watch this so much.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: That little part that goes, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. That little interlude that was from there, but from a different song that I. That's from True Story of Andrina Butterwhiskers. Yeah. So for Sophie's Dream, there were a lot of the stuff that was original to the play itself, not written before. Was the underscoring of it.
So we had. I was sitting on stage at the piano as this mysterious character, sort of not really, like part there, but not part of the action. And so it was really fun because the Tree Muses would, as they put it in their own words, they'd like to whip up doozies of dreams for Sophie to try to help her. She was. She was in this really depressed and lonely place and kind of just nesting and spending a lot of time alone and feeling stuck. And so they. They were using her dreams to try to help her through all of that. And so they would whip up these doozies of dreams. And some of them were, like, really absurdist. And so I. It was just so much fun to come up with little things. Like there's this one little piano thing that's like.
Anyway. And that was when they were having this, like, really goofy tea party where they're like, please pass the salt. And just. I don't know, but. And it was just so much fun to be able to. I think that play that I mentioned from college that the student directed and this. The person playing the piano had come up with the score. I think that really inspired me during Sophie's dream. And so I. I just had. That was probably one of my favorite parts, was getting to do all that little bit of stuff.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Hi, this is Michael Ronstadt and we're taking a short break from our interview with Serenity Fisher to give you a little ad talking about our website, Nathan's and Ronstadt.com.
basically, we love to play for people and our website is the portal where you can contact us about playing at your house or venue. We love to travel. We'll work out the details when you talk to us, but please send us a line, we'll put a date on the calendar and we'll show up and make you happy.
The next thing I want to talk about is about some live concerts we posted on bandcamp.com My name is Michael G. Ronstadt and I have a Band Camp profile and I put all of the Aaron Nathans and Michael G. Ronstadt extra live stuff on there. So we have live concerts going back about eight years, and the two most recent ones were at the Last Chance Cafe in November of 2024 and also our album release concert from May of 2023. Please go on there. Check it out. Listen a bunch. If you want to buy it, you're welcome to, but you can listen for free. Without any further delay, we're going to get back to our wonderful interview with Serenity Fisher.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: Well, you had these songs that were written, so you must have changed some lyrics here and there to fit the story that you came up with. Because you and Robin wrote these. These islands of dreams. Actually, your idea of doing islands of little plays, it really fits that dream world. Yeah, because. And that seems like a really neat starting place. Yeah, because your other plays didn't do that as much. They were more of a. They were still a story, but it was more of. More traditional, I guess, in some ways, you know.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think in some ways, as we went on, they were all pretty kooky, but we just wanted to try out different things. I think by the time we got to the fourth one, Booty, a revolutionary pirate tale, I think that was the most, like, traditional musical since the second one was a pop ra or a pop opera. And so it was mostly sung like an opera would be. But sometimes we broke from that and had the characters speak. And that one started out, I was just kind of curious what would happen if I hit record on GarageBand on my computer and just tried to make up 30 minutes of a musical. Okay, so the actual beginning of Opelopus so starts with a character called the writer doing the exact 30 minutes that I recorded. And I had all these little parts of this little family singing, having this conversation around this table where they're communicating, but they're not really communicating. And it was just. It was pretty cool because I loved it so much that we took that actual 30 minutes, which included me saying, like, I'm gonna sit here, I'm gonna try to write for 30 minutes and see what happens. Lights up and we see a family. And it was all just stream of consciousness. So that one started that way and then had. It did have a few songs I had already written, but we did write a lot of songs for it. And the next play that we did was called Vortex of the Great Unknown, which also probably got a little closer to a traditional musical. A little closer. I think the difference is that we wouldn't necessarily always have, like, full songs like you most often have in a musical.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: The.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: The next one we did, Booty, had more like full length songs, but I thought Vortex of the Great Unknown would be a good way to show where we made some changes. And it's funny though, because I'm realizing that I think we kept some of the changes in the song as I perform it today. There was a song that I had already written called Dream of the Purple Turtles, which was named after a dream that I had where there was this band and they had an album called the Purple Turtles. So we used it as a romantic duet. And it's these characters that are sort of like something's brewing, but you're just not sure is this going to be the night they have their first kiss or that they admit they have feelings or whatever. So it was similar to the story that I wrote it about.
