Generally speaking, Sesame Street, Hamilton: An American Musical and McLovins shouldn’t belong in the same sentence. Unless you’re arbitrarily listing cool things, the long lasting children’s TV show, the phenomenon Broadway production and the up and coming band from Hartford, CT seemingly have little in common. That is, except Bill Sherman.
Through many twists of good fortune, the multi-talented musician, songwriter and producer went from collaborating with his college friend Lin-Manuel Miranda to landing a dream job as the Music Director on Sesame Street to connecting with McLovins’ drummer Jake Huffman, creating a wonderful musical web in the process. With the McLovins’ upcoming Ugly Christmas Sweater Party coming up on December 17th at American Beauty in New York, NY, the Grammy-award winning producer sat down with us to talk about his diverse resume.
Read on for this exclusive interview with Bill Sherman below, and find tickets for the McLovins’ Ugly Christmas Sweater Party here.
L4LM: Tell us about your work with the McLovins. How did you connect with them?
BS: The short answer for that is, Jake Huffman, the drummer for McLovins, is my ex-wife’s sister’s boyfriend. He’s sorta become like a family member to me. We became friends; he started writing songs for me for Sesame Street, and I produced his solo record. It became a situation where I had been talking with a friend of mine from high school, his name is Mike Novick – he had a similar progression of life and work as me. We lost touch and then reconnected and were looking for something to do together. I told him about Jake, I told him about the music, and then all of a sudden we were managing the McLovins!
It was this crazy, weird, natural progression, and then we produced their last record, and we’ve been trying to open doors for them and get them heard by as many people as possible. It’s been super fun. I’ve gotten to know other members of the band really well, they’re all wonderful musicians and they have such a great connection.
It’s interesting. I went to Wesleyan University and they went to Hart, right down the street, and it’s such a different concept of music there. I was a music major but I was really into West African music and I didn’t do well in the simple music courses. Those guys are killing all of the music courses with these really heavy jazz backgrounds, but the way they apply it to what they’re doing is really interesting to me. They’re really good songwriters and they really feed off each other well.
It was really fun to be in the studio with them, watch that happen. While they’re a really fantastic live entity, the way that they write songs and create in the studio is equally as interesting and equally as fun for me to be a part of.
L4LM: What was the process like in the studio with such different backgrounds?
BS: It’s interesting, we’re working on another record right as we speak. The process is the same, where – they’ve been on the road for months now, and they write from the road and send me demos or sketches of songs and ideas. We’ll send demos back and forth, and they set up a new demo studio in their basement. We’ll keep on going back and forth until we’re happy.
The last record was done over about a week total, but we did three or four songs here, and then we’d wait a couple weeks, and then three or four songs here. With this one, we’re trying to write as many songs as possible, and then whittle it down to the best twelve. It’s been fun, I think their songwriting abilities, and what they’re writing about, has matured in a way that’s really interesting. As a songwriter myself, Jake and I – Jake’s sort of the head lyricist- we go back on forth on what should we be writing about now. Given the crazy political landscape we live in right now, there’s a lot of fodder to be written about at this point.
L4LM: You mentioned that the band is touring a lot. Are you going to make it to the Ugly Sweater party?
BS: I will, of course. I do love a good Ugly Sweater party. I need to up my Ugly Sweater game. We try to do one big event every six months in the city, just to keep that line open, and this is that. I’ve never been to this venue, so I’m excited to see it. They do really well in New York, it’s a bit of a hometown audience. The last show was at Mercury Lounge, and it was really fun to open other people up to their sound, and watch them control a New York crowd. It’s always great.
L4LM: How’s the new album coming?
BS: Good! I’m guessing it’ll be out by spring or summer of next year. There are four of five tunes that are happening. When you’re writing a whole bunch of songs, you get four good ones, and every other song on the record needs to be as good as those four. We’re in that phase, figuring out what the best twelve songs are. It’s an interesting process to see what the content is about, now that we’re in this crazy new political structure. How that’s affecting songwriting, what’s important to be writing music about now.
Their sound keeps on maturing and changing a bit, too. They grew up in the jam scene and their maturing into something that’s more poppy and indie than that. The songwriting and songs have been evolving as well. This next record’s going to be real interesting to see the band’s new solid direction.
