“It needs to be about New York City, but not Manhattan-centric.” That’s what
Jesse Blumberg, Artistic Director of the Five Boroughs Music Festival, asked for
in his commission for the Five Boroughs Songbook. “Write for anything from one
to four singers, plus piano.” Well of course, go for four.

After a long and fruitless search for existing texts, I realized I had to do my own.
It used to be that I felt hopelessly unhip when I got out of the subway at Bedford
Street in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, but in the last few years
hipdom has moved further east, and now I have to get off the L train at the
Morgan Avenue stop to feel totally passé among the nineteenth century beards
and the twenty-first century tattoos. 

So I thought of a barista faced with these changing times. And of my all-time
favorite composition, Monteverdi’s proto-opera “Lamento della Ninfa.”
Similarities between Monteverdi’s and my “Lamento”’s are purely intentional.
Consider my piece a love-letter to his.

And for the Williamsburg/Bushwick non-initiates, some notes on the text:

— Bedford, the L-train stop in the heart of Williamsburg, used to be crazy hip,
now more crazy swank

— Bushwick, what Williamsburg was ten years ago, five more stops into
Brooklyn on the L-train

— Roberta’s, iconic Bushwick Michelin-starred, picnic-tables-in-an-old-
industrial-space restaurant

— Bogart and Morgan, two streets running through the heart of Bushwick. Exit
the Morgan Avenue stop on the L-train to either of these streets and feel like the
unhippest person in the world if you’re over thirty and absent an artistic tattoo
and a 19-century beard

— The 6, perhaps the least hip subway line in NYC, navigating as it does both
the Upper East Side and the Bronx. It will take you to Pelham Bay Park, a mere
29 stations and two hours after you transfer to it from the L