Conversations: Old Tales, New Media, The EPIC (!!) Takeover w/ Christie Vogler, Joe Goodkin, and Joel Christensen (Part 2)
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Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I'm your host, Christy Vogler from the podcast Movies We Dig. You might be wondering why I'm here today. Well, Liv is off in London doing some awesome things. And I am taking over to further discuss Epic the Musical with some very special guests.

Joining today's conversation is Joel Christensen, professor of classical studies at Brandeis University, and Joe Goodkin, who's a Chicago-based musician and modern bard who composed and performs two modern folk opera retellings of Homer's epic poems, which if you haven't checked those out yet and you like epic, I highly recommend. And this was really an excellent pair to bring in this conversation about Epic the Musical and

the process of this new media looking at a very old story. I really wanted to bring these two on in particular because we had an excellent conversation with them about the film, The Return, which is also a new take on Odysseus and his return home to Ithaca. And I think some of the similar hangups that we have with the film help inform us of

how we can engage with Epic. Now, if you've not listened to the previous episode where I introduced Liv to Epic with a song voted on by her listeners, you should go listen to that first because, you know, maybe it's not a fair process because Liv's reaction to the one song that was chosen is missing context. And as an archaeologist, I think context is important.

That being said though, our conversation made me want to revisit the songs and think more deeply about some original critiques I had about the musical as well. Does that mean I enjoy it less? No, not at all. I still love it, still listen to it, jam out to it in my car. And I think that's what people don't realize is that we can be critical about the things we love. And through that critical analysis,

new and wonderful things can be created. So please join me in this conversation about Epic the Musical. And maybe if Liv listens, she might, I don't know, give some more songs a chance. Conversations, old tales, new media, the Epic Takeover, part two with Joe Goodkin and Joel Christensen.

So thank you so much, Joel and Joe, for joining me today to talk about Epic the Musical. As I was mentioning, I think...

When I reached out to both of you, like you both were like top of mind of like, I really, really want to talk to you both about this after having talked about the return. So I was really excited for this conversation with y'all. And as I mentioned, so I am doing this takeover while Liv is hanging out in London, which is great for her. And the reason I'm taking over for this episode is because she is

Has not really listened to Epic. I had her fans vote, her listeners vote for like their favorite songs. And so she's listened to one song in its entirety so far. And that was no longer you from the underworld saga, which I think was a really good choice, but then it led into this longer conversation. That was really interesting. Cause her first question was like, Oh, do the women of the underworld show up in the underworld saga? Yeah.

And my answer could only be, well, his mother shows up for a line. And she was really upset because that book has so many women come forth and tell their stories to Odysseus. And I thought that was kind of like a really good point. And our discussion became more broadly this conversation of like, this is still a reception that is very focused on Odysseus and to an extent sanitizing Odysseus, which is

Liv loves the Odyssey.

And it's because Odysseus is presented as such a complex character that we can't always decide if he's good or bad. And I do think Jay, the creator of Epic the Musical, is trying to do that as well. But they still make certain decisions, like having Odysseus being wholly faithful to Penelope, removing the death of the slave woman at the end of the book, and just like a couple of other choices that...

did actually end up sanitizing this character, even though you pretty much opened with him throwing a baby off the wall. So that's kind of where her critiques came in. And I think it made me want to reevaluate how I felt about it. And yeah,

So I want to talk about it more. We've already had a chance to talk about it on Movies We Dig. And that was a fun conversation because it was Elijah's sister who came on to talk about us, about the musical with us. And it was really interesting because she doesn't have a background in classics. She basically just came in as a fan of the show and like remembers reading The Odyssey in high school. So it's like, I'm not really sure what actually happened or not in, you know, the source material.

So that was a fun conversation because it was a chance to talk to someone who, you know, isn't immersed in Greek mythology like we are and what they take away from this modern adaptation of it. So that's kind of all the different things that were going on. And I'm going to open up to you guys. I want to hear, you know, what was your introduction to Epic? And what do you think about it overall, just to get us started?

Joe, you want to take first swing? Yeah, I am. So my introduction to it was becoming aware of it because the audiences at my performance of the Odyssey and the Iliad started asking me if I had heard of this musical, you know, that's how it came on my radar.

And I was like, at first, no. And it prompted me to go check it out. I think kind of mid, mid release at this point, it was a couple of years ago, right? It took him like four years or so. Is that right? Five? I don't know. A good number of years, right? Yeah. Cause it just finished in December of last year. Yeah. Right. So it was, it was a cool way to get introduced to it because it,

it sort of is a good model for how different retellings and oral tradition works. You hear about somebody else's version, the audience knows about somebody else's version, and they're trying to integrate your version into the other version in the source material. So I dipped into it very lightly at that point. I did not go back and actually listen to the whole thing until I knew that we were going to do this. And I think

that has its upsides and its downsides. Like I kind of envy people who were taking it in on an episodic basis as the sagas were coming out, because I think those are reasonable amounts of music to listen to sort of as a new release, you know? And, and I sat down and I was like, well, I'm just going to listen to all 40 songs. You know, that's what we're going to do. And I don't, I don't think it's meant for that. I really don't. I mean, I'm glad I did it because it really, it is a,

It's a cool way to listen to it. And clearly it all holds together that way, I think, in a pretty cool way. So my introduction was like a little bit at first and then a flood once I knew we were doing this. And so I think maybe my opinions of it are sort of colored between those two. But I will say they're like... I'm fascinated with it, first of all. And I love the energy around it. And I think it raises...

a lot of interesting topics and points and questions about both the story and especially for me, the medium. Like I think it's, I think that's where I'm most interested in is that he sort of invented a new medium. That's like, he's tricked people into thinking it's one thing, but it's really none of these things. It's something completely different as a way to present the story. And that, that really excites me. Like I really dig that. I think when you can see the stories, um,

within new media, like that's, that's amazing. That's basically as true to like the, the, the what's in what's moving about it to me and what's important about it to me as anything. Yeah. I think we joked. It's like, Oh, out of all of the things to come out of the internet in recent history, sometimes it's not bad. And this is one of those things. That's right. Joel, how about, how about you? I,

I mean, one of the reasons I love, one of the many reasons I love talking to you guys, especially having Joe on something like this, is every time we start a conversation, like, I change my mind. Right? On this one, though, like, this isn't going to be, like, the return we have to get Joel to, like, incept himself. I actually, you know, like Joe because...

my profession involves Homer in some way. Every time something like this comes out, people are like, have you heard about this? Have you heard about this? And like Liv, every time somebody asks me, my first reaction is, ugh.

I don't know if I want to know about it because it might make me angry and unpopular and like show that I'm getting so old. And so there are two people. I had a student, Spencer McDaniel, some students in my myth class. And then my daughter, Alia, who's just about to be 15, who said, you have to listen to this.

this and the reason we started listening uh i started listening a lot and this goes to the episodic thing with joe is that we have a rule in the car in the morning which is that everybody gets to choose a song so the three kids and me go on a commute every day um and some days we do a theme we'll do like all right we'll pick songs that only have a color in the title

Right. Or they do have a color title. And Joe, you may have seen my tweet about this one. The kids hated Purple Rain and still mock me for making them listen to it. I don't know if I'll ever live that heartbreaking. It's killing me. But all he has said, listen, you got to listen to this epic musical.

And part of it's because she's come into epic more broadly, both through pop culture and through having a father who is a homerous. Right. So she actually has from when she was really young. Well, not so young, but six years ago, a signed copy by Gareth Hines of his graphic novel of the Odyssey and has read it several times. And then, you know, something else we joked about before is she will text me about

when people say things about Homer I don't agree with, especially if it's one of her teachers. She would send me a screenshot of her textbook saying Homer was a blind poet who wrote The Alien and the Odyssey.

And then I respond like, how did he write? What are we talking about here? But she loves to get me agitated. So I haven't gotten to Epic Musical yet. But we started listening to it before it was complete. And the commute from when we leave the house to dropping my oldest off at her school is about the perfect amount of time for one of the songs.

And so that episodic listening is something that is really important because you get into the moment, you're just thinking about that, not the full arc. And I think the experience of just listening is crucial. And I know, I'll go back to the new media thing in a minute, but listening

My kids have seen Joe perform twice. They've seen him do his Iliad and his Odyssey, and they loved it. And they saw it several years apart, right, Joe? They grew from like seven years old to like teenagers, and then they saw Joe perform again. So they're used to these sort of perceptions of Homer, and they all got into it. My three-year-old, my 13-year-old son, Iskender, and Alia. And, you know, it brings a weird mix of stuff that's not great.