L4LM: Speaking of this political climate, I know you are one of the producers on the Hamilton album. What did you think of their recent encounter with Mike Pence?
BS: Like anything these days with politics, there are so many different sides to it. I’m happy that they said something, and I think what they said was the correct thing to say. I think the interesting argument is, is that the right venue to do it in? But really, why is this in the head of the news when so many things are happening? I think all of those questions are valid, and that, in turn, feeds my “what the fuck is going on” mentality. All of those arguments make sense to me, and all of the craziness makes sense to me too.
Overall, it’s an interesting time to be an artist. Everybody is trying to figure that out. We haven’t had a lot of protest songs recently. In the days of the Vietnam War, people were writing protest songs. In the past few years, people didn’t really do that. Now people are writing protest songs. Entertainers and musicians and artists are becoming activists again, in a way that they haven’t really been in a long time. So it’s an interesting thing to be a part of.
Also, as a songwriter, you are just constantly debating on what the best way to do that is without alienating anybody, but also trying to take a stand or say something that you would be proud of.
The Hamilton thing is nuts, period. Before the whole Mike Pence situation, but I’m proud of my friends. I think what they said was right. They weren’t attacking him, they were saying, “these are the people that are in this family, this community. Can you defend us too?” I think that’s a good statement, that doesn’t bother me. I think that’s right.
L4LM: Obviously Hamilton is the biggest Broadway sensation, possibly ever. What was it like working on that album? You worked with Lin-Manuel Miranda on In The Heights too, right?
BS: Yeah. So Lin’s been my best friend since we were in college. We went to Wesleyan together. He was the best man at my wedding; I was the best man at his wedding. We lived together for a really long time, we’ve been best friends forever.
We worked on In The Heights, and I arranged it with some of our friends. We made the In The Heights record, and that was great. Then I worked on The Electric Company and Sesame Street with PBS, and then Hamilton came around. They called me and they wanted some help producing the record with The Roots. Who would really say no to that?
The process was great. I don’t know how much you know about cast recordings. It’s a weird thing. Usually when you make a Broadway cast recording, it happens in a day or two. The orchestra comes in, they record the music. The singers come in, they sing the music. It’s two days, and they mix it for about a week or two, and then it’s done.
Hamilton took almost a month and a half, from tracking to mixing to mastering, which is never something that happens. Atlantic Records, who is signed on to put it out, were really committed to making the Hamilton record a “record record” as opposed to just being a cast recording. We were in the studio with Questlove and all of these other guys, figuring out how to make it pop and zing a little harder, and make it really sound like a hip hop record as opposed to just sounding like a Broadway record. If you listen to it, it really does. It was a way to take the theatricalness of it all, but really make it a record that you’d want to listen to.
L4LM: How did The Roots get involved with it?
BS: One of the guys at Atlantic in A&R who’s been a hip hop impresario for many years, he championed Hamilton after seeing it early on. He brought in The Roots, who saw Hamilton and were so struck by it that they signed on immediately.
Funny enough, I’ve become fairly good friends with Ahmir [Thompson], with Questlove, and he does this radio show for Pandora called Questlove Supreme, and I am a co-host of his radio show. He’s a big fan of Sesame Street, so he’s written songs for me for Sesame Street and I am on his radio show, so we’ve become really good friends. Initially they just got involved because they were into Hamilton and they wanted to make an impact, and they had never worked on a cast recording and it was something that interested them a lot, so they signed on. It made a lot of sense.
L4LM: I’m personally just a huge fan of Hamilton, and how well it comes across as a standalone hip hop album.
BS: Well thank you, I appreciate it. It’s a fascinating thing. I work for Sesame Street, and so I meet people whose kids love Sesame Street equally as I do meet people who love the Hamilton record. It’s a weird thing that they’re in the same social group, it’s very funny to me.
But yeah, it’s unbelievable what it’s doing for people, and how much they’re learning about American History, for God’s sake. It’s fantastic. I tell people when they ask me about it. It’s like strapping yourself in this hurricane, holding on as tight as you can, and wherever the hurricane takes you, you just go.
We produced this record, we won all of these awards. People seem to really be into it. You get to work with these great people, and the cast was wonderful, and blah blah blah. Here we are.
