Stephen Sondheim

Well, I wrote the whole score knowing that it was going to go backwards in time.

And I thought, what does that imply?

Well, it implies that something that you and I sing today, 20 years from now, will have a different meaning to both of us.

It doesn't have to be that we get divorced.

Maybe it'll be memories of something.

But everything that happens at a given time in your life

has echoes and resonances afterwards, what I would call like reprises, really, of thoughts, of moments in your life that happen in different contexts.

So I thought, if I'm going to write the show that goes backwards in time, we'll start with the reprises.

That is to say, start with the variation on the theme and then go back to the theme.

And that's what happens here.

It happens with a lot of other songs in the show, too.

But this one very specifically with the lyric because it applies to two very distinct and distinctly defined situations, one a divorce and one when they got married.

So you're taking two high spots of their lives, their marriage and their divorce.

I did that throughout the show.

I still began, as I always do, writing the score from the first song on, but knowing, always making notes as to how I would use it later in the show.

So I never wrote blind, so to speak.

I wrote knowing, okay, this will be useful when this – because we had plotted out the show and we knew what was going to happen in the second act.

In other words, we knew what had happened in the past.

And so, yeah, so I was writing to that kind of plot.