Songwriters Mizer & Moore Break Down The Original Music Of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel [Interview]

I feel like you two have been given a lot of impossible-seeming tasks for this show, like pulling a pop star from thin air and writing a Broadway hit.

Curtis Moore: It's been hilarious. We have had the most insane requests. As Tom will often say, it's anybody's guess what the request will be that we get for the next song we have to write.

Thomas Mizer: Sometimes Amy calls us up — Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the show — and we'll laugh, and we'll talk, and she'll tell us what she wants next. And then we'll hang up the phone and be like, "This is a joke, right? She is punking us."

Moore: Totally punking us. A couple of years ago when she called and said, "We just need a number one hit for Shy Baldwin." Okay, easy. We'll just write a number one hit.

Mizer: People spend their whole lives trying to do that.

So what was your reaction to the Harry Belafonte request?

Mizer: That was super intense. That was actually probably the hardest thing we had to do for the show, because he's iconic. And his catalog is so deep and well known. We wrote probably more songs for the options for it before we found the right song than anything we've ever done for the show, because we were just struggling to figure out what it would be. And the question it came down to is, why is he singing an original song at this wedding? Why wouldn't he sing one of his famous songs?

Moore: What's interesting is that when we're writing for Shy Baldwin, or The Silver Bells, those are fictional characters that we are creating, and we're creating their sound. Amy and Dan Palladino give us really strong thoughts and ideas. They're great with music. But ultimately that's a fictional character. We create that. But now we're being asked to write this Harry Belafonte song, which is just a very different world for us.

As Tom was sort of hinting at, when we are writing for "Maisel," for every song that's in the show, we've written three or four other ones just to get us to find the right angle in. What's going to be the most appropriate for that moment? And for the song that we ended up coming up with, "Maybe Monica," we wrote probably six or seven songs, just trying to find the right angle for it.

Mizer: Then we talked to Amy, and she gave us the best note. She said, "This isn't one of his pop songs. This is a toast. It's a wedding toast. He and his band got together and decided to have fun and write a song for Shy, teasing him, playing with him, playing with his bride." Suddenly it became something we felt we could do. Like a band getting together and coming up with some jokes and playing with this friend as a toast. Instead of trying to create something that was Harry Belafonte, it was more like, hey, a bunch of friends getting together in the style of his other songs and giving their friend a good ribbing at the wedding.

So then that was the answer to the question that you had — "Why wouldn't he sing one of his famous songs?"

Mizer: Yeah. Because there's no reason to write — Harry Belafonte's music is so specific and so wonderful and iconic, there's nothing we can contribute to that. But this, when it's character and story-based, that's when we can jump in and have fun.

Moore: Right. Obviously, if you've watched the series, you know what happens with Shy Baldwin's character. One of the things that Tom and I love to do, even though we're songwriters, we're also storytellers. We come from the background of theater, so we're constantly thinking in-story. And then to work with Amy and Dan on this, we are constantly trying to put a little bit of twist of story in all the songs we write as well. So they're not just a standalone song, but they're also integrated into what's happening in the plot. This is a great example of being able to do that in this moment.

Friday's episode brought us back to Shy's whole arc and picks up his story. So when you got another Shy assignment, did it feel easier because you've been writing songs for him for a while now?

Moore: No, I mean, in a way, it's more of a challenge. First of all, we don't know the story until they know the story. So we were told what was going to happen really late in the process. It's Shy's wedding, so this was a big deal. And given that assignment, we sort of were like, "Oh gosh, he's singing a song to his fiancée, soon to be wife" — or actually, I think they've just gotten married. I can't remember, but either way, it's the wedding ceremony. And so we have to come up with a development from "One Less Angel." So "One Less Angel" was his big coming-out hit. No pun attended there. And now we've got to write his next big ... it developed a little bit more. He's moving directions a little bit, and I think we were trying to give him that forward momentum as he would have in his career.

Mizer: There were a couple of competing factors. One, just the pressure on us. The response to "One Less Angel" was so lovely and people seem to really enjoy it so much. So now we're like, "Okay, how can we top that, if possible?" And second, this is his next album. So musically, he should progress. And we thought, as he moves into the '60s, he's going to want to be a little more Sam Cooke than Johnny Mathis. He's going to want to sit into a more R&B soul kind of world. Start to move that direction.

