A villain number is a very valuable thing to have, but if you look at most musicals, one way or another there's an antagonist number.
Collaboration is being open to each other's ideas and benefiting from each other's perspectives in an open way.
Composing easy? I find it easy if - big if - the idea is right, if I have the right collaborator, and if my collaborator is in the room. I like my collaborator to be in the room.
I'll always work with my collaborator in the room so I have a reaction on a note-by-note basis. I know in my gut when something works for me, and I'll fight for it, but I'm a very easy re-writer.
When I was younger, I'd get very invested in things. It's a hard lesson to learn, but you have to know that if you want to find gold, you've got to love the process of digging.
I always wanted to have a villain song for Hades in 'Hercules,' but I couldn't figure out how we would have Hades sing.
I love 'The Gospel Truth,' the song that opened up 'Hercules.' I thought that song was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed producing that and writing that.
Every time I play 'Part of Your World,' a whole part of my life comes back to me. It's just inescapable - it was an innocent time, and a sense of discovery that we were all involved with.
My first success was 'Little Shop of Horrors,' and I had been working for years on jingles.
There was a jingle house called Lucas/McFaul in New York, and they called me 'the demo king.' I almost never had the big final - in jingles, you have the big final, and then you sing on it, and you make a good deal of money.
Howard Ashman was an amazing lyricist and an amazing artist.
I think the thing that strikes you when you come back to 'The Little Mermaid' after all of these years is the simplicity and innocence. That's in the look of it, and that's in the sound of it.
I see my songs and shows almost like a mosaic - part of a bigger picture.
I've said, for a long time, my favorite part of my career is when I'm creating a new thing where I'm pulling from a new place.
Truth be told, of course, what I enjoy most is reinventing myself and doing new projects where I work in new genres, or I get to find what the voice of a particular musical is.
My favorite thing is a brand-new project from scratch because you really never know how they're going to come to life. Going back for the third and fourth time to old ones is very gratifying, but it's not my favorite use of my creativity.
It's writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that's broader than just figuring out a song. You're also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.
In animation, the directors are part of a huge team of animators who all have opinions, too. It's a much more democratic process. Also, the animation executives oversee things more.
I can't get into the underlying psyche of someone like Robin Williams, but he was at that level of fame where he was somewhat self-protective.
I'm an architect. Before you start pouring the concrete, you build a foundation that is solid so that when you take the scaffolding down, it holds - forever. So that when junior high schools are doing 'Hunchback,' a 12-year-old as Frollo still works on some level.