Like I think one of the first songs I heard was Warrior of the Mind. And I was like, yeah, I'm not loving this. I'm not loving this at all. Or the God Games one, you know, amusing, a little weird. Right. But then I listened to Love in Paradise. Yeah. And that song, I wish that listeners had suggested that song. It is up high as one of them. That's the one that converted me.

Because what I see going on in the middle of that song, when he's talking about like his memories and all the loss and the suffering is I feel that that Jorge has read into it as read into two lines from book five.

And he created this entire rich internal drama, right? That entire moment is based like, so the lines from book five that I'm thinking of is, you know, when the narrator says Odysseus was spending all his days sitting by the edge of the shore crying, was spending his night sleeping with Calypso, even though she's no longer pleasing to him. The Odyssey never unpacks why he's crying.

But one of the genius things about epic is that it's ambiguous. Homeric ambiguity allows audiences to read themselves and to read other opinions and views into characterizations. I think Penelope and Helen are prime examples of characters who you can never quite pin down. And that's because like Homer,

or the text wants audiences to be able to make judgments, needs them to. And so, you know, what I saw there was, all right, this is a really clever reception.

of the Odyssey really leaning into Odysseus as a traumatized figure and the music's good right on that and you know with a lot of it I mean some of it some of the early stuff really has a kind of Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda thing going for it like a little too much talk singing right Hatter songs right but

as the arc develops and as Horde develops his style, like it expands and musically it gets more interesting. The lyrics get more interesting. And I'm rambling a bit here, but I just want to go back that moment. I think, you know, when we all met and talked about the return, I hadn't really started to think about the two primary threads in reception of the Odyssey over the past, like since I'll go to 2000, 2001.

one thread is the critical one that all called the atwood theme because i think it was it was margaret atwood who first like really hit us hard with the penelope ad without her work i don't think we would have cersei and i i think we'd have less of the criticism we get of odysseus that we see even implicitly in emily wilson's translation i'm not saying they're all that atwood

But I think it's a canary in the coal mine, right? Really. So it's showing there's this thread that we all need to be aware of, of how nasty this man is. On the other side, I think there are readings that really start in a way with Jonathan Shay's Odysseus in America.

Right. Which I think is a less critically acclaimed book than Achilles in Vietnam. But to me, it's, again, another bellwether that came at a time right before war on terror had really expanded to the level of had before we had millions of service people who are impacted by PTSD. And so there's that arc that I think is central to the return of

And to epic the musical, just trying to figure out why this villain is who he is, right? So the question is, if Liv were here and we were talking to her, the question would be, you know, is this a whitewashing of Odysseus? Or is it a psychoanalysis of him that tries to get us to see...

how he became a monster, right? And to me, the answer to that is, well, it is still kind of whitewashing because you don't have the final minutes showing him to be monstrous, right? You start out with him killing a child, but you don't get him still being a monster at the end. And that's where, again, if we're thinking about modern

Two I think of in mind are Walter White from Breaking Bad or the Penguin from The Penguin. Right. And I don't want to I don't. Have you guys watched The Penguin? Mm hmm.

No. Okay. Well, I'm telling you, it's genius in anti-hero work. And you find out at the end, I don't want to move it for you, but like at the end, there's no redemption, right? And that's the thing that I think if we're looking at Epic the Musical, it combines with different themes. One is the, you know, the traumatized hero, but it's also a romance. And so at the end, you can't have Odysseus be irredeemable for the romance to work. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting that like the ending of the return was almost very like almost the exact same as the ending of Epic with the focus on

Penelope and Odysseus rebuilding the relationship together, saying there's still something there and we're going to move forward together. Would you fall in love with me again? So we waited the day the Ithaca saga was released to streaming. We listened to it in the car. And when it ended, I was like, wait, what?

Where's book 24? And I yell, like, in the car, like, I yelled in the car, like, it's just a return all over again. And the kids are like, well, what's wrong? I was wondering how we were going to integrate your take from the last one into this, but you just did it for me. That was good. I knew it was coming. Like...

It was so weird because it's like so much of Epic the musical is really focused on the first half of the poem. And literally just the last saga makes up the rest of it. And obviously a lot gets missed as a result of that.

Well, and I think a contrast that we could make before we go back to maybe praising Epic the Musical a little more is that, you know, two years ago when ChatGPT first came out, I asked it to summarize the Odyssey for me. And the summary it gave was just the legendary scenes, right? Pretty much just from books five through 12 and very little else. Like its understanding of the Odyssey was Odysseus' narrative,

and the homecoming in reunion with Penelope. Everything else was out there. Now, over time, I've actually changed. So I have two ideas about this. One is those legendary things are what everybody knows anyway, it's what they walk away with. And it's actually probably what was well known about the Odyssey prior to the performance of our poem.

But it then puts the pressure on me as a Homerist to explain why all those other parts of the Odyssey are important and why they're there. Right. I mean, no, none of these retellings spend any time worrying about the telemachy. Like they have no patience for that. And so I think it's part of it's just dealing with the legendary and the mythical part of it, because the rest of the Odyssey that we know is so damn weird that people don't know what to do with it.

And so it's really forced me to rethink the Odyssey. Like, was it torturing ancient audiences the way it tortures us? Right? Yeah. That's a good question, frankly. Like...

Yeah, no, it's really, it's been really useful for me because I think, you know, Joe, with your songs, you do this too. I mean, great reception is interpretation of a poem, right? It's taking an artwork and looking at it and what it comments on is critical, but also what it can't engage with tells you something.

Yeah. Like, Joe, if we were to sit down and like lay out everything you did for the Iliad and the Odyssey, there would be interesting allusions, right? Yes. Allusions is pretty understating it. I mean, you know, like I'm listening to you talk about. So I basically leave out books nine through 12 in my version of the Odyssey or I condense them into one book.

song that imagines Odysseus as a bluesman singing about where he's been in songs called Blues and Bee. And there's all these oblique references to the different episodes.

Which I thought was interesting for a lot of reasons, but plenty of people have come listen to me play and say, I was expecting a song about the Cyclops and I was expecting a song about this to Joel's point, the stuff that everybody knows. And, and, you know, my center point is, well, if you already know it, why should I sing about it? Like, why don't I sing about something that you haven't thought about, you know? So I, I think a lot of that rang true. Yeah.

Joe, I have a question about Blues in B, actually, because after having listened to Epic, the musical, I went and listened to Your Odyssey as well. Yeah. And there was a line in Blues in B that's, but through it all, the world never got the best of me. Yeah. And to me, that line reads as ambiguous because you could read it as the world never bested me. Mm-hmm.

But like after listening to Epic is like and everything Odysseus goes through is being very human and almost monstrous. It's like they never got the best version of me. And I was wondering if that was intentional or unintentional in the wording. Well, now it's intentional that you brought it up that way.

It works. I mean, the audience is always right. Nobody is bigger proof of that than me, Joel. Every performance and audience member finds something in my work that I don't remember intending, but it's a better version of what I thought I intended, which is really beautiful. And actually, it was a turning point for me when I learned to lean into that because I

You know, I wrote that piece now 20, oh, geez, 24 years ago. And that recording is from 2010. And that's so that recording is from 300 performances ago, at least at this point, maybe more.

So I think I meant it more as the first one. But ambiguity is sort of the hallmark of what I did. Like I went with a lot less is more and I went with no narrative as compared to Epic, which is sort of way more highly narrative than like that to me is the sort of we can slide right into it. But this sort of sleight of hand of saying it's like a musical is...

is not true like in musicals you don't sing like i have a hat on because you're on stage wearing a hat and you don't have to tell the audience and so he's he's doing something like really interesting that's a lot more to me like a bard where he's painting a picture for the audience like that you can listen to in your car to your point joel and like telling you setting up and then telling you the emotional part of it and sort of exploding these little moments and it's

it's kind of messy in a beautiful way and that it's neither it's neither it's nothing. It's its own genre almost, I think like that's that was kind of as I thought about it more. I think that's, you know, and there are positives and negatives or just differences of that approach as well compared to others. So, yes, I did mean that, Christy. That's what I meant by that. Like I said, I don't know if I would have.

brought that reading into it had I not listened to Epic first and really thought about this question again because as we've talked about in the return, I'm much more about the Iliad and everyone already knows Achilles is a very complicated character and talking about him and talking about war to me has always been much more

front and center in the Iliad and less so in the Odyssey, but people are bringing that reading to it a lot more. And so like, I think epic and like more recent discussions has really started to make me think more of Odysseus as someone suffering from 10 years of warfare. And again, why I liked the return is like, well, why did it take him 10 years? Sure. That you could have this grand narrative of like all of these obstacles in his way. But at the end of the day, he's like, feels like a broken man. Yeah.

