With “The Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Takes on Another New York Story

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. Since the blockbuster success of his musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda has been more than a little busy.
He's acting, directing, composing for Disney projects, including the upcoming Lion King movie. But his new project is kind of a throwback in the best possible sense.
It's a concept album. Yeah, right, done is reimagined a film, the 1979 cult classic The Warriors, which I loved back in the day.
And he's re-envisioned it as a song cycle. To do it, Miranda brought together a cast of legends, including Lauryn Hill, Nas, Mark Antony, members of Wu-Tang, and many more.
To be clear, The Warriors wasn't originally a musical, though it's got a great soundtrack. It's an action movie about a gang that's fighting their way through New York City.
And Miranda tells the story and song along with his writing partner, the actor and playwright, Issa Davis. Hey, how are you.
Welcome. Nice to see you.
How are you?

Good to see you.

So in 1979, The Warriors comes out.

I saw it then.

Yeah.

You guys saw it when?

I saw it probably in 1984.

That's respectable.

A friend's older brother had the VHS.

Okay.

Yes, and I saw it in January of 2022.

More recently. Yes.
Well, for those folks who don't know the story, why don't you tell us what the story is? Yeah, yeah. Just to set things up.
Since it's something that's fresher for me, for those of you who don't know, when I saw it in January 2022, I was really taken by this group of, you know, multicultural men in the film who are called up to the Bronx, to Van Cortland Park, for a truce meeting, a peace meeting.

Yes, the music by Barry Dvorak.

Yes, that amazing synth. Open montage.
Yeah. And everyone around the city, not just this one gang from Kony, but all these gangs and all these amazing outfits, go up to Van Cortlandt Park and hear Cyrus give this amazing speech about how to create peace with all of the gangs in the city ceasing fire, stopping to fight.

Nobody is wasting nobody.

That is a miracle.

And miracles is the way things ought to be.

