Nondheim: A Mixtape (Vol. 1)
Music for Sondheim-trained ears
Last year, we asked Sondheim Hub readers to suggest music not written by Stephen Sondheim that nevertheless, for one reason or another, seems Sondheimian. Your responses were fascinating: not a list of imitators, but a collage of songs and pieces of music that share something with Sondheim’s work — whether that’s wit, rigor, ambition, psychological sharpness, formal daring, or simply a familiar sonic thrill.
What follows is the first volume of Nondheim: an occasional series of playlists for those of us with Sondheim-trained and (crucially) curious ears. Below, we offer a guide to this first curated offering. (You can listen to the full playlist on Spotify here — or click each title below to find the relevant track on YouTube.) Please feel free to add your own suggestions for future Nondheim playlists in the comments below!
1. “The Whole World Changed” (The Connector)
→ music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brown is one of the first names many reach for when asked to suggest a contemporary writer with Sondheimian craft instincts — and with good reason. Today’s playlist begins with his 2024 musical The Connector. As an opening number, “The Whole World Changed” does the kind of heavy lifting Sondheim and his collaborators excelled at: it establishes a publication, a lineage, a mythology, and a moral fault-line, all while moving at a propulsive lick. The territory the show inhabits — idealism surrendering to ambition, the gap between truth and performance — feels palpably Sondheimian too.
What looks at first to be remarkable, bizarre
Will soon reveal itself to be part of a pattern.
And we who stand outside identify the history
In the seemingly unprecedented thing.
2. “Hosing the Furniture” (The Jonathan Larson Project)
→ music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson is often discussed in relation to Sondheim because of lineage, and sometimes too loosely. Here we can hear a more specific affinity. “Hosing the Furniture,” now more widely known thanks to The Jonathan Larson Project, comes from Larson’s 1989 revue Sitting on the Edge of the Future, a piece prompted by the 1939 World’s Fair and its visions of domestic modernity. You can hear Larson using an unmistakably Sondheimian device here: a comic surface that keeps cracking under pressure. The song starts as chirpy household bustle and gradually reveals panic, resentment, delusion, and violence, all through a woman’s spiralling interior monologue. Larson is brilliant at the fake-out: “I’m singing in the living room” (as opposed to the rain); “Raindrops are falling on my couch” (rather than my head). The lyric swerves, again and again, and that unstable moment-to-moment surprise is part of what makes the number feel so rich:
Tom likes cocktail
Onions
Tom nodded off again
Last night
Was it me?
Was it-
I get treated like dirt
Oh dirt, dirt
Here’s a squirt
What a glow
3. “You’re Nothing Without Me” (City of Angels)
→ music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel
The central conceit of City of Angels is gloriously Sondheimian: a 1940s noir murder mystery and the story of the Hollywood screenwriter adapting it unfold simultaneously on a split-stage, the fictional characters bleeding into the writer’s real world. “You’re Nothing Without Me” is a duet of mutual contempt between a writer and his fictional detective. It is a song about authorship, ego, dependence, and the humiliating fact that creator and creation need one another. Stone (the fictional hard-boiled detective) and Stine (the writer who invented him) debate mutual indispensability, and the lyric is as ingeniously funny as anything in the canon:
You are some gumshoe.
You just don’t think. Well
Get this, dumb gumshoe,
You come from my inkwell.
Is your mouth lonely
With one foot in there?
Stone, your brain only
Holds thoughts I put in there.
4. “Birch Trees” (Three Houses)
→ music and lyrics by Dave Malloy
Dave Malloy may be the major contemporary musical theatre writer who most consistently treats form itself as an adventure. Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Ghost Quartet, Octet, Preludes: each show invents a different architecture for feeling and thought. Three Houses, which premiered at Signature Theatre in May 2024, is a pandemic parable about three people isolating in three different locations, each forced to face personal demons while sheltering from the world. “Birch Trees” traces the interior journey of Susan, who has retreated to her late grandmother’s home in Latvia, an inherited place full of emotional residue. Malloy builds his portrait with a beautiful observational specificity:
and the birds;
the air is latticed with birds of brilliant colors
cerulean crests
vermilion breasts
and butterflies flutter by
in bursts of ochre and amber
5. “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” (Only Murders in the Building, Season 3)
→ music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
Is this the best patter song of the century so far? I sincerely think it has a claim. In season 3 of Only Murders in the Building, the fictional murder mystery musical “Death Rattle Dazzle” is at the center of the intrigue. This song, from the in-show musical’s score, sees Steve Martin attempting to identify which of a set of infant triplets is guilty of matricide. It’s ludicrously fun, intricate, and inventive. Here are some lyrical highlights:
In this picaresque puzzle of the Pickwick pack
Will a lighthouse shed some light
On which kid gave ol’ mom a whack?