And what is he returning home to? Like, is that how how like how do you do that? And well, and I think these questions, though, are exactly the things that animate the receptions. Right. You know, and this is in a way no different from what happened in past performances, like in antiquity when people were rewriting.

the story coming up with new explanations all the time to tell different to sort of tweak the narrative I mean there are radical things of course like Helen being replaced by a cloud Helen and like spending all of her time in Egypt you know or Odysseus having a different version of events where we actually spent all that time in Crete uh

But I think that the fascinating thing about this as I go through, I'm looking at the track titles and reminding myself is how many of them actually acknowledge Odysseus's violence and failure.

Like the song 600 Men, or just opening with the opening songs, A Horse and the Infant. There is no attempt to say Odysseus has not done monstrous things.

Like that is very different from, say, a typical essay about Odysseus from the 20th century. It's hitting it straight on. But instead of saying he's a monster, we need to get rid of him. Right. Or trying to retell the story by recuperating someone else's narrative.

It gives, tries to give some reasons. And what's interesting about this is where I think the return makes him traumatized and makes his violence an outcropping of his suffering.

I think the more dangerous thing about Epic the Musical is Odysseus doesn't ever seem to be uncalculated to me. Right? Like, he seems to be a means, ends justifies the means type of character. And I'm wondering to what extent is this a cultural mirror for our attitude towards violence and colonialism? And I'm not saying that the author, sorry, the creator of this means that. Right?

Right. I do want to be a part. Like if we could get them in conversation, I'd want to be like, so how do you feel about Odysseus? Like I'd want to know a little more if we're being rope-a-doped into rooting for a guy who the creator actually knows is really still terrible at the end. Right. Which again is a feat of its own because like nobody's a monster to everyone. Right. Right.

Right. Like dictators have wives and children who love them like mass murderers do as well. And so I just think that engagement with violence and slaughter and conscious decision making in that direction. I'm wondering if it could have been made in a different century at all. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that was we with Liv. I talked a little bit about the song Monster because what it does is it's this opportunity for Odysseus to put himself in everyone else's shoes that he's come across and rethink about, like, well, why they did why they enacted violence against me and my men.

Because he does it for Cyclops, does it for Cersei, and I think there's a couple other characters. But it also just ends up being a justification for his own actions, which again, opens with throwing a baby off the wall. And it's interesting too, because it's presented as...

He had no real choice because Zeus is telling him, well, either you do this or you and your whole entire family die. And that's kind of, that's something I pointed out with this class I did on mass killing events across time is like, what ultimately gets people to commit the most atrocious acts against others. It's the threat against yourself or those you care about. Like that's just it. And, and,

Odysseus' whole justification the entire time is I'm doing this for mostly my wife, kind of my son too. And I think what's hard about Epic, and I've seen recently that there's some missing songs. There's one song that gives kind of the, like, how did Odysseus and Penelope get together? Like, why are they, why is he so obsessed with Penelope?

Because that's never really a given in epic. We just know he is. That's a great example of there's a line or two you could pluck in and go in and create a whole world around this thing that is just presented to you in behavior or, you know, and never explained, which I'd love to hear that. I think that would be, you know, I have my own ideas, but I think that's really an interesting thought.

Well, then, so maybe there are some other specific things I want to talk about, but maybe we go back to Joe's earlier comment about the genre and the form. Because I do think that is what is sneaky radical about this as well. It's not just the adaptation of the Odyssey, but I've had the conversation several times with my kids where they've said, oh, are they going to stage this now? Are we going to be able to go see this whole thing? And I said, well, what would it be like?

How would that work? Like, how long would it be? And then we've also, I don't know if you guys have watched the videos, right? TikTok videos that have been on YouTube. But I just, after seeing them, I don't know if it's possible to stage it in a way that is as powerful.

Like I will confess to I have I've cried while listening to it and watching it. I mean, the some of the arrangements are beautiful. Some of the harmonies are just beyond and the vocalists they have really pushed what at times are an almost unsingable melody to to an extent like to to make it seem easy.

And that, like, you know, Joe, we talked about this some before, but I had some experience in this with reading Greek tragedy online and the different experience of the intimacy of the performances on the small screen. Right. And also the compression of the sound.

When you compose music and vocals for the purely digital environment, not for the open soundscape of a large auditorium, it's different. And so I wonder how much of it would even sound good in a large auditorium. I'm sure they could figure that out. But there's something about that.

the intimacy of the experience that is so different from every other engagement we have right now. Because you're sitting there and people aren't sitting in a room

with thousands of people watching this. It's on their phone, right? Or their computer. Right. And you have this direct access to the creator and it being released over time. It's a serial musical that's not a musical. That's also a sustained engagement with an epic and then literary and reception, reception tradition.

And I'm still working my way through what that means, but also how it's forced me to reconsider ancient epics. Joe, I mean, you've done something similar, right, with your work, but then something very different because it's live and it's always got people and it's iterated.

Yeah, I think all the things you just raised when I was thinking about, you know, if I were trying to build a musical out of a more conventional stage musical, which actually I've been doing with my Iliad piece for the last three years. So I know the pain of trying to hold on as much as possible to these things that work in one realm, but understanding that they're not meant for this other realm. You know, I've had the experience of somebody much better at theater than me basically trying

telling me for 36 hours, everything that didn't work about my version of for this new medium, a kind woman named Ellen McLaughlin, who's a wonderful actress who did a great job helping me re-envision it. But like if I were building a stage musical out of Epic,

I would take one line from it. I would take the line, ruthlessness is mercy on yourself. Is that the line? Something like Joel might have it there. I would build the entire musical on that one line. Like I would just start with that. Because to me, that's a really salient kind of like fascinating, concise line.

explanation germ slash origin story like you're talking about. And I would, you know, I don't know what else would stick around, but that's the thing that stuck with me as being would translate to this environment of, you know, this different environment you're talking about. It's funny because when I wrote my Odyssey, I was

really hell-bent and committed to not letting it be documented. I spent the first decade, that recording of it you listened to was a decade after I wrote it. And that's the first recording I did. I would prohibit videotaping, video recording in my performances. And I had people take down video performances of it off the internet if I found out that they did it. Because I was so...

to this idea of something impermanent about it. Like exactly what you're talking about, Joel. I want this to only be an experience and I want it to be special and I don't want people to know what they're walking into before they see it, things like that. And that really guided like so much of what I did, probably to the point of hurting my career with it. I think if I had gotten on board with documenting it earlier,

But my point being is this epic is so self-consciously harnessing the exact opposite. Like Joel said, it's created for this digital realm. It's not, it's sort of, again, a sleight of hand, like it's an oral performance, but it's not. It's a highly processed, highly produced, sophisticated as heck, you know, presentation with visual aspects to it that you don't need, but certainly are like

became just as important to the engaging in it as the audio. And it's like, I don't know how you untangle... Clearly, once it took off and he got juice behind it, he very self-consciously wrote the rest of it engaging in these aspects of it. So I don't know how you would... You'd almost need to do a full adaptation of an adaptation. And yeah, I don't know if that makes sense. But it does. And Joe...

I've got an idea. But it's been part, I'm going to go back a little and tell you about this idea because I think it matters. But before that, I do want to say that one of the remarkable things about this with the videos that's important is that you have

bodies, skin colors, people from different backgrounds who are singing these songs and involved who would not have been involved 30, 40 years ago. And so just as a reception, it's an astounding accomplishment. And I don't know if it was intentional, but I'm going to assume that everything was.

Right. Because I think it's also important in the traction it's gotten with people under a certain age. Right. So, yes, some of it's cheesy. Some of it's weird. They have to learn. They may not know what's going on with, say, you know, the one with the Lotus Eaters. Which one is that? Is that open?

Open arms. Yeah. Yeah. But they do see people who look like them and who seem like they're fans. Right. Like this is a fandom driven piece at this point. Which is important because too often in the Academy, especially we look down on fandom. Right. But I think, Joe, the model for this has made me rethink fandom.