Dig it! Can you dig in? And then Cyrus is assassinated. The person who assassinated Cyrus blames the warriors for doing so.
And the warriors are? The warriors are a gang from Coney Island. And they have to fight their way from the Bronx all the way back down to Coney Island in the course of the film.
But then the tale is an old tale. Like it's Saul Urich, who wrote the novel the movie's based on, based it on the Anabasis, which is a soldier's account of trying to get back home from war.
Tell us about Anabasis, the Greek sourcing for this novel from 1965 by Saul York. Yeah, I mean, it's this mythic story.
It's a story about these soldiers who are fighting their way through enemy territory to get back home. Like, it doesn't get more clear than that as a plot line.
That's Homeric. And what I loved about the movie was it was filled in with the specificity of the New York I was growing up in.
I remember, um, you know, my parents, uh, when I was born, my parents lived in NYU housing. They were NYU grad students.
And so I still went to nursery school down in the village, even though we had moved all the way up to Northern Manhattan. So I would take the A train from West 4th Street to 200th Street every day.
You were living in the Heights? Yeah, yeah. We were living, yeah, and commuting from the village for nursery school.
And I remember just tracing the arc of the Warriors. And I knew I lived closer to where Cyrus spoke than to where Coney Island was.
And so there's this mix of the mythic and the specific. I mean, when I watch this, I love seeing the New York I grew up in.
I love seeing Grey's Papaya at 72nd Street. I love seeing the Wonder Wheel.
Still there. Still there.
I love seeing the Wonder Wheel at the top of the movie. And so, you know, it really created my first mental map of the New York I hadn't seen yet growing up at the top of Manhattan.
And we've written 26 songs basically musicalizing this story. The opening song, we decided to have an emcee from each borough represent that borough.
Who do you got? So we have Chris Rivers, who is, you know, an incredible emcee and also, you know, son of the legendary Big Punisher, the first Puerto Rican rapper to go platinum and one of my MC heroes. He plays the Bronx.
We have Nas representing Queens. We have...
Also executive produces the album. Yes, because as much as I love Warriors, he loves it twice as much.
We have Cameron representing Manhattan. We have, of course, Ghostface and RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan representing representing Staten Island, as they have for so many years.
And then we have Busta Rhymes representing Brooklyn and introducing the Warriors, since that's their home borough. So, Lin-Manuel, the whole wide world knows you for Hamilton, but of course before that is In the Heights.
And I wonder how In the Heights relates to the Warriors in your mind, either just thematically and in your kind of creative universe? Yeah. Well, I think I could write about New York for the rest of my life and never get bored because there are so many New Yorks inside New York.
And you know that given the publication you work for. But, you know, In the Heights was my first musical.
I started writing in college. It was the classic write write what you know.
I thought, I live in the most musical neighborhood I've ever been in. So that seemed like a great place to set a musical.
And then imagine my surprise after reading Ron Chernow's book. Chernow's biography of Hamilton.
Yeah. So much of it took place in New York.
Right. That like, oh, Burr lived on 162nd Street for a year.
and that, you know, there was a cabinet meeting in Washington Heights before, you know, the Capitol relocated to Philly and then D.C. The fact that the entire story was just a few layers of topsoil underneath the city I'd grown up in.
And then with Warriors, it was a chance to go to a totally different era. And the fun for us in crafting the score was there's the score that the movie gives us, which is this amazing synth rock score that we nod to many times.
But there's also all these other subcultures happening in New York in the 70s. But do talk about the music and the original score of the Warriors because most of our listeners will not recall it or know it.
Yeah, no. It's very particular.
Incredibly, like, of its time since intro, but you've also got this beautiful rock song in the last scene by Joe Walsh called In the City. In the City.
I forgot that Joe Walsh that soundtrack. Yeah.
Yeah, the finale. Wow.
When they're walking down the Strand. Yeah, when they've made it to the sea.
Mm-hmm. And so, you know, but again, like, for us, New York in the late 70s was a musical playground.
So, you know, there's a gang in the South Bronx in the movie called the Turnbull ACs. In the movie, they're skinheads.
In the 70s in New York, Fania was revolutionizing salsa music. And all those musicians like lived in the South Bronx.
Hector Labo and Willie Colong. And, you know, it's such a South Bronx story.

So we took the license to write like a salsa tune for that gang and basically made New

York our musical playground. Mata la esperanza, el mundo te mata la esperanza Y cuando el mundo te mata la esperanza, solo queda venganza Imagina una guagua de escuela, lleno de tipo arma Un montón de boricuas furiosos, bien encojonados Quiere matar la mujer Que dice matar un sudor I mean, that was really the first thing that we did as collaborators was we just started giving each other playlists and, you know, really wanted to go after the diversity of genre.
And so on the album, we see all of the songs that, you know, sort of were inspired by what our playlists were. So, you know, we've got this salsa tune and we've got, you know, rock and we've got R&B.
And then we have metal that shows up there as well. And something that was really important to us as well was having Shansia, who is our DJ.
In the movie, it was Lynn Thigpen who played the DJ and kind of kept track of everything. Yeah, hey, poppers.
I know, it's so perfect to do that in here on the mic in the studio. There's a radio station that figures into the plot.
It's how they put alerts out about the warriors' movements around the city. It's also a handy dramaturgical device.
I'll bet. Let you know where you are in the city at any given point in time.
They actually put that in after the fact when they needed a little bit more continuity. Exposition.
Well, let's listen to a clip from the film. Great.

All right now, for all you boppers out there in the big city,

all you street people with an ear for the action,

I've been asked to relay a request from the Gramercy Riffs.

It's a special for the Warriors.

That's that real live bunch from Coney.

