HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT
AN AMERICAN MUSICAL
June 2024-January 2026
HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT
This is the history of An American Musical, formerly titled Democracy: An American Musical. I'm John McDonnell Tierney...my friends call me "Jack." To tell it properly, I need to take you back to June of 2024. At that point in my life as a composer, I had made a very clear decision: I was done with full-length musicals. Finished. Burned out. After writing and producing four of them, I had no appetite left for years-long projects that consume your calendar, your sleep, and occasionally your sanity. I had turned instead to shorter musical forms, things with beginnings, middles, and mercifully, endings.
Then the world changed.
Joe Biden was still in the race for president, and people I respected and not prone to melodrama were warning that Donald Trump was on track to win the 2024 election. At the time, their predictions felt dire. In retrospect, they barely scratched the surface. Nothing in those conversations imagined the pain, the cruelty, or the social rupture that President Trump and his allies would unleash on the country during the first year of his second term.
I did not imagine masked men shooting people in the streets, dragging them from their homes, and spreading chaos wherever they went. What I did imagine was a president whose sole interest was himself; his image, his family, his legacy: an immature adolescent in an old man’s body whose appetite for revenge appears bottomless. And most alarmingly, a man who lies almost as often as he breathes, a man who has publicly insisted, and still does, “What you’re seeing and what you’re hearing isn’t real. Believe only me.”
That realization produced genuine fear in me. Fear for myself, yes, but far more for the country my grandchildren will inherit. And fear, like all deeply felt emotions, demands a response. I support and continue to support various resistance efforts, but it seemed to me that I had something else to offer besides carrying a sign at a protest. I could do what I do? I could do what I know how to do; I could write a song...so I did.
That song was titled “Power to the People,” and it now serves as the finale of An American Musical. At the time, I told myself that I was not writing a musical, just a song. But when that one was finished, another popped into my brain, circling the same themes: democracy, freedom, voice. Then another...and another....pop, pop, pop, pop!
As the months went on, and as Trump’s agenda revealed itself with increasing clarity, I found more and more reasons, needs, really, to write songs about rights, freedom, and democratic values. Fast-forward a year and I had nearly twenty songs “in the can,” all thematically linked. It wasn’t a song cycle anymore, it was a musical in search of a book and so I wrote one (a few actually) and now, January of 2026, after nearly twenty months of work, I have both music and a book...ta da!!! A Musical!
DEVELOPMENT
The show began with roughly twenty months of steady composing and writing, during which the score and core themes took shape: freedom, voice, responsibility, love, justice, truth, and what it means to be an American. During that period I wrote, revised, and re-imagined songs not as isolated numbers, but as a body of work meant to function together as a civic, emotional, and theatrical experience. After the initial writing phase, the project moved into professional music development. I spent sixteen hours in the studio with professional singers recording a full demo of the score. That session gave the songs vocal authority, musical clarity, and a life beyond the page, making the work sharable with theaters, producers, and collaborators in a serious way. As the political climate intensified, several songs from the show began taking on lives of their own. Individual numbers were used at rallies and resistance events, becoming tools for public expression rather than just theatrical material. “We Are the People” was later featured by Town Street Theater in California as part of a recent production, marking the first time a song from the show was embedded in another company’s work. I am actively seeking other opportunities for collaboration.
In closing...
What finally carried this piece forward was not despair, but connection. An American Musical is a gathering place. A space where ordinary voices, like those you might overhear in a diner on an ordinary day, are allowed to speak, sing, argue, worry, and hope out loud. If the work does anything at all, I hope it reminds us that democracy is not an abstract idea or a historical artifact. It lives or dies only through the choices we make together, in community, one voice at a time. This is my voice.
John McDonnell Tierney
January 25, 2026