BWW EXCLUSIVE: 5 SONGS BY... Jason Robert Brown on THE LAST FIVE YEARS, SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD, PARADE, 13 and THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

BroadwayWorld is kicking off a brand new feature series spotlighting the best and brightest songwriters on Broadway and beyond with their own personally chosen quintet of songs that hold special meaning to them, titled 5 SONGS BY... .

Today, we begin the 5 SONGS BY... series with multiple Tony Award-winning composer, lyricist and orchestrator Jason Robert Brown who discusses his work on the fan favorite two-character musical THE LAST FIVE YEARS which was recently translated into a successful movie musical iteration earlier this year and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. Additionally, Brown comments on selections penned for his stage musicals SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD, PARADE, 13 and THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY.

More information on THE LAST FIVE YEARS on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download is available at the official site here.

Visit Jason Robert Brown's official site here.

"King Of The World" (1991) from SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD

"I was living in a 400-sq ft studio apartment in the West Village trying to figure out where in the world of New York theater I was supposed to fit in. I couldn't sleep one night, got up and and wrote "King of the world? You're not even King of New Jersey" on an index card, then went back to bed. The song emerged over the next couple of days, and only many years later did I realize what it was about, the terrifying feeling of being trapped without anyone knowing who you really are and what you really can do."

"You Don't Know This Man" (1995) from PARADE

"I had written a song called "I Don't Really Know" for Lucille to sing on her way to visit Leo in prison. Even typing that sentence now, it seems like such an on-the-nose title for what was a very on-the-nose song. Writing the lyric was torture; too many ideas and not enough syllables. Nonetheless, the music for that song felt very special, and I really believed in it. Alfred and Hal both listened to it and tilted their heads to the side quizzically, like confused puppies. I often find that a song is wrong because it's written for the wrong moment; some moments just want to sing more than others. In this case, Lucille singing alone on a trolley didn't catch fire. I threw out the entire thing. But when I had Lucille sing to Britt Craig, instant combustion - I wrote the new song in a half-hour."

"Still Hurting" (1999) from THE LAST FIVE YEARS

"After my marriage broke up, I moved into a basement apartment on West 94th St. and squeezed my grand piano (essentially my only possession) into the very small living room. We were rehearsing Parade at Lincoln Center, and at night I would come back to the mostly empty apartment and practice Bach inventions (which I've always been terrible at playing) to focus my brain. I would sit there for hours, trying to bring out the different voices and keep my foot off the damper pedal, and then when I started writing the heartbroken song that served as the opening for The Last Five Years, I found myself replicating the gestures from those inventions and fugues into the texture of the piece. The fughetta section in the center of the song felt to me like a way to organize the chaos of Cathy's brain; and true to form, out of the entire score for the show, those are the only eight bars I can't play accurately."

"Brand New You" (2007) from 13

"The original ending for 13 involved all of the kids showing up and surprising Evan at his bar mitzvah, and Kendra (the hot popular girl) singing a Britney-like song she had written as a tribute to the bar mitzvah boy. This was a cheap pandering idea and was naturally very popular when we premiered the show at the Mark Taper Forum. When Dan Elish and I resolved to change the ending to something more truthful and therefore more reserved, Kendra's song got the heave-ho. One day while we were rehearsing, Chris Gattelli asked if there wasn't some way we could do a mega-mix or some such thing at the end so that we could really show off how special and joyful our cast was. On that same day, my former assistant in Los Angeles sent me an email telling me that she had spent the whole day listening to "Brand New You" in her car because it was her favorite song and she was despondent that I was cutting it. So I came up with the idea of using "Brand New You" as a sort of encore, and every night it brought the crowd to its feet cheering. I realized far too late that I had made a mistake in cutting it in the first place; what the show needed and wanted to be was a show full of moments like that."

"Another Life" (2010) from THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

"Marsha Norman had, through some sorcery, arranged this fantastic boondoggle whereby she and I spent a week at a private villa on St. Barth's - a villa with its own recording studio - and worked on the first act of The Bridges of Madison County while we ate lobsters and lazed around the pool. Amazingly, we actually did get writing done - a lot of it. I hadn't brought my own guitar, but there was one in the studio, an old Martin with rusty strings and tuning pegs. One afternoon, I was thinking about the character of Marian - described in the novel as a folk singer in the Pacific Northwest - and I channeled my immense love of Joni Mitchell. I creaked the guitar into a reasonable approximation of tune and sat in a lounge chair, and I found myself playing a melancholy bossa nova. It was the first time the whole texture of the show clicked in my head. When I played the finished song for Marsha later that day, I said, "I don't entirely know how it fits in, but the show we're writing has to be able to accommodate a song like this."

Stay tuned to BroadwayWorld for more songwriters featured in the 5 SONGS BY... series later this month! To purchase the new THE LAST FIVE YEARS on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download, click here.