From In the Heights to Hamilton, New York City – with its frenetic pulse and intoxicating contradictions – has been an intrinsic part of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s artistic palette. Even so, the EGT-winning musical mastermind is likely to confound more than a few fans with his and Eisa Davis’ new project: Warriors, a narrative concept album based on the 1979 cult film The Warriors.
For those who do not reflexively think “come out to play” when they hear bottles clinking, The Warriors is about a Coney Island street gang forced to traverse the city after dark while a gaggle of gangs — each one sporting a distinct fashion aesthetic, from goth baseball to silken Harlem Renaissance — tries to murder them as revenge for an assassination they’re falsely accused of. It’s the violent, stylish stuff of midnight movie legend, and despite Miranda’s affinity for NYC-based tales, a surprising choice for a guy who was recently penning smashes for Disney.
With Warriors out Friday (Oct. 18) on Atlantic, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis (a playwright/actress who appeared in Miranda’s 2021 film Tick, Tick… Boom!), hopped on the phone with Billboard to discuss the inspiration behind their gender-flipped take on the subject matter, how they landed hip-hop royalty (Nas, Busta Rhymes, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Cam’ron, Ghostface Killah and RZA) for the project and what might be next for their Warriors.
Lin — at a preview listening session, you mentioned that about 15 years ago, someone pitched the idea of a Warriors musical to you. You summarily shot it down but kept mulling it over. What was the “aha” moment where you had a breakthrough?
Miranda: That friend, Phil Westgren, approached me in 2009, and the bulk of my thinking why it couldn’t work is, “Well, it’s an action movie.” Action movies and musicals are always fighting for the sale real estate: When you can’t talk anymore — the emotion is heightened — you fight and/or sing. So doing it as a concept album first freed us from that. It allowed us to score the moment. We approached that in different ways throughout the album. Sometimes we dilated a moment of action, sometimes it’s a montage and you hear sound effects and by the end the Warriors are victorious. (laughs) The other thing that made it compelling to write was flipping the gender of the Warriors as a female gang. I had that notion in response to seeing GamerGate happen online around 2015. These toxically online men doxxing women’s home addresses, the chaos of it struck me as a very Luther thing to do. Luther shoots Cyrus, blames the Warriors and then watches the fun unfold. It seemed to be the same malignant chaos. That thought led me to thinking of the Warriors as a female gang and suddenly it got really interesting to write. Every plot point is wrinkled or changed in some fundamental way. I got excited by the notion of writing women’s voices surviving the night.
Eisa, unlike Lin, you said The Warriors was not part of your childhood. What was it that made you think, “I get it, I have something to say here”?
Davis: Number one: Lin asked me. Number two: Because they’re women, I thought, this is really exciting to look at the wrinkles and search for the ways that this is a specifically femme story. What is it that I’ve experienced on the streets of New York at night, or what is it that I want when it comes to protection and having a crew? We based the album on the movie; the movie is based on the novel; the novel was based on a Greek narrative from 400 B.C. Obviously, it has staying power and good bones. There’s something intrinsically human to the various responses to violence and adversity and loss that are in this story. One is that you can try and take revenge and continue the cycle of violence. Another thing the Warriors do is they defend themselves against the injustice of being falsely accused and develop more courage. Another response is to try and end that cycle of violence, try to create a peace not only in yourselves but the communities around you. All of those human responses being baked into the story, it has something very compelling to everyone.
What you said about GamerGate is interesting. Similar to the misogynist response to the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, do you think some perpetually online bros will get upset about the Warriors’ gender swap?
Miranda: Maybe. Probably. I know none of those people have seen this movie more than I have, and in many ways it’s a love letter to that original movie, too. I don’t think a beat-for-beat recreation of the movie would be satisfying. I’ve seen those adaptations, they’re not satisfying: You’re just waiting for the moment that you liked in the [original] movie. I think of this as a love letter to the original film and its own thing that could not be confused for the original film. To me, it’s the best of both worlds.
You really scored a murderer’s row of rappers to represent each borough: Nas, Cam’ron, Busta Rhymes, RZA, Ghostface Killah and Chris Rivers (Big Pun’s son). What was it like giving feedback to these legends? Lin, you’re a genius in your own right, but was that intimidating?
Davis: That’s such a great question because, of course, the only reason this murderer’s row, as you put it, are even on this album is because they already respect Lin and what he has accomplished. So everyone was on board and ready to do this. It was written for all of these rappers and what their rhythms are, but it was a question of, “Are they able to say someone else’s lines?” That’s a big deal.
Miranda: They’re used to writing their own features.
Davis: And have pride in never being ghostwritten.
Miranda: The shift was, “You’re not playing yourself. You’re playing the Bronx. You are the voice of Staten Island or the voice of Manhattan.” It’s having them playing these roles but bring what we love about them as emcees to the table.
The Warriors film is known for its violence and grit, things not usually associated with musicals. How did you go about ensuring there was a sense of danger on the album?
Miranda: It was freeing doing this as an album. Our job is to paint it as vividly as possible musically, to paint those slick sidewalk streets in your mind. To that end, we got the best artists we could find. We even got Foley artists to create some of the soundscapes of the subway and the city on top of these songs we’d written.
Davis: That really helped with creating that grit you’re talking about.
Miranda: The job is to create the sickest movie in your head possible. It’s also 1979 shot through 2024. I remember recording the scene where Luther calls an unknown associate and gives them a status update and someone said, “I don’t think young people know what a rotary phone sounds like anymore.”