Again, ancient performances. And I think you saw the version of this, which was my piece where I compared the performance of the Iliad to the video recording of the Stop Making Sense performance video.

Right. And so if we look at the 40 songs and the B sides that haven't been released in the same way, what we have is a series of episodes that I think are equivalent to the way that Epic was performed episodically in antiquity.

You would never get every possible story told at once. You don't start the Rage of Achilles with the story of Paris, but that story is somewhere there in the background and someone could have sung that song if they wanted to. So the model for a stage performance, I think, would be closer to rock opera than traditional stage. That's what we kind of figured out.

Yeah, but it would be, all right, we've got two or three hours. We're going to do this. We're going to expand some songs, truncate others, throw others out and surprise, here are some new ones to go with it. Right. Because it's about creating a new text for the experience that may not fit the same way.

one. Right. So, Joe, it's like with you right now to create a stage experience of your long work, you're making adaptations for the genre, but it's based on what you've done before and those experiences. So I can imagine a track list and adaptation that would work. But again, it would be a very different thing from the engagement that you get on the small screen of the Internet. Yeah.

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A couple of things I wanted to follow up with what Joel was saying was kind of rethinking how people would have experienced these stories, these songs in the past. Because like I noticed that and I think some of the comments when we were asking those listeners, you know, what song should we pick? And a lot of people talked about like how you engage with different ones differently.

Based on mood or circumstances. And I've definitely felt like when Ithaca came out, I was obsessed with the Ithaca saga for a long time. I was really obsessed with the Cyclops saga for a long time. And then lately I've been back to like the underworld and the one immediately after that, because I like that the darker tones were introduced, which makes sense for my more recent mood of events happening. So like, yeah,

I thought that was really interesting that people were instinctively picking up that you don't sit down and just listen to it from beginning to end. You engage with what it's kind of speaking to you in the moment. And that's a really cool aspect about it. The other thing that I really thought about with the visual elements and the animatics that were created, and now people are doing, they're picking other media that they like, other visual media that they like, and they're putting the songs over it to...

re-imagine characters in other media within the story, which is fascinating to watch as well. Yeah. And...

The one thing I noticed about the original animatics is you do have different artists doing different things, but they can't like certain aspects of like Athena or like little things about how you're supposed to kind of represent Odysseus became somewhat standardized. They're still individual to the artists, but like there's certain things that you like, what does Polites look like? He wears glasses for some reason, weird little elements like that.

Yeah, obviously. And what I what it made me think about is like so much of mythology that we forget about in the ancient world is visual. Like those stories were visually told as well. I love Greek pottery for that reason is like you can go and see these stories being these scenes and you can fill in with your knowledge like what happened before this story.

picture after this picture like what is the overall story this is telling and now I just imagine like a painter humming along part of

the Iliad or the Odyssey as they're painting out this scene. Yeah, that's that, that the visual thing, I'm glad we're talking about it because I think that's just as important in a sense as the audio or it's, it's, it wound up shaping the back half of it clearly once he got community involved to that level and it built up this whole world that, you know,

You don't have to just listen to it in your car. You can engage in it visually. And maybe that's good or bad. Maybe the visual engagement is a little like it's it's narrowing what you can think of it. Well, I can't see politics as anything but a glasses wearer now. OK, well, but I mean, that's that's a great.

That's a real-time example of how these things work and how the narrative is shaped and how the meaning is shaped by every little thing that goes into a retelling based on the technologies that are available at the time. I got a chance to see how my songs played in Zoom during the pandemic that I'd been playing in person for years.

almost 20 years at that point, right? So I got to see how a medium innovation or a forced limitation or whatever it was, the same material played in a different medium, you know, just like going from oral to writing. And now like nobody could have written a viral TikTok musical

until six years ago because there wasn't TikTok. It's like your point bringing up David Byrne, who's a genius. He has this book, How Music Works, and he talks about how creativity is always subject to whatever limitations it's going to be presented in and how we think of the limitations always or the opportunities always drive way more of the creative process than people who are listening to it think about. And that could not be more Homeric. Yeah.

as an observation to me.

Also, I think what both of you are bringing out, and I just want to clarify to make sure we're on the same page, but also for everyone listening, is that collaborative influence that leads to some assimilation over time is exactly an indication of how ancient poetry and performance worked. You're talking about standardization of iconography for the characters. There wasn't someone in charge saying, Paulides needs glasses. Someone did it.

someone else liked it. Those images were preferred by people viewing them. And the artist assimilated over time because it became a stock feature, a grammar of the shared experience. And there was nobody in charge of that.

And so that's where like this whole, the model itself, like the five year journey into the Odyssey that created it. I mean, how much of what was created was reliant on audience engagement response, the fandom, right, Joe, what you said about how you can feel in the music, the acceleration of what happens after people get more engaged. I mean, one, to go back to your point about the technology facilitating it,

You can't get real-time independent audience feedback while you're performing, Joe, and change the song to adapt to them. You may hit notes differently. You may hold something longer. Over time, you change the way the songs flow based on audience feedback, but the real-time instant feedback of the internet.

especially in a period where a majority of people were sitting around in their homes, but facilitated the shaping of this, which again reminds us of how much historical context feeds back into the shaping of art, not just its content, but its form as well. And so that's one of the things about this that I think is also really important. Like we say, well, this person created it.

it right but like all of these songs you know all of the audience engagement the passion about it i mean that it's not the tail that wags the dog but it's kind of getting close it's a partnership no but it's a partnership yeah it's you know it's it's complex and it it it's also not a one-way street it goes over time back and forth you know there's clearly still one person who is

has his intention at the beginning of it, but when it's being informed that much by this real-time feedback, if he had written 40 songs without taking audience feedback, they'd look a lot different than 40 songs that are spaced out in groups of whatever, four or five over time. I'm wondering if part of why this went viral, especially as a new type, I would argue a new type of media, is the fact that

You know, we talked about the return. Christopher Nolan's Odyssey coming out. Wait, what? Yeah, I know, right? I know, I'm bringing it back. It's this, like, I had to engage with a lot of Ridley Scott for my paper on Gladiator and Gladiator 2. And it's kind of...

It seems much less open. Like the creator gets, it feels like the creator gets to decide everything. And then you get this finished product at the end. You don't get to see the input that goes into it because it's still within the realm of what appears to be specialists, right? Like screenwriters, producers, and all of that. And like the audience feels very detached.

from the creative process. Now that's not necessarily true. Obviously, cultural knowledge of the story very much informs the way the creator decides to tell it. But this process was different because it had that much more give and take.

that clarity, like, you know, Jay would go on and be like, oh, here's some, I, here's some questions that people had about like these musical notes or here's like some misunderstood lines in the chorus that I, you know, it's like, I want to talk about and, and,

And so he's very much engaging with like what could be the flaws within the music with the audience and they get to be, feel more involved in the creative process because he's having that open conversation throughout. And I think that's something that's very much appreciated. Like there's this aspect of authenticity that younger people really like in their, their creators, their content creators at this point. But again, that also feels much more ancient than modern in a lot of ways. Yeah.

Well, I think there's, you know, you're pointing out something I really hadn't thought about, but I think it's crucial, right? Even the return or in addition to Nolan's movies, these are finished cultural products that are sold to you. Yeah. Right. They're just given to you. You didn't ask for them. Right. Nobody said Pasolini, make me, make me a return. Right. It just happened. Right. But when you, you know, a crucial part of fandom. Right.

right especially at the level of the peak that you get with uh around epic the musical is the the feeling of ownership and about it right you get to watch it develop right joe it's like when we were kids and like if you found out about the pixies before everybody else did right like you were cool and like you had purchase on it but there was a lot yeah yeah everybody i was into nirvana before they went mainstream like sure nobody listened to

It's really not that good. Sorry. So, no, but it developed over five years and people got to watch it come out. They got feedback. They felt ownership about it. And again, I think that's a part of the, you know, the responsiveness of the artist. But also it's about the technology.

technology, right? Because you just, you feel like it's right at your fingertips. You watch it changing over time. And I think Christy, you're absolutely correct as well, that, that, that feeling of ownership about our story, right. And the story we shaped together had to be part of it, of ancient performances as well. Though I will say, and maybe this is just a difference in either age or age,

or something else, like that idea of taking audience feedback on something I write and integrate it sounds like a fucking nightmare. Pardon my French. I don't think it's easy.