But in Vortex of the Great Unknown, we have this whole science fiction thing. In the play Vortex of the Great Unknown, they are in a different dimension, dimension 317 in the zoetropic galaxy. And they are facing this. Two things. I mean, there's definitely parallels to our world with global warming. They didn't have global warming. They had this giant vortex that was traveling the galaxy and enveloping planets. And it was growing as it enveloped these planets. So it was like, okay, it's getting bigger. It's possible there's some kind of ecosystem in there that these planets are able to exist. Or it's just life is over. And. And they couldn't stop this approach of that. And then meanwhile, they also all had this effect of this numbing of all of their senses. And so there were these people at the fifth flavor. There were all these. They were scientists that had synesthesia. They were trying to work out how to help people get their senses back so that they could at least be fully themselves and fully aware in life when this vortex hit. And just in general, so they could have their senses back. There was a line that I'm like, I. This was definitely not the first line, but I went to look at my lyrics that are the lyrics that I currently sing. And I'm like, I must have kept this line because the words are coincidence and dreams imagine states of never being I turned myself to facing you Strawberries, radishes, synesthetic adages I turned myself to facing you. I didn't know what synesthesia was back then when I first wrote it, so I actually thought that was kind of cool that I had like reverse adapted a song, taken the play version. But then there was one that I thought was really funny. It's a song, we used to perform it a lot. It's called the Makeout Song. And I know I was saying I wasn't sure if I was going to share it because I'd be a little embarrassed.
[00:17:54] Speaker C: I figured you'd.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: I know the thing is, I can't help but share embarrassing things. And then I, you know, deal with the anxiety, fallout later. But when I was looking back at it, Vortex came out in 2013, I think, so it had been a while since I'd been in immersed in the world of Vortex of the great unknown. And there's this line, so make out song was a song I already had. I had written it back in California in like 27 or something. And so this was like 2013 that we wrote and performed it. So it was a similar situation. I guess these characters kind of had this song where they were sort of. I think the Purple turtle song might have come late a little later. That was more like heart involving their hearts. This part was more involving just making out a little bit. I just thought it was so funny. I looked back at these lyrics and it was making out is easy closed up in the pod. And I was like, what is the podcast? So I had to go back and look at the script. And it's like, oh yeah, they have these solar. Or they have these solar storms that kind of are part of the fact that increase in intensity and they're part of the fact that this vortex is approaching. And so they have to get in these pods to be safe during the storm. And so that's. They're singing about this pod. So anyway, that's a really big example of how the original lyric was that like making out seems easy in the backseat of my Chevy, but my heart is beating fiercely and I don't know if I'm ready. It didn't have a blue Chevy. Had this. I think the large population had numpods. And then they had what was called sense sensipods or something like that.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: So you had to adjust to the situation.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: Yes. And there's also. There's. We turned it into a duet. It was just a single person song. We turned it into a duet. So they're both sort of like talk, you know, kind of probably singing. I'm guessing they're more singing their thoughts to the audience a little less to each other. But then we have these characters that are called the Flavors that we had. These two actors that are. Have really amazing voices and they played the flavors. So this. The two characters are Peter. I can't think of his. His little cute. And he had a really cute little name. But. And Mabel Maple. And Mabel is. They all have synesthesia. And I cannot say we did. We did a lot of research on synesthesia which for anybody who doesn't know, hopefully I'll define it right. But it's when you have multiple. When you have overlapping sensory experiences. So like you. Some people can taste colors or they.
Sometimes there's like a personality part of it where it's like chairs have personalities or something, but it's ours. We probably took some liberties because in this case they. The flavors truly were not just from the experience of this person. In. In reality, they had specific things they were saying. And in trying to come up with this flavor that would help bring their senses back. Their senses had been numbed. One of the laboratories was Naples, because her form of synesthesia was that she could hear these flavors and they would sing to her and she would pull that. She'd pull out these little bottles and she would taste them and she would hear them. And so the flavors were singing kind of like in the scene in the Little Mermaid where all the little pond animals are, like, trying to get them to, like, kiss. They're like, you gotta kiss the girl kind of. I was looking at that and they're like, ooh, blow on her neck. Ooh, give him a peck. So that was definitely not in the original song. And the original song was a silly song, to be fair, but it got a lot sillier.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: I love that. Because I'm curious, as I go back in circles here, it seems like the next play, Booty, which you mentioned, was very much traditionally presented musical. You have a story and you have songs for the musical. I think as a band, we don't play as many songs from there, except just a few. Could you talk about maybe writing the song about Rachel Wall?
