Michael R. Jackson’s life changed forever when he first heard Tori Amos, Liz Phair, and Joni Mitchell as a queer teenager living in Detroit. “Each of them had a lyrical audacity that really struck a chord in me, particularly as a young person and artist who was trying to find his voice,” the playwright and composer says over the phone. “It wasn’t until I discovered albums like Under the Pink, Court and Spark, and Exile in Guyville that I realized you could fearlessly speak the truth as you saw it.”
Phair in particular would play a major part in shaping Jackson’s meta-musical A Strange Loop, which takes its name from the final track on Exile in Guyville. At one point during the award-winning show’s 20-year journey to Broadway, its music was a mash-up of Jackson and Phair’s songs, and its plot involved a meta narrative about getting the rights to Phair’s music. In real life, Phair denied Jackson’s request and encouraged him to write his own songs instead—after all, she told him, she didn’t crib the Rolling Stones when she wrote her response to their 1972 classic rock touchstone Exile on Main St.
“It ended up being the best advice that she could have given me because it forced me to move away from depending on her work to tell the story,” Jackson explains, before adding, “One day, though, I would like for her to hear my mash-up of [A Strange Loop’s] ‘Today’ and ‘Fuck and Run,’ because they go together perfectly.”
A Strange Loop evolved into a musical about Usher, a queer young Black man who works as an usher for The Lion King musical and is writing a musical about that experience—just like Jackson himself did in his 20s. (The whole thing is extremely self-referential.) Snippets of Phair and Amos’ influence still peek through, from “Exile in Gayville,” a track about the agonies of dating apps, to “Inner White Girl,” which puts a spin on some of Phair’s lyrics. A Strange Loop debuted in 2019 and subsequently won the 2020 Pulitzer for Drama. This April, the show finally landed on Broadway—right down the block from The Lion King.
Read More: What A Strange Loop Playwright Michael R. Jackson Is Listening To