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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblot, and this is Bookworm.

Today, the great Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim is my guest.

His book, Finishing the Hat, published by Knopf, is the first volume of his collected

lyrics. It covers work from 1954 to 1981 and comes with attendant comments, principles, heresies,

grudges, wines, and anecdotes. It's one I've been waiting for eagerly. From Westside Story to merrily we roll along,

finishing the hat is a book that puts on display the enormous amount of work that Stephen Sondheim

puts into the writing of a theatre song, down to tiny concerns about A's and Oz,

thaws and butts and ands, it's an extraordinary process. I wonder, when you first

began to hear lyrics, I know they were often Oscar Hammerstein's, had the difficulty occurred

to you? No, I'd never thought about writing them. And I don't think Hammerstein's were the first

I heard. In fact, they weren't. I grew up on my father had records of people like Fats Waller and Rajin Hart. So I heard a lot of songs long before I heard of Hammerstines or even knowing, I should say, that I heard of any of Hammerstines. I probably heard some of the Hammerstein-Kern stuff, showboat, let's say, without knowing

it, but, you know, it didn't particularly interest me. So, no, it didn't, nothing really occurred

to me about the difficulties. When did they become a parent? Oh, after, after I submitted my

15-year-old show, that I say, I was 15 years old and submitted a school show that I'd written to Oscar in the

surety that he was going to produce it and asking to treat it as if he didn't know me. By that time,

I was sort of a member of his family, sort of an orphan member of his family, and had been since the age of 11.

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