There’s an infant to indict
I’ll book this little crook tonight[…]
Like a forensic pediatrician, I’ll complete this inquisition
I will name the neonatal from the cradle that proved fatal
I will find the perpetrator who did murder to their mater
Or
Coochie-coochie-coo
What if none of it is true?
Has my inspection been too cursory
Should I look outside this nursery?
6. “The Light in the Piazza” (The Light in the Piazza)
→ music and lyrics by Adam Guettel
Adam Guettel’s relationship to Sondheim matters here — not in a reductive sense, but because Sondheim recognized something in Guettel’s writing. On his list of “Songs I Wish I’d Written (At Least in Part),” he included Guettel’s “The Riddle Song” from Floyd Collins. The Light in the Piazza, which opened on Broadway in 2005, is a show poised between musical and opera. The title number is essentially an aria, Clara’s surrender to a love she can’t fully articulate. Like the most moving Sondheim set-pieces, it earns its ecstasy as much through what it withholds as what it releases:
Tiny, sweet...
And then it grows
And then it fills the air!
Who knows what you’ll call it
I don’t care!
Out there somewhere
I have something I have never had...
As sad, as happy...
That’s all I see
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7. “Four Sea Interludes: IV. Storm” (Peter Grimes)
→ music by Benjamin Britten
Sondheim was clear that he was no indiscriminate opera devotee, but he was certainly an admirer of Benjamin Britten. “There’s always some acid and unexpectedness and drama,” he said in 2009, when asked what attracted him to Britten’s work. Peter Grimes, Britten’s 1945 opera about a misanthropic Suffolk fisherman hounded to self-destruction by his community, is among the great operatic works of the last century, and its Four Sea Interludes are orchestral portraits of both the sea and the characters’ inner worlds. The “Storm” interlude is a thrilling example of dramatic orchestral writing — and, to Sondheimian ears, unmistakably Sweeney Todd weather. An outsider condemned by society, the same musical “spiking” of beauty with acid…
8. “Talking Business”
→ Dessa
Dessa is a Minneapolis-based rapper, singer and writer, a member of the indie hip-hop collective Doomtree. “Talking Business,” released in 2021 as part of her IDES singles series, is a masterclass in lyrical economy, and it achieves that economy through a brilliant formal constraint: the lyric all but dispenses with verbs. The story arrives in shards, but with complete clarity. That is a deeply Sondheimian pleasure: economy that does not simplify, compression that intensifies. By withholding the usual grammatical machinery, Dessa forces every noun to work harder, as evidence, clue, and atmosphere. The result is a miniature crime film assembled from props, gestures, and traces:
Cash fare
Rideshare
Taxi to the airport
Gate 5
On-time
Baggage just a Jansport
Business-class so rum and cola
Guiltless sleep til Mexico then
On the beach like any other rich resorter’s doctor’s orders
9. “The Games I Play” (Falsettos)
→ music and lyrics by William Finn
There is an obvious Sondheim-world link here in James Lapine, who collaborated with Finn on the book of Falsettos. But the real interest of “The Games I Play” lies in how unmistakably William Finn sounds like himself while still offering pleasures a Sondheim-attuned listener will recognize. The show’s emotional world is one of brittle wit, sexual candor, fear, yearning, and family improvisation. Whizzer’s song catches all of that in miniature. It has the shape of a standard confessional number, but the harmony keeps shifting beneath him, and his self-description keeps changing too: swagger, defence, hurt, appetite, real attachment.
I bet on the horses
I die by degree
I am sure his divorce is
A tribute to me
Ask me if I love him
It depends on the day
These are the games I play
✍️ To read on, and to unlock the full Sondheim Hub experience, please support our work with a paid subscription. Tracks 10-16 continue below…