And I do mean the Warriors. Here's a hit with them in mind.
Nowhere to run. And I hit you with nowhere to run.
Nowhere to run. There you go.
Yeah. It's never been as menacing as in this context.
Yeah, that's such a great montage in the movie. Where does this figure into the whole story? It was useful to the filmmakers and it was useful to us as well.
Yeah. What Shansia does is she really animates the fact that, you know, there are these really strong Jamaican roots to hip hop.
And in a lot of ways, you know, this is an album that's a love letter to the film, but it's also a love letter to a moment in the cultural origins of hip-hop. Got a word and the waves breaking from the station boppers.
Ears open. We in a condition.
Truth is broken. Peace meeting go heavy.
And Cyrus, the one and only go back to the film? I think so. I mean, you know, I think one of the strengths of our collaboration was Issa was coming to it fresh, and this movie was written on stone tablets, in my mind.
And I think what we've written is somewhere in between. I think fans of the movie will totally appreciate the moments they love and the lines they love, and that's all in there.
And And yet I think that Issa really came at it with a lot of dramaturgical innovation and really opened up. And it could also be this.
I think chief among them being the fact that all these gangs are lured to the South Bronx with the promise of peace. And in the movie, the thought of peace dies when Cyrus is shot.
But Issa's found a way really beautifully to keep that promise alive, the fact that that's what got us out of our neighborhoods in the first place, and sort of put some hope through it in a way that's really, I think, very moving and exciting. Something that came up as we were adapting this was the idea that I could be really irreverent with it and really, you know, go after the sexism that's there in the film, the homophobia that's there in the film.
It was Lynn's idea actually to have the gender swap where the warriors as a gang are a femme gang, you know, they're women and girls. And that Cyrus is a woman.
And then what we got to do with that was, you know, just really go after what a specific experience of women fighting their way back, but unarmed, you know, just only having their bodies and their wits and, you know, just facing all of the obstacles along the way. And I worked on a show called Justified City Primeval, which is an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel.
And something that he said in adaptation is that you can just hang it up, the host text, and strip it for parts. And I feel like that's something that I got to do again here with Warriors

is really just reach for what was important to me about, you know,

women in this particular experience.

And also thinking about, you know, how like black girls on the playground,

you know, doing a little roll call.

You hear that Warrior Cypher track, the third track, you know,

we're going, ah, she can, ah, she can. and that's something that I used to do as a kid, right? And then that, again, is also part of what gives birth to what we know of as hip-hop, as this international cultural force.
Ah, she got, ah, she got Warriors, show what you got I'm called Chiefs, oh please, you know my style. Issa Davis with Lin-Manuel Miranda talking about their new album, The Warriors.
We'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who you, of course, know as the creator of Hamilton, along with Pulitzer Prize finalist Issa Davis.
On a new album called The Warriors, Miranda and Davis have reimagined the cult classic from 1979 as a song cycle, and they describe the album to me as a love letter to the film rather than as a remake. So for now, it exists only as a record, although I can't quite believe it's not going to be on stage or on film before long.
There's so much fashion, just out-and-out fashion in the film version, since the movie is so visual. Did you rely on different styles of music throughout the album to evoke some of this sense of style and fashion? That's so funny.
Sometimes the fashion gave us clues as to what the music would be. You know, I think that having the gang on skates that we meet in Union Square move up to 96th Street, you know, we also know that, that like Paris is, the events of Paris is burning are taking place around this time.
There's this amazing queer nightlife subculture happening. And so we made that the house of hurricanes and had this incredible moment with this gang.
But I also, what was freeing about doing this as an album is I really I think it's a love letter to the movie in a real big way. You know, I would never dream of remaking this film.
I was going to ask. You know, that's...
This is not a preface to... No, not at all.
No, not at all. On the contrary, it's a love letter to the movie.
And it was so freeing to basically find the music that would create the story in your head. You weren't tempted at all, either one of you, once this project had hit its stride, to say, now I see this as the soundtrack of a film or something on stage.
No, to me, I was adapting the film. Like, for me, I was, you know, we were picturing our own version of this movie.
And do you think you need knowledge of the film in your head when listening to the album? No, not at all. That's been the fun litmus test in playing it for people.
I like playing it for diehards of the film and seeing them nod at the references. Right.
And I like playing it for people who have never seen it. Young people.
Yeah, I played it for this one young person who was like, who called me. What counts as young,-Moa? Like 20-something and like produces a podcast.
There it is. And had never heard of the movie.
The produces the podcast part. Yeah, and she turned to me and she said, I Googled this after you played it for us.
And like, they're dudes? How does it work if they're dudes? Which means we did our job because it means the warriors in our telling, you know, we sort of carved out our own lane. That is not, you know, I think the pitfall of a lot of adaptations is you're waiting for that part you like from the movie to happen.
And to be the same thing. Yeah.
And so I think this has lots of, like, if you were a fan of this movie, you're going to love this album, but it also carves out its own lane as a companion piece.