I mean, I don't, I don't, I mean, if that is his process, I clearly, it clearly was part of the success of it of why it's connected. And there's no right or wrong and nobody's process, like your process is your process. But I just, I don't know. That's incredible. Let me just say that. Yeah.

I think he still had to have had a vision throughout because themes you saw in the very first few epics definitely pay out at the end. It never felt like anything...

There wasn't a thread left at the end that hadn't been tied, it felt like. No. I mean, all of it's kind of creator's sleight of hand in some sense, which is great. But everybody does it in some way. It got me thinking about, though, if I wrote my Odyssey piece in 2001 and 2002 in a bedroom by myself with just my dog.

Like if I had had the technology to start like leaking those songs one at a time, like I probably would have and it would have shaped my final result. Like my own art was like at the time I just had my bedroom and an acoustic guitar. Yeah. Like that's all, you know, I had. I couldn't I didn't even record it till 10 minutes late until 10, 10 years later. So.

And so I'm thinking if there's a different metaphor or analogy for this, maybe something to consider both for this and for ancient material is a long form television show that starts out with like lots of open ending things. But over time, it keeps getting trapped by decisions it's made until it has nowhere else to go. Because, you know, if we were to go back and listen to early ones, I think you're right, Christy, that a lot of the

are there. But once you get an audience involved and you release things, you can't backtrack easily. You can't retcon it. Yeah, you get trapped into the thematic flow regardless of whether or not you still agree with it. I think of like how

Go ahead, Joe. No, no, I was just going to say that's that I was kind of, I think we were headed this direction anyway. So, you know, the art of preserving something though, that's where you can't go back with it. Right. So like, you know, a bard can take feedback and like make an adaptation in the story the next night he or she tells it, if there's no record of it, right.

You can backtrack, you know, it's like, it's like, it's like when, when Helen, you know, like in what is either book or three or four where Helen tells the story and mental is just like, wait a minute, that's not how this went. Like, you know, perfect example, like, like of oral culture being able to revise, you know, competing stories. Right. Like, so the act of preserving it to me and being locked into that, you know, like choose your own adventure. You can't go back at this point unless you,

you know, you do something dumb like in Star Wars where at the beginning of nine you go, psych! She was actually... Sorry, spoiler alert, everybody. But I...

But I mean, that's a great like I that was you just put it perfectly where it's like you can't you make decisions and you start narrowing that thing. And that's where technology, you know, the audience remembers. Right. I mean, that is the flip side of having such a dedicated audience is that they probably know your lyrics better than you do.

Totally. Right. Yeah. And like by the end. And so that's where like one of the things, because maybe we can talk a little bit more about some of the content and interpretive moves that that's made in these songs. But to go back to Love in Paradise. Right. Again, my favorite. But, you know, the idea that he is haunted by his losses and the men who have died.

It's powerful and I love it, but I don't see that same type of emotional complexity in the Ithaca saga.

I'm wondering, and I didn't follow in real time audience response, but I'm wondering if there just wasn't room for an Odysseus who wasn't rational and romantic at the end. Yeah, I feel like some of it got unloaded on the suitors, which is something we talked about with the return as well. Like, I love, shoot, the song after the challenge, Hold Him Down. I love that song with how

It is. And I think I talked about in our episode covering it, the like lines of of them planning to rape people.

her is is said quietly and calmly just laying out in but in this flowerly language that never comes out and says rape right and like it's beautiful and terrifying at the same time and like to me that was that was a really powerful song but to put it just on the suitors

feels wholly unfair to all the men in, in, in the epic poem. Uh, cause that, that is a tool of terror. Yeah. And so is that, that, that desire. And so we'll, it seems pretty essentially modern, if not modern Western American to sanitize one person, to let there be a hero, uh,

I'm still struggling with that in this whole performance. Because, Joe, you brought up the song Ruthlessness before, right? And one of the creative things about this interpretation is the cause that, if I'm following the narrative right, is the cause that it gives for Odysseus' prolonged suffering. And that's that Athena wanted him to kill Polyphemus. And he didn't. He only blinded him. And Odysseus...

poses that as an act of mercy. And so what's different about this Odysseus from the return is that he makes ethical statements. He says it would be wrong to kill Paul of Phoebus.

right he's the monster and so like you know those of us who know the Odyssey are like wait he didn't kill him because of a strategy because he needed to move the big stupid stone right so then we get like I just I'm trying to figure out what it does to the Odyssey Joe and you brought up so I'm going to put this on you what it does to an interpretation of the Odyssey to have Athena being punishing him for not killing Polyphemus yeah

Well, that's all that's that's all the time we have for this podcast. Well, and I think that goes to like the discussion I had with Liv and this overall critique. And I what I compare it to in my experience in a lot of ways is Disney's Hercules Zeus of the loving father figure.

And that is by far not in any way how most people would imagine Zeus. They would imagine Jeff Goldblum from Chaos instead, being a little bit more accurate to the depiction of Zeus. But that was one of my first introductions to Zeus as a Greek mythological figure. And I still love that movie, but like...

I, I'm trying to decide if like, is it problematic that that was my introduction to Zeus? Is it problematic that the epic, the musical is a, the introduction for a lot of people to the character of Odysseus as a loving husband trying to get back home? Yeah. He,

Commit some violent acts, but that's okay. Because frankly, that's okay in America. If you're doing it for the people you love or self-defense, it's acceptable. Like that is kind of showing us what our world is like currently. And when we were talking to Wren, she pointed out, it's like, you know, I am really sick and tired of media keeps showing me these stories of men who cheat on their wives.

And that's a broader problem in popular media is like, what is a good male figure as a father, as a husband? And it's really sad that like most people can only point to Bandit from Bluey right now as like a really good example. All right.

I'll interrupt and then go back into the flow there. So my son, my son was 13, has a theory about why kids love Bluey so much. Right. And the theory is this. He says, in every episode, the parents spend all their time playing with the kids and paying attention to them. And kids like it because that's not what happens in real life and their parents aren't as good. Wow.

Yeah, I looked at it when he said that. I'm like, are you trying to tell me something? He's like, it's just the way it is. But I think that's why adults like it too, right? Like it is an idealized version of what they want the relationship to look like with their children and their spouse. And okay, we're getting on a weird blue side. No, I think though, I mean, it has a weird parallel and it's like what, you know, if there's a lot of different things you can take out of a story, which is the reason why

to me that, you know, things stay relevant is that they open themselves up to being relevant in a lot of different situations and not just one specific angle. Then of course, you're going to, you're going to have times when certain, certain parts of a story are heightened and more engaged with, because like Joel said of cultural, you know, current cultural environments or what have you, I don't like,

I think the desire to analyze Odysseus as good or bad is... It's not... I don't want to say it's flawed, but the story to me is much more than that, is open to much more than that. I understand it because of course people do, right? But I'll never forget, I saw... I think it was Richard... I know it was Richard Martin give a talk about the word hero being connected to Horus, to Borderstone, right? Because there were these...

or heroes, mythical heroes who protected these cities, right? As their warrior cult or what have you. And like, so this idea of Odysseus as good or bad wasn't really why he came around. The story of him came around. He came around because he was powerful and he could protect

your city from other. So like you said something, Joel, I think you wrote this last week about epic being about the consequences of people with power behaving a certain way, you know? And I think that's so, that's what's interesting to me about this story. I think. I think you're right. Totally, Joe. And I want to, I want to riff on that a minute and I want to, I want to try to present an interpretation of the depiction of Odysseus here that is redemptive.

Right. Or maybe not Redemptive for Odysseus, but for the play. And that's that. Let's go back to the Odyssey itself. Joe, you and I have talked about this so much, but won't hurt rehearsing. I'm always saying people misinterpret the Odyssey. Right. But that's probably wrong. The way I should say it is they don't see in it what I see.