Davis: That someone was Lin’s wife, Vanessa. (Miranda laughs) What we had to do was make sure we baked into the dialogue that this is a phone call, so people who had no idea what these sounds were would know. To make sure we didn’t have what you would call a pat musical theater score, something more cliché, one of the first things we did was make each other playlists and say, “This is an idea for this particular gang, they might have this particular sound.” Maybe there’s more of this Jamaican patois in the DJ so we have the Jamaican roots of hip-hop represented. Maybe we have this really amazing beat that can add this ballroom culture and have this queer, trans [vibe]. We were going for all of these vibes that would be legitimate for a pop listener.
As you’re saying, there are so many different musical styles on Warriors. Which was the hardest to get right, and which was the most fun to play with?
Miranda: They were all fun. The most joyous probably was going down to Miami to record with Marc Anthony and his orchestra. It would not sound as good as it does if we had not gone down to where Marc plays. We came in with a fully finished demo but by the time Marc is translating it to his orchestra with Sergio [George], his righthand man, he found another level of authenticity. Writing all of these was enormous fun. I think the one people will be most surprised by, considering what they’ve heard of my work, is our metal song, “Going Down,” with Luther. But I’m a big metal fan. The challenge was not so much writing the song and not blowing my voice out on my demo — because I don’t have a screamo voice — but finding the person to play Luther. My metal gods are all my age or older. (Davis laughs) We went to Atlantic and said, “Who is the next great metal singer we don’t even know about yet?” And I think Kim Dracula is one of the great discoveries of this album. Everyone who listens to this leaves going, “Who the f–k was that? And how can I hear more of that?” That was an exciting discovery.
Davis: Like Lin said, everything was so fun. It was wonderful to spend a week and a half with our Warriors, because they’re such dear friends, and hearing this gel together and sing was something only they could do. Another thing that was so joyful was to be with Mike Elizondo, our producer, at his studio, and being able to work with his band. What was challenging for me, as someone who does not have the same experience and Lin and Mike, was making sure the ideas of everything I heard was something I could articulate and share with all of our artists. Everything was so clear in how I could hear it, but how could I share how to get there? I had a nice learning curve.
I love that you flipped the Lizzies into the Bizzies, a boy band. Did you use any particular boy bands as sonic touchstones for that?
Miranda: We wanted to do the boy band to end all boy bands. The Voltron of boy bands, if you will. The Megazord. We wanted to connect New Edition all the way to Stray Kids and back again. You have Stephen Sanchez holding down the gorgeous falsetto crooner at the top; you have Joshua Henry holding down the soulful Boyz II Men era vocals; you have Timothy Hughes holding down the bass; and then Daniel Jikal representing the new school of hip-hop.
I love that you included K-pop boy band music on this, because that is the new school.
Davis: That was a flash of genius on Lin’s part. Of course, he doesn’t speak Korean….
Miranda: (laughs) How dare you tell them that!
Davis: We went to Helen Park, who is an incredible composer, and she dropped that instantaneously.
How much direction did you give her?
Miranda: We painted the picture for her: This needs to be the come on to end all come-ons, but then at the end, you sneak in the phrase “you killed our hope.” The folks who speak Korean will have a head start on how nefarious this gang is.
Ms. Lauryn Hill portrays the DJ on this, which is wildly impressive. At what point in the process did she enter?
Miranda: It was the first song we wrote. We had no plan B. We wrote it to Lauryn Hill’s voice. Essentially, we sent her manager a love letter from me and Eisa, the track and some test vocals for her to fill in however she pleased. And we stayed in touch. I learned from her manager she was an admirer of Hamilton. That kept the door from being all the way shut.
Davis: And then we prayed.
Miranda: And then a lot of prayer until one day the Dropbox came and it had all the vocals. It was so much better than we even imagined. The fact that she trusted us and sang the song we wrote will always be among the greatest honors of our careers, but then added so much of herself to it, added background vocals. She’s a co-producer on that track and she earned every bit of it.
I know you said making this a recording allowed you a certain freedom, but are you considering a staging?
Miranda: Yeah. It was an enormous privilege to be able to write it this way. This caliber of world-class talent, it’s hard to get them in the same room at the same time much less on a stage eight times a week. The fact that we get these fingerprints on these roles is incredible. And you’re talking to two theater artists. Of course, we’d love to imagine continuing to work together and what the next incarnation could be, but what we really love is that everyone gets the thing we made on Friday. It’s not a recording of the thing we made that you have to be in New York to see. Everyone gets it at the same time. As someone who lived through both Hamilton cast album going around the world and the relative inaccessibility of Hamilton because we could only serve 1400 people at a time, it’s enormously gratifying to give everyone the same gift at the same time.
Davis: If there’s a show, it’s a discrete thing. The album is its own thing and if we have a show, it’s its own thing. It’s another level of adaptation, just like we adapted the film. This is its own thing.
Final question for you both. In the movie, which is your favorite gang and why? And you can’t say the Warriors.
Davis: What’s the gang that puts their tokens in?
Miranda: (Laughs, coughs) In the opening montage, there is one gang that’s very courteously [entering the subway] like they’re on a school trip.
Davis: They’re like, “We’re going to uphold the social compact on the way to a meeting of gangs across the city.”
Miranda: My favorite gang is the Turnbull AC’s. The Turnbull AC’s walk to a Mad Max: Fury Road vibe. And a converted school bus of bats and chains is the most terrifying, awesomest thing.
