This, too. Tesori’s words on setting lyrics (written by other people) into music that brings it to life. I think Open Book does that with our clients words and ideas. We need to spot the story in what they give us, and make music with it.

“I’m not a lyricist at all, but I’ll say what my gift is: recognizing lyrics in the sea of words,” Tesori explained during a recent interview in her office at City Center, where she serves as a creative adviser. She immerses herself in her collaborators’ verbiage in various ways. She asks for what she calls “noodles,” which Kron described as “bits of lyric that didn’t make it into the lyric I built for her.” Tesori also has them read their lyrics aloud to her, sometimes “two or three times,” as Kron recalled, to glean intention from inflection.