And, you know, I present my interpretations as correctives because we've lionized Odysseus, not based on what's in the poem, but based on our desire for men and leaders and heroes to be good. But what the Odyssey is really about at some fundamental level is the cost of survival. Yeah. Right. Is the cost of living in a world that's not simple. At some level,

Hector's world is simple. You kill or you get killed. There are no choices there. And that's part of the tragedy of the Odyssey is the people, sorry, the Iliad is the people who have choices are

choose to fight and be in a position where they no longer have choices, right? And so the Odyssey, you know, the way I talk about it, you know, in class is I say the Iliad is a poem that teaches you about death and how to die. And it's simple. The Odyssey is a poem about what it means to survive and how hard it is to go on living. And so Odysseus in this telling, I mean, what I respect about it, I think what we have to sort of anchor ourselves to is that

they don't lie about Odysseus's murders, right? Everything there. Like he lays everything out except for the, um, infidelity. And I, I mean, you know, not to be contrary to your comments, Christy, but I actually think our society doesn't give a shit about people being unfaithful at some basic level. Yeah. They're just like, whatever, like Tony Soprano did it. Nobody cared. Yeah. Um, that's maybe the one thing about Walter White, um, in, in, uh,

Breaking Bad that's surprising, right? Like, oh, he does do it all for his family in a way. But we hear about the killing of an infant. We start out with that, losing all of his men. We have the slaughter at the end. And so I just don't think the poem, sorry, the song celebrates it. They acknowledge it and they give him the humanizing thing of the romantic story in the end.

And so I'm wondering if we can read it as that cost value situation, right? Odysseus, like anybody else has gone to war, has done terrible things and that's who he is. But this is still someone who can feel love. And because we have this notion in the simplicity of our storytelling that there are bad people, there are psychopaths, there are serial killers, there are dictators, they're bad.

But the fact is, they were little kids. They're human. They're human. People fell in love with them. They're human. Yeah, they're human. And maybe the complexity that we're uncomfortable with here is that as well. The truth is, nobody's fully good or bad. And some of us who seem good all the time have probably done things that...

fall far below our own standards. - Christy, you brought up that song, if we could go back to a specific song, "Hold Them Down," which I think is like, as somebody who's tried to write about the violence in Epic from a first person point of view and struggled with it pretty mightily,

Like that song to me was one of my favorites. I think an interesting thing, I'm sure Jay's listening and he'll take my notes on this. But no, like I would have had that song reprised and sung by Odysseus and Telemachus about the enslaved women. Like that's the type of thing to me that would make for like,

a full picture of this or a fuller picture, a different picture. Like there are, to me, there are so many songs like that song does a great job. That is a, like a menacing song. And it, especially in the style of music that he's writing, it'd be, it's so easy to like, go like murder jazz hands, you know? And you're like, well, that's not, you know, murder jazz.

But it's like that song is really lyrically like, like really bold. And it's a I know that from walking that line with with that, you know, I just I would love to see it also in Odysseus's mouth or Telemachus's mouth. I think that would be powerful. Imagine a supercut though as it is.

I love the bow scene and the murder and the return with that music. Yeah. To sort of make us think about it. Yeah. But for me, I mean, so to me that indicates that they never gave up on Odysseus as having the monstrous capability from infant and the horse to that one. Right. But it does, but I just can't, you know, get my simple mind around the fact that book 24 isn't there at all. Um,

You know, maybe Joe to fix the return and this you and I need to collaborate and do a book 24th the musical. See, I mean, that would be awesome. First of all, I'd be way into an entire musical on book 24. Like starting. I mean, that would be.

That's just the type of thing that nobody but the two of us would like, Joel. I would be totally in there. Maybe Christy too, but maybe three of us. I'm here to jam out, as in listen. Even professional Homerists don't like Book 24. They'd be like, what is this garbage? I love Book 24. How I learned to stop worrying and love Book 24 could be the title of my whole book.

And it was a real revelation for me for two things. One, I think if you see book 24 as book 48 of both of them, I think it's incredible. I think that's the way I think about it. And I don't know if it's intentional. I just feel like we could end and begin so many articles about the Odyssey with just that line. Joe Goodkin says, book 24 is book 48 of Homer. And talk about mine.

Talk about the realness, which is a word that I always just attach to all epic stories. They're powerful because they're something real about humanity. And true, really. Actually, maybe that's better. Like truth rather than reality. The idea that you can come home and kill a hundred some people

and not wake up the next morning after you sleep with your wife and have to deal with it. Like that's the most like how you come home matters. Like that's a perfect example. It's not, it's beautiful because it's real. It's not, you know, I don't struggle with it at all. I think it's, I think it's perfect, but you can use that Joel too, if you want. Joe Goodkin thinks it's perfect. No, cause it makes me think like, you know, I think the best and no, not maybe the best, but one of the most memorable depictions of,

of a warrior coming home and losing his shit. Is Rambo first blood? No. I agree. I don't know if you've seen it recently. The later, like what Stallone became and what Rambo became made it impossible for people to remember that. But first blood, like he comes, he freaks out, he kills a bunch of people and he ends up in prison. The end. Like it's real. Like if this were myth, we would say the myth is saying,

society can't accommodate the damage done to veterans in its honor. Right. Which you can also say about the record, What's Going On, the Marvin Gaye record. That's about a Vietnam veteran coming home and being alienated from his society, right? Like it's the same, it's less violent, I guess, but you know.

No, but that's what makes it even more disturbing. More real. The later Rambo movie weaponizes our warriors and sends them off to fight in Afghanistan before we even knew that was going to happen. Right. This is Paige DeSorbo from Giggly Squad. Boost Mobile is no longer that prepaid wireless company you remember. They've invested billions into building their own 5G towers across America. With Boost Mobile's networks, customers enjoy the speed and service they'd expect from the big three.

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well that brings me to a question joe i had about your odyssey compared to both the return and epic the musical is that in those ones it is penelope convincing odysseus that they he there's still humanity to him they're still the man she fell in love with again we have no idea why penelope is obsessed with odysseus in the epic the musical

And she's arguing, you know, trying to convince him. It's like, no, no, there's still something here that we can build from going forward. And you have Odysseus making that argument in yours. Okay. So I think this is where I will, I just said I was not going to comment on my own work in that way, but I'm going to. So I assume you're talking about the lines. I'm still here and it's still clear.

Right. Okay. To me, what I thought of, what I intended when I wrote that was that you don't believe him when he says that. Like, I think he's lying, clearly. Like, because he's trying to tell her he hasn't changed. And he's lying. He's coming home after 10 years of war. Like, he's doing what Odysseus does, which is trying to

Which is using words to try to get his way, right? So I intended that to be more ambiguous than him taking on that role. He's desperate at that point. That's the way I thought. And this is a weird connection to a movie that... But I imagined in...

just like in the blues brothers when john blushi is down on his knees in the sewer trying to you know convince carrie fisher not to shoot him and he's just like the dry cleaning was late like i you know i i didn't took the trash out i got locked out like that was my vision of a

strangely enough, that was my vision of him. But I like that version. Because again, that felt more real, like who is this woman who's waited 20 years for a man and expected nothing about him or their relationship to have changed? Like that is what frustrates me about Penelope in those versions. And that's why I like Circe's Penelope because oh, he's finally shown up and he's kind of destroyed our lives as we know it. Right? Well, it's looking at

You know, I think you're absolutely right there, Christy, because one of the things I really struggled with with the Ithaca saga is the "Will you fall in love with me again?" one. Because Odysseus, like, again, I want to give props to the depiction of Odysseus because this Odysseus is not being manipulative. Like, the lyrics are, "I'm not the man you fell in love with. I'm not the man you once adored. I'm not your kind and gentle husband. I'm not the love you knew before."

And then she says, well, what kinds of things did you do? It's like, I left a trail of red on every island. I traded friends objects I could use, hurt more lives than I could count on my hands. But all that was to bring me back to you. And then she says almost nothing. All we get from her is like, hey, hey, can you just...

can can you just check the bed over there like is it still the thing and so it reminds me like no something far more complicated and interesting to me if we're thinking about relationship is have you guys seen the show homeland i know of it but i haven't seen it so season one so the basic premise is this guy the main character was missing in action he's a prisoner of war for like

years with terrorists and he comes home and the whole question of the first season is whether or not he's been turned into an Islamic terrorist during his time and so he's got the care he's married to you know he comes home his wife his like

cooked up with somebody else because it's been like five years like they bury that um she finds him secretly praying unable of being like sleeping in bed like not being intimate with her um and that gives us a whole season of complexity right and so i'm wondering how much of like

The inability of Penelope to be a complex figure here is about the form that we were talking about before, or the focus, which is really just Odysseus. Because I think, to go back to what you said, Christy, there's a real lost opportunity here. Because what's amazing about Penelope, even in the return, is you don't really know what she thinks until that terrible...