L4LM: When you started on it, was the Hamilton mania as strong as it is now?
BS: It was off-Broadway, we were getting ready to do it. Rehearsals for Broadway is usually when the cast recording is made, so we did that in August or September of last year. Then it opened some time in September.
The buzz about that show was never little. It was pretty great. It wasn’t insane yet, but once the record came out it got more and more insane. It became gold and then platinum really fast, and now it’s double platinum. I’ve produced a bunch of records and written a lot of songs, but a platinum record! It’s ridiculous. I got a platinum record sent to me in the mail. I was like, “Mom, look at that!”
L4LM: Do you have any favorite moments or songs working on the Hamilton cast recording?
BS: My two favorite songs in that whole show are “The Battle of Yorktown” – my friend Alex who arranged and orchestrated it did such a bang up job – and I like “Guns and Ships,” because of Daveed [Diggs]. I also play in this group called Freestyle Love Supreme, which is this hip hop improv group. We make up hip hop songs, and Chris Jackson (who plays George Washington) is in it, and there’s a bunch of other guys who are involved in Hamilton that are in it. One is Daveed. I always love to listen to his voice. When he does the rap in “Guns And Ships”and he just floors it, it’s just really incredible.
Have you heard his group clipping? He raps in this avant garde, noise, hip hop group where there are these dudes that make beats and he just raps like a lunatic over the top of it. Their album is spelled CLPPNG, and it’s super dope. You should check it out.
L4LM: I will! Now you’ve mentioned Sesame Street a couple times, that just speaks to your unique resume. How do you balance it all?
BS: I’ve been really lucky. I’ve been the music director for eight years, and it’s the craziest job ever. Even the days when I don’t think it’s crazy, then it gets really crazy all of a sudden. It’s the longest running television show in the history of the universe. I always tell people that, there’s a few things we have in common. We all pay taxes and we all grew up on Sesame Street. It’s this one defining thing. You can talk to somebody who’s 50 or talk to somebody who’s 10, and everybody has this relationship with Sesame Street.
These songs that I’ll write on a given Tuesday, by Thursday they’ll be somewhere in India. Somebody will have listened to them and they’ll have learned how to read or learn an emotion. I don’t realize the impact that it has until either someone tells me about it or I can usually see it.
I’ve had this weird resume. It’s been the things that have fallen in front of me, or the things that I’ve tried to put myself in the position to work on. They’re all weird and eclectic, but they all sort of somehow make sense one way or another. It’s as weird as can be!
L4LM: I have to ask. What was it like meeting Elmo for the first time?
BS: It’s pretty surreal. I think the thing that was more surreal for me is that, when you walk onto the set of Sesame Street… When I talk about it, I always say it’s sort of like walking into the Oval Office. I’ve never walked into the Oval Office, but I assume it’s kind of the same thing where all of the air leaves you, and you can’t believe where you are. That’s how Sesame Street is! You see the 123 steps and Hooper’s Store and all this other stuff!
You go there every day because it’s your job, and then you bring somebody to the set. Seeing someone having that experience for the first time is really fun to watch. They cannot believe what’s going on! That just happened recently with Jake Huffman from the McLovins. He’s been writing songs for years for Sesame Street but just came last week and walked onto the set. He turned pink and couldn’t believe where he was. It was really moving and wonderful.
L4LM: Have you had any cool experiences with musical guests on Sesame Street?
BS: The first year I started working there, I wrote a tune for will.i.am, which is called “What I Am?”. This big song I wrote in my first year is now this benchmark that I’ve been trying to live by ever since. At this point, I’ve written tunes for just about everybody who’s out there. There was Bruno Mars, there was Ed Sheeran, One Direction, John Legend, and Common, some other rap people.
When I was growing up and I was in college, I was a huge Dave Matthews fan. He came on the show, and he’s become a decent acquaintance of mine. It’s cool to have access to all of these people and some of my heroes. That part of it is really cool, I’ve really written songs for just about everybody at this point.
L4LM: What are you working on now?
BS: Well Sesame Street is in production now so we’re headlong into that, and the McLovins record is on the way for early next year.
L4LM: Right on, well thank you so much for taking the time!
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