Daniel Okrent

It was going to be a, you know, a spined tingler.

And so she comes over to his house and he plays a

few of the first songs, and she stops him two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror.

This is the story of your life.

And as Sondheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is.

Now, in the Seacrest book, we don't know what the story of his life is, but I was able to determine through a

but primarily Judy Prince, who never gave interviews, that in fact it was about revenge.

Yeah, there are two major arcs to his life.

One is from absolute alienation to finally near the end of his life connection.

The other is from an ambivalence that could be crippling at times to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing.

But it took 50 years for him to move from one of those poles to the next one.

I think that's a sentence that says a great deal about his entire career and his entire life, that through his music and his lyrics, he was able to express things that he could not, for various forms of inhibition, express otherwise.

It was where, if it's not autobiographical, obviously he's not slitting throats, obviously he's not Georges Seurat, obviously he's not in

you know, in the woods and into the woods.

But the feelings expressed in those shows all come from inside of him, I think, very, very clearly.

It's the inhibitions that keep us from expressing those feelings was something that he attacked.

No.

And socially, it's a very good thing to do.

And sometimes when he was in a bad mood, he would let them out socially.

But mostly it came through in his songs.