“Still Hurting” — Jason Robert Brown with Ariana Grande from SubCulture NYC on Vimeo. Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser at John Kilgore Sound & Recording, NY NY, 29 January 2016. You’re going to be underestimated, you know. I absolutely love this song! On Monday night, Ariana Grande joined composer Jason Robert Brown (13, The Last Five Years) for a special virtual concert to benefit the staff and musicians of famed Manhattan venue SubCulture. I love the theater, and it happens that Broadway is where the theater gets the most attention. “And if you look at what that brand is, it’s chaser lights and it’s jazz hands and it’s tap dancing and it’s big, belty high notes, and stuff that isn’t in any of my work.

“I got to do two things that I never thought I was going to be able to do,” said Brown on the latest episode of Stagecraft, Variety’s theater podcast. © Copyright 2020 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. If I had known that that was how pop songs got made, I would have told the publisher that I probably wasn’t going to be great at that particular kind of record-making, since I didn’t really know which part of that I would be comfortable doing.

And honestly, Ari, thank you for everything – the day you showed up for auditions was the beginning of eight years of unimagined blessings, and I’d like to think there’s a lot more to come. I was really looking forward to that! The whole album is pretty friggin’ hot, I’ll tell you that – my personal favorites are “Greedy,” “Into You,” and “Leave Me Lonely.” And of course the title track, which I had so much fun deconstructing for the MTV Movie Awards.

UPDATE! She starred in the Broadway musical 13, which Brown wrote the music for, before getting an even bigger break on Nickelodeon. And then I got to play that song with her and the Roots on “[The Tonight Show Starring] Jimmy Fallon.” That was never going to happen in my life.”. To celebrate, you can now purchase the track on iTunes AND you can purchase the SHEET MUSIC on SheetMusicDirect!

Ariana Grande, Broadway. On Monday night, Ariana Grande joined composer Jason Robert Brown (13, The Last Five Years) for a special virtual concert to benefit the staff and musicians of famed Manhattan venue SubCulture.
She has a perfect sense of what fits her.). There’s an asterisk: If you go to iTunes and look up Ari’s new CD, you won’t find my song there. You’re so talented! (Ultimately, she changed about seven words, and her fixes really did sound better coming out of her than my originals would have.

Meanwhile, if you’re hoping for Grande to star in a new musical written by Brown: Maybe, but don’t hold your breath. Tonight, September 19, Ariana and I will be performing “Jason’s Song (Gave It Away)” with the Roots on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon! “Still Hurting” is the opening ballad from the perspective of Cathy, who is telling the tale of their famed romance in reverse chronological order. (I’ll pause to point out how weird it is when the kid you cast as a 14-year-old is calling you as a peer, but you only need to spend about two minutes in Ari’s company to recognize what an amazing musician and what a total pro she is.) Where can we get that awesome piano arrangement of Dangerous Woman?? Send us a tip using our anonymous form. It’s a wonderful and fascinating development, and so unexpected. SHARE. I told her she should write the lyrics, since I didn’t feel like I could put words in her mouth. The way pop songs get made these days is that a producer comes up with a beat, a groove, maybe a harmonic progression to go along with it, then that beat is sent to several different people who write “top lines” (this is what they call melodies; I don’t know why they aren’t called “melodies”) and then the recording artist chooses one of those top lines and might also write a couple of phrases of the lyric or adjust the melody in some way, and then some rapper gets called in to do what would otherwise be a bridge if the song had any harmonic structure to it at all, which it generally does not.
It doesn’t interest me at all. Ariana called me in December and told me that since I was going to be in LA for a couple of weeks, she wanted to get together for a writing session. love you so much and you are so amazing at creating awesome music!! Absolutely fabulous and can’t wait to hear hopefully at subculture.

Find past episodes here and on Apple Podcasts. They have remained friends and collaborators since, with Brown having written the track “Jason’s Song (Gave It Away)” for the deluxe version of Grande’s 2016 album, Dangerous Woman. Ariana Grande covered "Still Hurting" from the musical 'The Last Five Years' with longtime friend Jason Robert Brown. He also revealed what advice he’d give to young composers, what recent musical he considers “the perfect show,” and which of his own musicals he considers hardest to pull off.