Guest Blog: I'm Really Proud of the Score': Composer Jack Godfrey on Establishing Characters and Emotions in New (Born) Musical BABIES

Babies is a new musical which follows nine year eleven students who have to look after robot baby simulator dolls for a week as part of a teen pregnancy project at their school.

When I started composing the score, I really wanted to find a musical language with which to establish the world of these nine teenage characters. The genre that felt most natural to me was that of indie rock and pop-punk. I made this choice for a couple of reasons: firstly, I listened to a lot of indie rock and pop-punk when I was 15 and 16, and so it felt like the perfect way to pay homage to my own teen years. But more importantly from a storytelling perspective, I feel that indie rock is an extremely fervent and frenetic genre of music, synonymous with emotional outbursts and expressions of angst.

This seemed particularly apt for a musical in which our collection of teenage characters experience a lot of strong emotions, which they often do not understand or have much control over. Throughout the writing process, the book writer, Martha Geelan, and I have talked a lot about wanting Babies to feel like a pressure cooker, in the sense that the show constantly builds in intensity as the plot develops and the students become increasingly involved in the baby project. And so I really wanted to ground the musical world of Babies in the sound of chunky power chords and pounding drum lines similar to those I grew up listening to and falling in love with.

Beyond this core music language of indie rock, Babies also dips into other genres for other characters. For example, Becky, a social media influencer character, has a song with more of a contemporary RnB vibe and Jasmine, a studious high-achiever who I would describe as being like a Disney villain Hermione Granger, exists in more of a pop-adjacent MT world. I felt that it was important to give these different characters their own musical backdrops in order to help establish their distinct character identities. Babies is fundamentally an ensemble piece, and so it was really important to me to make sure that each of the nine characters feels like a true individual, musically as well as narratively.

I write all my songs on my laptop using the music software Logic, and I like to make a full demo track with drums, guitars, bass and keyboards. I can play all those instruments to a fairly decent level, and I generally spend a lot of time figuring out the groove and overall rhythmic feel of the song. I then send my Logic file to Joe Beighton, my co-orchestrator on Babies, who embellishes my demo version in order to make the song sound fuller and more dramatically engaging.

When it comes to vocal harmonies, I generally record a basic version of the shape of what the backing vocals in a song could be, with some kind of rough idea of how I want them to interact with the lead vocal, and then Joe fleshes it out into an arrangement that will make sense with the full cast singing.

Joe is a bit of a vocal arranging master, so I’m always excited to see the ways that he can elevate and build on my ideas. When it came to the score for Babies, I particularly wanted to explore the idea of using extreme levels of counterpoint (multiple people singing different melodies at the same time) in order to emphasise the feeling that we are experiencing nine different people with their different personalities and desires.

I’m really proud of the score of Babies because I definitely found it a challenge to get inside the heads of all nine characters, many of whom are quite different from me. And so it’s been really fulfilling to see the show come to life and to feel like I’ve been somewhat successful in achieving the goal that I set for myself!

I’m really excited for the show to open at The Other Palace so that audiences can step into the world of Babies and hopefully come to love these characters as much as I’ve loved writing songs for them.

Babies is at The Other Palace Theatre from 31 May - 14 July

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