How I Wrote an Opera About the End of the World

During the month of May I am going to highlight the Judgment Day song demos individually, with a post a day for 21 days.

Before we launch into that, I thought I would provide a little insight on the writing process that took place over the handful of years it took to complete the opera. There’s a backstory to what led to its conception and creation in The Book of Judgment— which should make for some interesting reading— but that’s more about the why. Today I want to focus on the how, specifically the storytelling and songwriting process.

So how does one put together a narrative that tells the story of the end of the world? And then set it to music?? As my long, COVID-y year of recording the demos began to wind down, I found myself asking this same question. How the devil did I come up with all this? Two hours of music. Twenty-one tracks. The short answer is that I wish I knew; with so many years having elapsed since composing the bulk of it, it’s all become quite foggy, and therefore I probably won’t be able to tell you in any crisp way. That said, I’ll do my best to reconstruct things from the artifacts of my memory. So here goes.

For starters, I had an unfair advantage. The plot had already been written, more or less. Revelation laid the blueprint, and the basic story has been enhanced over the millennia with evangelical thinking as well as bits and pieces of other parts of the New Testament to establish a sort of modern end-times canon. Taken together, this formed the basis for the plot of Judgment Day: a purported savior comes to bail out a troubled world, only to turn out to be a demonic force, the antithesis of all that is good; the story culminates with a final battle between the forces of good and evil; and all of mankind is either caught in the middle or forced to choose a side.

On the surface, this sounds like an incredible setup for a bombastic stage production. You’ve got good vs. evil, a memorable villain, and all kinds of potential for high production value hijinks. But that is still bare-bones. I knew we would need some relatable characters— compelling principals and handful of secondary roles. And while the eventual battle of good vs. evil loomed large in the story, by itself it was hardly a narrative engine; there would have to be additional forces driving the story forward. Thankfully, at this point I didn’t try to overthink it or contrive a plot by formula; I let the muse— and the music— take over.

As I have related elsewhere, I’m pretty keen on Jesus Christ Superstar, and while musically Judgment Day is quite different, I did take one key inspiration from the book by Tim Rice. (At the time, JCS was top of mind, as I had put on a successful and unique production a few years before.) The opening and closing of the show are soliloquies delivered by a tortured fellow. Judas is a bystander and narrator who meets a tragic end; Thomas is the protagonist whose ultimate fate is uncertain. So it’s not the same role, but having this first-person lens into the story is a fantastic device for telling a sweeping, cosmic tale in a very personal way.

Thus I was off to the races with my first protagonist, and then (if memory serves), out of nowhere the idea popped into my head for If This Goes On… I lifted the title from a 1960 Robert Heinlein novella about a theocracy that takes over the United States and a rationalist, Masonic conspiracy intent on overthrowing the regime. (Dear God, I wish this wasn’t still so resonant in 2021…) In one fell swoop I had my lead character and the framing for the story: humanity is rushing headlong toward the apocalypse, but it’s going to be one of our own making. And thereby I also christened Thomas— the skeptic, the doubter— adding the surname Judge for good measure, because, well, if we can just be the judge i.e. exercise discrimination and good judgment, many we don’t have to blow ourselves up. At least, one can hope. But it’s all up to us.

So much came from this one choice. By grafting a tale of political intrigue and power disguised as religion onto the Revelation skeleton, and providing Thomas to navigate it for the audience, so much of the story wrote itself. Just add modern themes of media manipulation, corporate greed, police overreach, and surveillance capitalism, and most of the scenes and personae reveal themselves to you. It wasn’t exactly paint-by-numbers after that, but a lot of the character ideation process came readily. Brother John, Marshall Law and Psi were lifted from the cultural and political figures of the day (early 2000’s); Peter is an archetypical revolutionary and a nod to the apostle/zealot of the New Testament. And of course, THE ONE is the ultimate bad guy.

And then there’s Maggie, the heart and soul of the story. The final missing piece in the plot was the relationship between Thomas and Maggie. Maggie provides two essential elements: a love interest, which is a good thing to have for an accessible, popular work (which I hope this to be), and more importantly, a religious foil for Thomas’ skeptical agnosticism. The dialectic between the two is at the forefront of the story while world-changing events career toward a denouement. So we have a three-tired structure that unfolds: personal and philosophical between Thomas and Maggie; tribal/governmental via media and politics; and a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Maggie was partly inspired by Mary Magdalene of the bible of course, but she is strong, her own woman— not an archetype of feminine “original sin.” (Let’s face it, the Magdalene of the bible has gotten a pretty raw deal over the millennia; this is an idea I’m obsessed with and will form the basis of a sequel I have in the works.)

Now for the music. I wish I could say that I composed the music with a grand plan, but that’s not the case. I mostly let it come to me in waves. I’ve always believed that music comes from another dimension… thence we receive it, and thereafter we attempt to shape it into something coherent and accessible. I’d like to say I was purposeful with my approach in terms of styles, instrumentation and so on but to be perfectly honest, I was not. (This is in contrast with newer projects I have brewing, which I am approaching in a much more methodical and intentional manner.)

Genre-wise, it generally slams, flipping between hard rock and electronica with only the occasional breather for a ballad. While I don’t think of it as a rock opera, it does rock. There is nothing subtle about the story of Revelation; nor is there in Judgment Day. This mood was established with If This Goes On… perfectly capturing the Bush/Iraq War-era angst I was feeling, and it set the tone for the rest of the work. I already had the bookend in the title song, a tune I had written years before, which not only gave me the title of the opera but the predominant 3-4-5 melodic theme used throughout. I’m not even sure I was initially conscious of that last part as I composed the first few songs; at some point along the way I realized it and went with it.

There are definitely major themes, musical modes and such, as detailed in the Book of Judgment. But for the most part, I just let each song come to me as it did. For some pieces, music and words arrived almost cut from whole cloth; others were laborious and took months to finish. The one rule I followed was that the songs were crafted to support the plot. That doesn’t mean that I sat down to write sequentially, song-by-song from beginning to end. Sometimes I would do that i.e. sit in front of the description of the next scene/song title with a vague idea for the style or mood, and force myself to write; other times the music would come to me randomly, and I would realize it was perfect for this particular scene or characters. Obviously, I styled songs to fit the mood of the scene and within the plot e.g. larger production numbers required full orchestra, and so on.

Wow, I’m thinking about this right now in the context of trying to remember how I wrote a particular song… and it’s hard! I am awe-struck that humans do this at all. WHERE DOES MUSIC COME FROM?!

Anyway, that’s the story. The concept was driven by years of angst, the plot emerged from a little inspiration and a lot appropriation, and the music was a free-for-all that I rolled with. In my opinion, the approach worked. But of course, in the end, you’ll be the judge.