Terrible line. Telemachus, this is your father. No, no, no. The ambiguity of Penelope is part of what's amazing. Here she's just placeholder.

But that's part of the challenge of, you know, 24 books, 12,000 lines. And, you know, another thing I think you would do that would make a stronger state actual stage production is you'd have to get rid of a lot of stuff and give more time to exactly to these other characters, you know, like you have to give a lot of time to the trio of family members. That's, that's where the, you know, if you're really talking about a homecoming, you have to give,

five songs to Penelope and you got to give five songs in that format. You know, it's okay to still have, you know, a dozen for Odysseus because of course you would, but you know, you need to, it's really hard if you're going to give the Cyclops like four or five songs, that's, I mean, it's great. It's great, you know, great character to write about, but it's really, really hard to make people care about more than four or five characters in this format, you know, I guess, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, that was one of my frustrations is like, we are told about Penelope throughout Epic the musical. I don't think the singer for Penelope was the same voice for the sirens. I still haven't quite figured that out for sure. So it's like we literally don't hear her voice until the final scene.

saga and yet all of this is being done for her she is the refrain for Odysseus throughout um which is really frustrating overall because again the first time you think you hear her it's even if it's the same singer it's still

a facsimile of Penelope at the end in the siren song. So, and I think, you know, to, to counterbalance them that with what's actually in the Odyssey is we have Penelope and Telemachus in book one, right? Before we see Odysseus, right?

And they have that awkward engagement. But we find out that she's really upset even by songs of homecoming. And she's given some interior emotional life. And so I think actually in the stage version, you could solve the problem with like one good song. But it has to be a really good one. It has to be up front. Yeah. And it has to be something about her choosing songs.

to take him whatever she gets something like that, right? Yeah. What I see at the end is this to go back to the whole, you know, we're all fucked up problems. We're all like bags of flesh with memories that may or may not be true. Right. At some point, you know, whether you're with someone a week or 30 years,

you choose to be with them despite the faults that both of you have pointed out in each other repeatedly, right? Like you make a choice that someone is part of your life. Yeah. I think what's difficult is like, but that's the kind of choice you make because you see them or engage with them in your life every day. This person is a stranger that has shown up and all you have is a memory of who they were. That's not the same person in front of you. So like how can, especially as a woman,

with a violent man, how can you make an informed choice that like, this is what I should choose? Yeah, I don't know. No, no, but I think that's part of the story is that maybe him coming home is her best option. Yeah.

Which could be, you know, I think again with the suitors helps with that a little bit. Like it's this guy or these guys. - I guess too like-- - And I think, you're good. - No, I was gonna say like, this is where, you know, the facet of Epic where that allows you to go in and create a backstory if things are unexplained.

Maybe sometimes you don't want to create a backstory. Maybe it's enough to just say like human beings do all sorts of make all sorts of weird ass decisions that nobody outside of them and maybe their significant other has any understanding why maybe they don't like we don't. People are capricious like they there's there's no backstory to this other than a decision that.

people of all genders have made for all sorts of reasons over thousands of years. You know, like it's, it's, I mean, I'm more intrigued. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, Joel. No, I was just saying, try this out though. Imagine if the song were to give the idea, if not direct an implication, rather than direct articulation that she knows this is,

suboptimal, but it's the best she's going to get. And she's just going to go along with it. Right. And then, you know, cause right now I think part of, I think audiences would probably rebel because I think people want to believe in the romance. They want to have that at the front.

The other way is the reality, like a lot of the times, right? And I will say, I will pull my elbow, patting myself on the back for a second. But, you know, I have two Penelope songs in my Odyssey. And I have one at the beginning and one at the end. And that's the same thing I do with Telemachus. And, you know, I put that song up front of her writing about, you know, losing her son to growing up, essentially, and being afraid of that. Because that was what I see in her character at the beginning. And I was able to think about, you know,

really my own mom, like watching me go away to college and like crying over me, forgetting my laundry basket at home. And like, I just saw, like, I saw all those same instincts of motherhood, you know, in Penelope. And then the song at the end is just not trying to explain what these two people see in one another. Um,

but to try to present that it is a, clearly there's something mutual between the two of them that, or something understood that is their own little secret or their own little mystery between the two of them. You know, this idea of like live in me, like I live in you, which is what I have her saying is just like, I don't want to explain it, but it's clearly there because of the way they're behaving. Like we see them behave a certain way. So yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, maybe, maybe, yeah, not spelling it out is probably the better way, but giving her some more complexity. Yeah. Because we all know if we are not ourselves involved in relationships, people go through terrible things and treat each other terribly, yet still stay together. And from the outside, people look at those couples and they're like, what the fuck? Like, how does this work? How can she stay with him? How can he stay with her? Yet somehow they make sense of the world.

- Yeah. Like there's no relationship really between Penelope and Telemachus. I don't even think they have a song together. They don't.

Telemachus references her. But what would be interesting then is like if she's making, and the return kind of gives this sense, like she's making these decisions to keep Telemachus safe as her young son. I think you could still do that. Like I'm still doing whatever. It's more likely that Odysseus as the father of Telemachus will keep him safe than the suitors will. And you could just frame it as she's making the decision on behalf of her son. It's funny because I think what we're circling around is that

an actual stage musical version of this would be essentially writing about all the shit that Epic the Musical doesn't write about. Yeah, pretty much. No, but I think there's like, it's in the same place, first of all. So it would make for a great stage, like you can have in the same place on Ithaca. But it's, I mean, it just shows you how much material there is to work with in the poem. When you're just like 40 songs and we're talking about the 60 that you could have written, you know, it's amazing. It's so generative and it's so,

rich and you know it's it's why it keeps providing people with inspiration to create things which is what reception is yeah yeah and i think that that was my impression almost from the first time i started listening to to epic the musical um was that it is in some ways a more powerful interpretive engagement with epic than most books about homer that i've read

I mean, it just gets in there and sees things that I think conventional scholarship and conversations fails to.

Yeah. So it's like, I don't want to keep you guys too much longer. You've been so generous with your weekend time. There is like, so one thing I read while working on gladiator stuff that really made me think about like the, the most popular engagements with Greek mythology recently, especially for younger generations is Percy Jackson and epic the musical. And someone pointed out, it's like when you were producing media, like,

at like a high cost and that's not necessarily true of Epic but like to get the most outreach you try to stay ideologically general you don't want to piss off a particular group too much

And as a result, we're given the slightly sanitized version of Odysseus. He's still problematic. Like he's not perfect. He's still human in a lot of ways, but we root for him. We want him to get the girl at the end, like just how a lot of our media is. And I think that's what's hard is then because we accept some things about Odysseus and still consider him a hero or someone worth rooting for.

Is that just so it will appeal to a larger audience of people? And is that necessarily should be the end goal? And I think Joel already kind of answered this question, right? Like this has reached so many more people. Percy Jackson, which had Western-sive influence, especially in his earlier books, but the author has worked on it since then. It's so popular because it fed into not the best aspects of our reception of the ancient world today.

Well, I think we need to be really direct to the point that this is part of what makes the Iliad and the Odyssey successful. I wouldn't call them ideologically neutral, but they're ideologically ambiguous. Two clear things that I think can be shown is, one, you can give anybody the information in the Iliad about the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, and people will have different interpretations, even though it's pretty damn clear.

but two like the odyssey especially when people talk about his political idiom is in favor of kings or not right like it can go either way it's really just a complicated exploration and so i think you know i was talking to my friend elton bark about this the other day we need to be more conscious of the extent to which ambiguity is intentional to make the uptake or acceptance of epic even higher and this is definitely the case with mass media stuff

But the thing is, it doesn't pull its punches completely. Right. Like, you know, compare this version of the Odyssey, like Epic the Musical to any earlier movie or Odysseus and Troy or Brother, Where Art Thou? Right. I mean, this acknowledges that Odysseus is not a good person and has done terrible things. Mm hmm.

I think what it does, I mean, the line I always use about Achilles and Patroclus' relationship is, which I think applies to everything you said, is everything is possible, but nothing is necessary, if that makes sense. And that's the beauty of it to me. That is what allows it. And I think, you know, your question about...

what are the costs of of of imprinting a more narrow ideology on something i i i i think it's i don't know if there's an answer to that really like i think it's the pri i think that's what reception is in some sense is it's always going to imprint and really it's you know like like joel said it people keep retelling them because they can do that like if they couldn't find all these different things in them they wouldn't retell them and that's sort of the cost is your

The solution to me or the, I don't know if you need a solution is always to just do another telling and find something different in it. And people also, and this goes to maybe the process of engaging the audience with feedback.