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:56] Speaker C: And I think this is. This would be a good way. We'll talk about this and then we will. We'll have to finish it up. But let's talk about how you wrote it with having a story, because it's probably a different process than trying to edit what you've already done.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I really like the process of each of our plays because Sophie's Dream started with an idea with Robin and I meeting, letting some of the songs inform the story, letting a lot of writing I'd already done inform the story. And then Opal Opus started with that 30 minute stream of consciousness thing, Vortex of the great unknown. I wanted it to really feel like a totally equal collaboration between Robin and I from start to finish. And then Booty came because Robin had found, at like a. Some kind of a book fair or something, she had found this book that was called Booty Adventures on the High Seas or something like that. But if you look up Booty by Sarah Lorimer, you'll find it. And it was a book that had amazing illustrations and stories of real female pirates and just like, just edited together in such a really, like, fun and easy to Just pick up and read a story here and there or whatever kind of a way. And Robin was like, I really think we should make our next musical be Booty. So we did kind of. We were hoping we were honoring the person by using the same, like, title. And then we made the school. There was a school in it that we called the Sarah Lorimer School for Girls, who was named after the writer. We tried to really like, promote the book so that it was clear we weren't like trying to rip it off. But we took three pirates out of that. And they were pirates that were supposed to be in like ghost pirate purgatory. And they had like, things in their life they had to do before they could cross over or whatever. And so the play itself took place in the 70s and they were trying to help this character, Ramona. So one of the pirates was Rachel Wall. And I wrote the story just based on what was in the book, which was cool to actually have. It's kind of fun sometimes to have all that material. And her story was that she had been a pirate who, like her. Her pirate gang or whatever, they would wait for either a really bad storm to be over or for a lull in fighting during wartime and they would send her out on like, I don't know, a little. A little raft or piece of wood or whatever and dressed as like a lady. And then, you know, if a ship saw her and they would try to help her, then her crew would come and attack the ship and they would steal from them. So she. So that was what she did. But at some point, I think she decided to give up her ways of being a pirate and try to live like a life of no crime. But according to the book, she saw somebody with a hat that she liked the hat and she wanted the hat. The person wouldn't give her the hat, so she stole the hat and. And she got arrested and she was hung and she was the last woman in Massachusetts to be hung. But anyway, but she was. We just thought she was such a quirky. She just sounded so quirky this, that. That last part of her life and just everything we read about her, she just sounded so interesting and kind of quirky. So we wrote this song and it was a really cool scene and we, as you said, as a band, we still play it because the band, the Cardboard Hearts were backing band.
[00:25:23] Speaker C: Yeah, we were the booty band and we dressed up as pirates. Yeah, I still have my button up shirt that's got. From the Goodwill store that was kind of off.
Not even more than off white. Yeah, it's a great little shirt. So it's a. But, yeah, it was, it was fun because we had this story and. And that song specifically introduced and. And involved. Everyone could sing the chorus. So it's called Honey Dirt.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:51] Speaker C: And I'm sure we'll be releasing that at some point in the future. I feel like this kind of dives into the process and the creative process is sometimes messy. Right. And it's super creative and bounces all over and every play here has a different process which you talked about.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: So.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: And I always forget about the really hard parts of it and I just. I. So when we've got. Thought about writing another one, then it's suddenly I'm like, this is really hard. But I just remember that we had these fully put together plays that just. It all went so smoothly. I. It's like I can't. It's like I have amnesia about the really difficult parts.
[00:26:31] Speaker C: I think that's what is survival mechanism at best. You know, we forget about. We're like, I'm going to do that because it's fun. Yeah. So if you're ever out there creating, I mean, just try to get to that finish line and be super creative. I know you have a whole batch of songs that we plan to record at some point soon, but. And maybe that could be a play in the future. You never know. So basically, where can we find you?
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Serenity.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Serenityfisher.com hopefully it's up to date. And also we are on YouTube and even though I don't do very much with it, we are on Instagram, sfch or something. Serenity Fisher. Cardboard Hearts.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: Yeah, there's another band with a similar name that we just kind of like did our thing. So basically I've tagged a bunch of Serenity Fisher and the Cardboard Heart stuff on Instagram. So it's mentioned via my Michael G. Ronstadt Instagram. And you can go to michaelronstadt.com to find out information where we're playing.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: We have a Facebook page and we're.
[00:27:29] Speaker C: In Tucson, Arizona right now doing two performances.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: So, you know, just keep a lookout for what we're doing.
[00:27:36] Speaker C: Thank you, Serenity, for being a part of this. Please keep listening to our podcast. It is always a pleasure to have you supporting us. Even though we can't see you, we feel you. Let's go on to the next one.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: And we'll see you next week.
Thank you so much for joining us on our interview with Serenity Fisher. All her ideas, her process, it inspires me to go out and create, and I hope it does the same for you. Please go to nathans and ronstadt.com to find out more information where we're going to be next, or ask us to play a house concert. If you want to hear our performances from two live concerts, go to bandcamp.com and search Aaron Nathans and Michael G. Ronstadt. You'll find something from November of 20234 and May of 2023.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Enjoy.
