The Schwartz Scene Blog

A Blog/Podcast by Carol de Giere, including an interview with Stephen Schwartz

Introduction: Stephen Schwartz’s touching ballad, “Fathers and Sons,” is a favorite song among his fans, and was included on The Stephen Schwartz Album compilation as well as on the Working cast album. The song poetically describes parent/child relationships in a way that is both deeply personal and universal. When Stephen wrote the piece in 1977, his son Scott was three-and-a-half years old, as the lyrics mention.

Stephen Schwartz and his son Scott Schwartz –Photo by Terence de Giere

Thirty years later, father and son shared ideas and plans as Scott directed the workshop production of Stephen’s opera-in-progress. (Scott will also direct the final production of the opera in Santa Barbara in 2009.) When my husband and I drove up to see the workshop performance, we interviewed Stephen for this podcast. Terry also captured the father/son portrait that you see here.

“Fathers and Sons” also reflects Stephen’s relationship with his father. Stephen grew up in the suburbs of New York City in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, where he lived with his parents and younger sister. As a teenager in the early 1960s, he experienced the usual alienation of youth for the older generation. Later, he and his parents developed a close and cordial relationship.

In 1996, someone snapped this candid photo of Stephen’s father, “Stan” (Stanley), Stephen, and his mother, Sheila Schwartz, attending the Academy Award ceremony when Stephen received Oscars for writing lyrics for Pocahontas. (How many parents get to say they walked the red carpet? They must have been glad they paid for their son’s piano lessons and four years of weekend studies at Juilliard Preparatory Division.)

As a composer-lyricist for stage and film musicals, Stephen didn’t originally write “Fathers and Sons” just to express something about his family life. He wrote it to fit into Working. Some of the people interviewed by Studs Terkel in his book Working (the source material for the musical) touched upon similar sentiments, and Terkel organized a set of eight father/son interviews under the heading FATHERS AND SONS. At one point, though, Stephen doubted that it really fit in the musical, but his co-adaptor, Nina Faso, and music director, Stephen Reindhardt, talked him into keeping it in the show.

If you don’t know the song, you might want to read the lyrics (below) and listen to a brief clip of Stephen singing the song on The Stephen Schwartz Album at http://www.amazon.com/ - The Stephen Schwartz Album [opens new browser window]

Lyrics to “Fathers and Sons”

I heard a lotta songs say “Where you goin’ my son?”
Now I know they’re true
Boy, you never stop to think how fast the years run
Now they’ve taken you
I remember you was three ‘n’ a half
Your ma and me, we’d sit there after things got quieted
We’d laugh at some new word you said
How tough you were to get to bed
And we’d plan the night away
Planning for our kid …

I was your hero then
I couldn’t do no wrong, as far as you were concerned
You thought I was the best of men
The tables hadn’t turned
You hadn’t learned
How little time it takes
And daddies make mistakes …

Seems to be that lately I been thinkin’ a lot
I think about my dad
Lots of funny things come back I thought I’d forgot
Now they make me sad
High school and it used to be
I didn’t want him touchin’ me, and I shuddered if he did
Further back to summer nights
Baseball games beneath the lights
And sleepin’ in the car
My daddy and his kid …

He was my hero then
He couldn’t do no wrong, as far as I was concerned
I thought he was the wisest and the strongest
And the best of men
The tables hadn’t turned
I hadn’t learned
How little time it takes
And everybody breaks
And daddies make mistakes ……

I heard a lotta songs say: “where you goin’, my son?”
Now I know they’re for real
Boy, you never stop to think how fast the years run
And the things they steal
Now it seems I always knew
Why I do the things I do
And the things I never did
Why I work my whole damn life
So’s I could give a better life
Than the one my dad could give me
I give it
To my kid …

Podcast: Stephen Schwartz—Fathers and Sons

You’ll find the transcript for this six-minute podcast below. Listen to the podcast by clicking the arrow button immediately below (Internet Explorer and Opera browser users click the button twice):

Welcome to Podcast #3 from The Schwartz Scene at www.theschwartzscene.com. I’m Carol de Giere. Today we’ll focus on one aspect of songwriter Stephen Schwartz’s life and creative interests represented by his song, “Fathers and Sons,” from the musical Working. Stephen often writes about parenting concerns, especially the relationship of father to son, as in Pippin, Children of Eden, and Geppetto and Son. In Wicked, which deals more with father-daughter issues, the Wizard sings to Elphaba about how he always longed to be a father. And he says [Schwartz’s lyric:], “Helping you with your ascent allows me to feel so parental.”

