Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis Share the Secrets of Their Musical Concept Album Warriors

Writers Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis have joined forces to create the new concept album, Warriors. Inspired by the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors and Sol Yurick’s novel, this album takes listeners on a thrilling journey through a fictitious New York City girl gang’s adventure from Coney Island to the Bronx and back after the murder of a respected leader. Here, Miranda, known for Hamilton and In the Heights, and Davis, an acclaimed playwright (Bulrusher) and performer (Passing Strange), share their meticulous process of crafting a compelling narrative through song.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why make Warriors as an album as opposed to a musical movie or a stage musical?
Eisa Davis: Writing it as an album meant that we really got to concentrate on the sounds that we wanted.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It set us free in terms of who we could get and what we could express. We let ourselves off the hook for having to write amazing action sequences. Now, you’re going to imagine it.

Eisa: it’s designed for you to envision it.

Lin: That being said, we’re both theater artists. We’d love to see this explored in a theatrical form at some point.

Eisa: But who knows if it would even work the same way on stage? We would have to go a lot further to even think about how to change something that was made to be an aural experience.

One of the things that impressed me is how easy the story was to follow, even with minimal narrative assistance. Can you talk about the story structure? 
Lin: We spent about a year just talking about the structure of it. Eisa has such an eagle eye towards making sure everyone is in space and time. I’ll give you an example. The gin bottle that is used to make the Molotov cocktail to blow up the car, Eisa’s on a mission to plant the gin bottle so it doesn’t come out of nowhere. I was very much like “Who cares? It’s a gin bottle.” And Eisa said, “But if we mention the gin bottle beforehand, it will be that much more satisfying.” She is very much the continuity script supervisor in that regard, and the overall structure owes an enormous debt to Eisa’s rigor in that department.

Eisa: It was the first thing. This story has a real propulsion to it. That’s something that [original director] Walter Hill spoke a lot about. It’s very clean. They go up to the Bronx and then they fight their way back to Coney. What we needed to figure out was why we care about this journey. It’s not just because it’s working on an action level. Who are these people and why do we care about them getting home? We get to see who they are in every exchange they have with the gangs they’re fighting along the way.

Lin: The challenge with that structure is that there’s no time for an “I Want” song from each of our Warriors. We’re not going to get to know them before they’re thrust into the mess they’re in.

Eisa: We meet them in media res.

Lin: We were very deliberate about that.

The album is a mix of legendary artists like Lauryn Hill and Busta Rhymes, Broadway people like Phillipa Soo and Amber Gray, and a couple of people who I wasn’t familiar with, like Kim Dracula (who plays the villainous Luther) and Julia Harriman who sings the role of Mercy. I’m looking forward to other people discovering particularly those two, also.
Lin: I was lucky enough to perform opposite Julia in Hamilton in Puerto Rico, so I knew she was a wonderful actress and singer. But I saw her in a workshop of a rock musical a couple of years back and I was like “Oh, she’s secretly Pat Benatar.” That’s what put her in our minds for this, because Pat Benatar was very much the comp for Mercy, a voice that rings through the night. And I think that Kim Dracula is gonna be one of the discoveries for people who don’t listen to the metal genre. Like, Who the fuck is that? They’re closer to Freddie Mercury, in that they can do anything with their voice and bring us options.

Eisa: “Do you want me to be a little wild here?” and we’re like, “Sure. We don’t know what’s gonna come out of your mouth, but we know it’s gonna be amazing.”

Hamilton has a lot of references to other musicals in it. What Easter Eggs should people be listening for in Warriors?
Eisa: Well, I think the biggest thing is, you know, it’s Women in the Sequel, right?

Lin: [Laughs] I’ll take it. You know…Hair was a big touchstone, because it’s such a great late-’60s rock album.

Eisa: We have one little “We Got Life” in there.

Lin: We also have an “Easy to Be Hard.” There are a couple of Hair drops in there. More than anything, fans of the movie The Warriors are going to hear every quote they love, whether it’s in a lyric or whether it’s spoken. We hewed close to the greatest hits from the movie.

At the listening party I went to, and at the others you’ve thrown, guests were given copies of the recording script to follow along with. Is that how you want people to listen to Warriors, by following along with the text?
Lin: You kind of experienced our ideal version. The album will have the liner notes and you can have a full Jesus Christ Superstar experience with that. We’re going to make the same booklet you were holding available for download, so that even if you’re streaming it, you can read along. The way we listened to cast albums as kids, looking at the impossibly small font and never being able to follow “And it’s beginning to snow…” is the goal.