There was a line in an early outline or script that we saw, and I don't even know if it made into the episode, but it mentioned that Reggie, his manager, had written a song. And that sort of popped for me. I was like, "Ooh, this is Reggie, who's his dearest oldest friend, but what they've been through is kind of rocky, writing a song for his best friend about who's the person he wants to come home to." And you can listen to it as just a pop song and a fun moment, but hopefully there's just that little bit of pathos and emotion beneath it, of Shy's having to do this as a publicity thing. But underneath it, who's he really singing to? I don't know.

Moore: Yeah. I think you're right, Tom. I mean, I think I know who he's singing to. [Laughs] I think you know who you think he's singing to, but that it is exactly that. We're trying to get all of those things in the song. So it's still his next single, but at the same time, we, as storytellers, are trying to layer it with a little bit of extra storytelling.

It's funny because when I realized that we're back with Shy, I was disappointed that we weren't catching him at a concert or something, because I was like, "I want to hear him sing again!" But then he just jumps on stage at his own wedding –

Mizer: Right?! It's so awesome because –

Moore: We actually haven't seen the episode.

Mizer: We haven't seen it, so we don't know how it was finally cut.

Moore: We have to see it with everybody else, which is hilarious. So I'm excited. I was actually, we were there at the taping. It's interesting. When we filmed that episode, that was the first time I'd been with people after Covid, and this was, I guess we filmed almost exactly a year ago or maybe a little bit less than a year ago. It was probably last April. And it was filmed in New York City in this big ballroom. And just to be in this space with 400 extras, I was like, "Wow, here we are post-Covid, and yeah, it's really a nice treat that he gets to sing, and I'm really glad they brought him, and therefore Darius [de Haas], back to have a little moment."

So how do you write a song for a bad musical? What are the markers of that?

Moore: Well, it's interesting. This song, the way it's written in the script is, it's the only good song in an otherwise bad musical. And the joke of the show is that Abe says, "This is the only good song ... and then they reprise it like five times." So you imagine you're seeing a show where they're just singing the song every five minutes. So in the song itself, we used the hook a thousand times as part of the joke. We just say it like –

Mizer: A hammer to the head.

Moore: And oh, "They came, they danced." We just threw it in there as many times as we could. The funny thing is, I feel like sometimes — I mean this in the best way — but the best musical is just teetering on being terrible at the same time! It's such a balance, you know what I mean? And sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don't. And I think we just sort of fell back on, we wanted to write a really funny, patter, energetic song that kind of threw the whole plot together and had a whole bunch of people singing very different things. So we gave everybody different solos, and it's just a fun music theater moment.

Mizer: Yeah. I got to indulge in leaning into some ridiculous rhymes that I probably wouldn't do normally. I rhyme fiancé, I have someone say fianced to rhyme with danced. Things like that, that are just silly and fun. And they sing the phrase "cabbage rolls." I mean, how often am I going to get to do that in my life?

Moore: I know. And we got to work with David Chase, this amazing arranger, Broadway, and TV guy. And just to make it even more authentic, he's just a genius when it comes to this kind of style. So he knows exactly how to make it just fit right in that pocket.

There's also a great line. I think it's Abe's entire review, which is just, "A musical your mother would like."

Moore: [Laughs] That's so true.

Mizer: [Laughs] That is it. That's what we're aiming for. It's like, we had listened to a lot of different composers from the era. I mean, we're musical theater people, so we didn't have to do research, we knew these people. And we all decided with Amy that the writer of this musical probably had been obsessed with Rogers and Hammerstein all through the '50s. And so he's ripping off Rogers and Hammerstein. So we thought about, "What is a bad Rogers and Hammerstein big number?" and that's kind of what we ended up with.

You've really run across all different the genres of music that were in the '60s. Is there anything tying all of these different songs together, or has it been like starting from scratch every time?

Moore: I mean, we go so fast, and we've now been living in this world for three-plus years, four years. And it's just been utter joy to be there. So I think we have been able to sort of jump into things quickly, but every time we do, it's always new. It's really rare that we can go back and be like, "Oh, we wrote all those great songs before, let's use one of them here." I can't tell you what they are, but the assignments we've been getting for season 5, which is what we're doing right now, I mean, literally right now, have been out of this world and so hilarious that we're just like, "Oh, that is not at all what I thought we'd be doing." So it's always an interesting challenge and one that we love doing. Everything does feel like it's totally different.

Mizer: I think if you had asked us what we'd be doing in our career, the last thing we probably ever would've suspected is that we'd be writing some '60s stripper numbers, but we had to do some of those this season too, so who knows what's next.