The folks from Voctave perform one of my favorite show tunes — the title song from On A Clear Day, You Can See Forever. The lead vocalist is Tituss Burgess.
I didn't care much for the show but I think the lyrics for this number are about as perfect as song lyrics can be. In his autobiography, Alan Jay Lerner — the man who wrote those lyrics — wrote about how long it took him to write the words for "She's Not Thinking of Me," a song for the movie, Gigi. And what he wrote was…
I passionately wish I could say that outside of "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?", "She's Not Thinking of Me" took me longer to write than any other lyric. But it would not be "the vrai." Six years later I sat down to do the lyric for "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever." After two weeks of the usual run-of-the-mill torture, I realized that if I were ever to finish the rest of the score and complete the play I had better move on.
So I decided to allot the first three hours of every morning to working on that lyric and I did. Seven days a week. I finished it eight months later. During the eight-month period I wrote ninety-one complete lyrics and discarded them all. Several years ago a friend of mine who lives in Bar Harbor, Maine, in the summer wrote me a letter and told me that the minister at the local church had used the lyric as the text for his Sunday sermon. I wrote back and told him to tell the minister not to wait for the second chorus.
I think it was worth it…