Like sometimes people don't know what they want until you give it to them. Like, I think it's, I think it's like, I can't remember which nineties rock singer. It was probably one of the Gallagher brothers from Oasis was just basically like, like the audience will, we'll take what we give them. Like,

Like, you know, they don't know what they want until we show it to them, basically. And I think that that's also, you know, it has some ramifications that are not great. But also, sometimes you're surprised. Like, sometimes the audience doesn't know they want something until you hand them a finished product and they go, oh, shit. Like, I didn't know I wanted, never mind, you know, or whatever, you know. All my references are 90s. Joe, you got exactly right there because I think the solution for

a bad or insidious narrative isn't to point out how it's bad or to stop spinning narrative. It's to tell a better story. To replace it with something that fills the needs more, that fills the gaps and shows how, through its performance, other narratives rely. It makes people feel something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Epic and Musical does that. I mean, again, it has millions of TikTokers caring about Odysseus.

They may have to learn that they care about a douche bag. Many a lover has had that realization. I'm going to throw up. I'm going to put something provocative out, which is that the creator went to Notre Dame, right? Is that right?

That's a great question. I thought... I'm asking it like I didn't research it. Yes. Okay. The music school, right? Like he did go for music? Is that correct? Okay. So in 2018, I performed The Odyssey at Notre Dame for the classics and theater department. And they started this in 2019. So I mean...

Jo, I was gonna say listening to your Odyssey, one of your Telemachus songs, which gives vibes to like a similar like young Hercules from Disney. Like I had really similar vibes with that, but that also really transitioned on Telemachus and the wisdom saga of just like, I don't know. I saw the parallel. I don't disagree with that possibility. - Let's have a bard off is what I'm saying. Let's have a bard off.

I will be there for it. - Yeah, for sure. - This is like the same experience I went through with "Hadestown" where people were like, "Can you believe a musical about Greek myth?" And I was like, "I can believe it 'cause I've been doing it for the last 30 years." - Honestly, like has been our favorite ways to receive Greek myth recently. Like we love "Hadestown." - Yeah. - Three of us loved "Epic." - Yeah. - Like again,

we complicate our love of it because you should that that's just what you should do but like at the end of the day i'll still listen to it and enjoy it and sing along to it so will i yep so one other question i have also is odysseus shouldn't be a tenor right he should be a baritone yeah that's what i i totally agree it really upsets me like

Like he should have, he should have an Eddie Vedder voice. Yeah. Or like a Ray LaMontagne voice or something. I don't know. Oh yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Or like, who's the guy who's in, oh, now I'm forgetting his name. He does that song, Skinny Love Bon Iver. Oh, Bon Iver. No,

No, but he used to, like, he is a baritone in normal life. And then he started singing falsetto and got successful there. Odysseus should be a shapeshifter. Oh, there you go. That's what I was thinking. It's like the falsetto could actually be a really interesting component. He should basically be Michael McDonald is what you're saying. He should be able to sing both parts of Temple of the Dogs. There you go. What a perfect 90s reference. There we go.

Well, to help us wrap up a little bit, because this is, you know,

This episode is in part to being like Liv, you know, you don't have to talk about this with us, but maybe you should listen to Epic. Do we agree that it is something that she and her listeners should listen to? Thumbs up? Give it a try. Give it a try. Absolutely. How do you, so my last question to you, you guys is how do you want to see people engage with it? Like who are newly entering it? What would you like to see their engagement look like? And then how can we as scholars and creators, um,

be a part of that process like help them to both enjoy it but also see that like there are other versions that exist out there that could be better could be worse or just more more of i mean i think i think they should just start listening by the sagas right listen then watch some of the videos to for how to do it and then the second thing

I'm going to do at least one Substack post about it to encourage people to see how it's great perception. And then I'm actually working now on a book contract to write a book about the popular reception of the Odyssey. And there's going to be a chapter that's just about the 21st century. And Epic the Musical is going to be part of it. Because what scholars can do is tell people that you can take this shit seriously because it is serious business. It's important.

Yeah, because I think that was something that Monica Serino said that was kind of funny was like, Canvas will let you do reception panels. You can't get that at the SES. They're getting close, though. I've been working on it. Joel, do you know anybody there with SES? I may be the vice president of programs, so let's see what we can do.

Ooh, good to know. But I mean, there's like a movement. I mean, even within like when I took my class on the Odyssey and it's what we would call receptions in 1992.

seven or eight, like it was in the complete department basically because, you know, and now those, those classes are in classics departments. Like, like it's full on and it takes time to see the value in them. Like, like minds have to shift, you know, like Joel's talking about and they happen because people advocate for them and see the value. And we just need to make it clear. I mean, the audiences who watch on TikTok don't care.

But my colleagues need to know that what Pausanias did by talking about the Odyssey, or Virgil did, including Odysseus, is the same thing that's happening with Epic the Musical. And Penelope Atwood, sorry, the Penelope Adram Atwood, Circe, it's all part of

critically receiving a text and re-envisioning it for your time. And to your point, like, okay, 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify or whatever, like, if

If 250 of them took ancient Greek, and I know I'm shouting into the storm, but like... Yeah, yeah. I could hire three Greek professors. That's what I mean. And it doesn't mean that that's the way they should engage with it because everybody should, but it has the potential on that scale to get people back to the source material in all sorts of different ways. Yeah. If we could get 0.01% of the people who love...

Wilson's Odyssey, who loved Epic the Musical and read Percy Jackson when they were kids to more language courses, our classes would be overflowing. Yeah. And I know, Joel, like this is something again, like I, at the heart, I got into it through the language of it, through reading it in Greek. And I'm not saying that that's like, that's clearly a very privileged way to be able to go after this stuff. But the thing that moved me and made me want to create a version of it was reading it

in the original text and connecting to other human beings through the text who have told it and other audiences that have experienced it. And, you know, if you can do that, if it's something you're interested in, you get to bypass everybody else's opinion of it and form your own. Yeah. Yeah.

Ultimately, I'm with you. I don't care what door people take to get into the room we share together. Right. But I think that having unmediated access to the past is a treasure. Yeah. Agreed. I don't know if you guys saw the reaction video I sent you, but my favorite line, it's just this YouTuber who's just reacting to the animatics of Epic, the saga. And at one point for Open Arms, he's like,

they mentioned the lotus eaters it's like oh damn the the percy jackson lotus eaters uh casino scene and i just love that like that was his connection to this part of the story and it's but like but it was also pure joy like it was like when people realize they get to make those connections like cultural connections and then like you can that's what i want people to take away is like going curious go in asking questions that's a good way to put it

My daughter started bringing the graphic novel to the car while we were listening and saying, "All right, what part of the story is this?" That's awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's a good way to wrap it up. Is there anything either of you would like to plug at the end here?

Go listen to some of these songs. Listen to Joe's music too. His Odyssey. Compare different versions. Enjoy it and make some of your own. I would say also, I hope they can make a musical of it, like a full regular. That would be awesome. If the creator or producers ever listen to this and you need someone to help in any way, I would love to see this on stage.

Oh yeah, for sure. Also, if that doesn't happen, but Jay needs a new project, Jason and the Argonauts, please. Cause I would love to see what could be done with that. Have you talked to Liv about that? No, I didn't know. It was something we mentioned in our podcast, but I'm like, you could have so much fun with Jason and the Argonauts, like Roman as reception of Greek heroes and just go from there and please have Medea.

Well, nerds, it's Liv here for the first time this episode. So wild. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening to Tuesday's episode and Friday's as well. I really wanted to do epic justice and I'm so thrilled that Christy, Joe, and Joel were able to do it for me because...

Not everything is for everyone, and that's fine. But these guys absolutely love Epic, and I could not be more obsessed with everything they just broke down about it. And maybe, just maybe, I'll have to start listening soon. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening. It means a whole damn lot.

Let's Talk About Myths, baby, is written and produced by me, Liv Albert, except in this case, because Christy did it all. Absolute queen. Michaela Pengawish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Select Music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. More on that soon. It's early in the morning and I'm recording this. I am Liv, and I absolutely love this shit.

And one final note to all of my Canadians. Thank you. We did... I mean, things aren't good, but things aren't bad. Thanks.

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