Carol de Giere: We’ve noticed that one of your themes for writing is the parenting process, or the parenting experience. I suppose that comes out of your own life. Would you say that it comes from your experience?

Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I think so. I think that I tend to write a lot about parent/child relationships from both points of view. I think that I had a complicated relationship with my parents. It’s a very, very good one now. But there were challenging aspects to it when I was growing up.

I think all boys have father issues. Maybe not all boys, but it seems to me they do, and I had my share. Working out my relationship to and with my father was sort of central to my whole emotional and psychological development. And then becoming a father and how I related to my kids and the kind of parent I was, was also very important to me emotionally. It’s just always been a theme in my work. It was there before I was a father because I wasn’t a father when I wrote Pippin, which has a lot of father/son relationship issues in it. But, yeah, it’s just something that for whatever reason has been emotionally significant to me.

CD: When you wrote “Fathers and Sons” you included the concept of heroes. So the idealism and realism, which is another theme that you’ve talked about–do you think that just emerged as you were writing? Or was it there in Studs Terkel’s interviews?

SS: No, “Fathers and Sons” is an extremely personal song to the point that I wasn’t sure it should be included in the show. I’m sure either Nina or Steve Reinhardt have told you that I was not sure it should be in the show, and basically the two of them said, ‘No no no,’ this needs to be in the show. It took a while, actually, to find out how to make it work in the show. But it’s extremely personal, particularly about my relationship with my own dad.

CD: Well, how does the hero, there was a point in your life, then, that you looked up to him?

SS: Sure. I think that that’s a common, I mean Terry I don’t know if you would agree, I don’t know what your relationship with your dad was like, but I think that that may be a common pattern of son to father relationships that when you’re young you idealize your father and he’s your hero and then as you come into your teenage years and you become more realistic about who your father is, the fact that he has flaws is devastating in some way. And one has an unrealistic picture of him in the other way. I mean, he suddenly becomes this total failure or whatever, but the negatives completely take over.

Terry de Giere: I remember that it tended to get that way to a certain extent. Also your personalities, you’re becoming independent mentally at that point and your own ego is developing and that creates that gap between you two.

SS: And then one hopes, and what has happened between me and my dad, and I have a great relationship with him now, is that you come to a synthesis where it’s acceptable for your father to be a human being, you know, who has strengths and who has weaknesses and who has flaws but who also has aspects that are strong.

CD: I’m not a parent but I’ve been told that that’s also the process of parenting, that you want to be the perfect parent and at some point you admit that you aren’t and then you embrace that.

SS: Yeah, I mean I think everybody, I certainly knew I wasn’t going to be the perfect parent, but you just try to do the best job I can. I know the couple of places where I felt I really slipped up are places that I still have strong regrets about.

CD: And so perhaps that’s why the song touches people.

SS: I think the song touches people because, I mean, as always, this goes back to the truism that you and I have discussed before that the secret to me to songwriting is ‘tell the truth and make it rhyme.’ And the songs of mine that seem to have the most effect on people are the ones where I am being as honest as I possibly can. “Fathers and Sons” is just a completely honest song.

CD: Are the details true? Scott was 3 ½. That one was true.

SS: Yeah, the details are all true. The whole thing about the baseball games.

CD: Baseball game beneath the lights.

SS: Totally. My dad used to take me to ball games.

CD: It was the Mets, right?

SS: Yes, it was the Giants before that. That’s what I really remember, that when there was no National League team in the New York area that we would drive down to Philadelphia once a year and go to a Philly’s game. And that was always one of my favorite favorite things to do.

CD: And sleeping in the car.

SS: And sleeping in the car.

Hear Fathers and Sons on
The Stephen Schwartz Album

Hear Fathers and Sons on Working Cast Album

Sheet music Fathers and Sons: http://www.musicnotes.com/

Read about Working the musical