Guest Post: One Verse More Like
Guest author: David Delaney
As is well documented Rent is a terrible musical with bewildering morals and confusing portrayals of heroes and villains (The guy who works hard so that he can let his friends live rent free in a loft while they dick around pretending the act of suffering is art? VILLAIN. The gleeful dog murder? LITERALLY AN ANGEL.)
The songs are all over the place as you’ll read about in Mary and my ongoing series but I’m here to talk today about One Song Glory, a song that is 25% fucking rad killer verse one and 75% terrible chorus that sucks and verse 2 that completely falls apart.
Ok so we open with a sparse electric guitar with heavy delay, then add male vocals, and a high synth. Tasteful, atmospheric. Drums come in on the hats to build, we’re cooking. And the lyrics? Verse one starts excellent. I really like how the word glory doesn’t fit that well with the rest of the lyrics. He keeps saying it and it keeps jumping out of the lyrics, SORT OF LIKE glory or the desire FOR glory is constantly interrupting Roger’s thoughts which oh man, it totally is.
The non-glory lyrics are also really doing a lot of storytelling quick. We get that he’s dying very quickly, and then “from the pretty boy front man” gives us history while at the same time showing us what Roger now thinks of that history. This is efficient lyric writing and I’m totally behind it. Then we introduce a love interest, awesome. Repeating that the love interest was a young girl for emphasis… not a great move in 2025 but this musical was written in like the 1930s or something so it gets a pass.
And that’s all the good parts of the song. Now we get “time flies time dies” which is a stupid lyric that the writer (rip) should be ashamed of. If you’re going to take the position that time dies you’re gonna need to flesh out that concept a little but Jonny Larson isn’t even doing that I think he’s just saying the girl dies which is unclear, and only unclear so that we can shoehorn in the terrible time dies lyric. Awful. Awful what is happening here can we hear verse one again?
No we have to hear the chorus which is just shouting glory over and over, the vibe shifts to boring rock and then thank god we go back to groove 1 for verse 2 but the lyrics. Here we get “find glory, in a song that rings true TRUTH LIKE A BLAZING FIRE” A song that rings true is kind of the absolute minimum that a successful song could hope to do so that is a boring thing to say and should not get a whole line of the song, but then we like lyrically cut away from Roger musical-singing-his-thoughts to Roger riffing trying to write the one song that One Song Glory is about and what he comes up with is Truth Like a Blazing Fire.
OOF. Well that one sucks Rog, what else you got, “an eternal flame” OOF not better. Is Jonathan Larson writer of Rent trying to show us that Roger is an awful songwriter? Because those lyrics are embarrassing and Larson the writer has shown in verse one that Larson can actually do good lyrics. So surely he’d know that truth like a blazing fire an eternal flame is just trite nonsense that does nothing lyrically. Why is that in there, why does it suck so much. Is it to make us filled with disdain for Roger? Maybe!
Now I’d like to get really nitpicky- because next Roggo says this song will come from the soul of a young man, a young man and that just sucks. Why does he say young man, this song is clearly a retrospective nostalgic number from the perspective of an adult man looking back or at least it was in glorious verse one. The truth is the only reason Roger says young man is to echo the young girl lyric in verse one, but the two lyrics are totally unrelated, this is EXTREMELY LAZY repeating or not repeating things in lyrics should be intentional and if you do repeat something it should have a slightly different meaning each time you hear it or you’re wasting your listener’s time.
Ok I need to go to bed but “Before the virus takes hold” is overly dramatic and makes a mockery of the tasteful scene setting in verse one, beautiful, scene setting verse one. I will conclude by saying sorry my article isn’t as funny as Mary’s [editors note: true], and that One Song Glory and Roger’s whole storyline in Rent encapsulates an overly precious, self indulgent view of art creation that leads inevitably to the creation of no art. Do not make art like Roger, do not try to make One Song that will bring you Glory. Instead, try to write A Song that you Kinda Like. Try to write a song like the first verse of One Song Glory. Jonathan Larson famously wrote like hundreds of songs for Rent and producers had to trim them down. Why does Roger had one songitus when Larson would know that doesn’t work why why why why why