Hawkins is best known for a string of hits in the 1990s -- including “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” and “As I Lay Me Down.” She’s put out six albums and was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990.
Her first musical ‘Birds of New York’ is about an estranged daughter who goes back home with her young son to reconnect with her dying father. It’s a family drama told with songs that demonstrate her rich lyrical storytelling -- like this song, ‘Missing.’
DD: “So tell me about the story. I don’t know too much.”
SBH: “It's a mother, two daughters and a son of one of the daughters. And I think that's it, actually. And so the drama is very intense. I don't want to actually tell you what happens, because what happens is, I don't think has been explored in a musical before, and I really want it to be something that the audience is on this journey and they don't know what's going to happen. Because, actually, the characters don't know what's going to happen. They don't know what will be revealed. … So it's not just the four people who come together in this very tense atmosphere, because the one daughter has been estranged. She's an artist. She's a songwriter. She has a son. Her relationship has just imploded, where she lives far away from the family, and she's known as having this great career and fame and everything, and she comes home to these people expecting one thing and a completely other thing happens.”
DD: I'm tantalized by what you said about that we're gonna see things that we haven't seen in musicals before, which I kind of maybe gives lie to my next question, which is, what are your influences, your inspirations that you're drawing from, whether in other art or in real life?”
SBH: “Well, I think that the inspirations have to be endless, because, you know, I'm old enough to have taken in so much, so I can't give every artist credit, but I will say that when I saw Fun Home on Broadway, I said to myself, I've got a musical, and I've got to write it. I've got a story.”
DD: “So you have a long career as a singer songwriter, as a musician, but this is your playwriting debut, right?”
SBH: “Yes, it is. And it did start as a play. … When I went to visit Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater, he's the artistic director there, he loved it as a play, and he was talking about the language, but when I left the meeting, I said to myself, I'll never get this made unless I put songs in it, because that's what I'm known for. And actually it was the greatest thing. And I think I've evolved into this person who has such confidence about what I have seen, or I have something a character needs to say, I really can find new layers of it, not better layers, but new layers of it in the writing of the song. … I really do hear what connects. You feel it. You feel it on your back when you're playing the piano and you're singing, and you see and you can feel the audience between your shoulder blades. You know what lyrics, because you just sense it. That's the kind of confidence that I'm bringing to the songwriting of this musical.”
DD: “You're a fairly recent Westport resident, right? What was your journey to Connecticut, Fairfield County?”SBH: “You're not going to believe this. I was in COVID. I'm a single mother with these two kids. … They were doing the homeschooling thing, and they both couldn't bear. … And I also was looking at the sky so clean and the water so clean and everything, and I was like, I don't want to be doing this either. So I said to myself, either there's a school open or we're not going to do it. We're going to do something crazy, like just be in nature and be in our lives and do art and whatever. And that was exciting to me, but I didn't quite have the guts to get off the grid. So I googled, and the first thing that came up was Westport.”
DD: “Did this move to Connecticut and this relocation, did that affect the story at all?”
SBH: “Yes, you're right, because I wrote it in New York City, and I think that coming here has clarified what are the important themes, and it's given me the time and the space and the trees, who I call my ancestors. It's given me all this perspective. And also, there are so many writers here. You can just feel it in the air. … Westport has allowed me to open up in a way that I couldn't have done anywhere else. You can really be sort of anonymous here. I don't know another way to say it. You can do your work, and you can also be anonymous, and you can present it, and people take you for what you are, an artist working on their work, and there's no shmegegge around it. That's what it is.”