And let's just point out Lauryn Hill.

Yes.

Performs a song called If You Can Count, which features Cyrus, aka Lauryn Hill.

Let's hear a little bit of that. Remember what you had to do to own your block Baby and all invaders keep the neighbors on rock Take a break, took a credit, spray cans nonstop Make a mission competition so your click is on top Imagine what I had to do to stay on top That's the picture of the biggest town Shut down up and I'm sharp Now imagine what we could do if you and your crew Got with me and my crew If we only knew we were bigger than the mob After all these years, it's so great to hear her.
It is. It's so great to hear her, and she performs only rarely.
And tell me a little bit about why she's the right Cyrus for the album. I think...
I mean, she might be the right thing for everything. We had no plan B.
We didn't. We were just like, it's her or, you know, nobody.
You know, we just had to have her. And it's because she is truly one of the greatest MCs and greatest singers that ever graced this planet.
You know, she's in everyone's top five MCs, you know, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a classic album that, of course, you know, recently Apple Music named their number one album. And she just has a kind of authority.
She has a kind of gravitas. And I think that, you know, she as Cyrus asking for this call for peace is exactly right.
It's exactly right. And we had a complicated career.
She has. And why did she say yes, other than your enormous talents and powers of persuasion? I mean, when you just played that clip, I turned to Issa off mic and was like, it's real.
It's like, we still can't believe that Miss Hill sang a song we wrote, you know? Because even more spectacular than the fact that she said yes, you know, she's one of the great writers as well, one of the great songwriters. So that she, you know, basically the way it happened was I met her manager at a social function and her manager mentioned that she had admired Hamilton.
And I said, great, because do I have a pitch for you. It didn't take long.
And Issa and I carefully crafted our letter to Miss Hill of like why we thought she was, why she was our only choice to play Cyrus on this album. And so I would just text the manager every week, just, hey, you have the tracks.
Let us know when she can get in the studio. And it wasn't until earlier this year that we, instead of getting a text back saying, she's in Brazil, she's in London, we just got a text that was a Dropbox.
And it had all the vocal files. And she had created these additional choral arrangements with background vocalists that she had added on top of what we had sent her.
Just unbidden. It just happened.
Yeah, and it was both in the spirit of what we had written, and also she had added these layers that we could never have dreamed of because she's Miss Lauryn Hill and we're mortals. But it was definitely bidden.
I mean, we were praying. We were asking like, you know, just can we give you our first unborn child? And we were slowly finishing the rest of the album.
Is the whole creative process through email? No. That's pretty much the only one that was through email.
I remember reading about this last... But with her, it's all that way.
Yeah, with her, exactly. Like she was the wizard behind the curtain.
Like we never got to meet her. So you never got to meet her? Yeah.
I mean, I'd met her before in the past. Somehow that makes it cooler, doesn't it? If she calls for a meeting in the Bronx, I'll go.
I'll be there. And so with the exception of Miss Hill, we were in the studio with everybody.
So we went to Staten Island to go record Ghostface. We went to L.A.
to record RZA. We really went to meet people where they are.
A lot of people came and met us at Atlantic Studios. And again, like selfishly as songwriters, like when you write a piece of theater, you write it and then you cast it.
Whereas with this, I really wanted to explore the musicianship of the people I was working with. We spent two weeks with our third partner in crime here, Mike Elizondo, who's the producer of the album.
And he lives in Nashville. And we just played with his band for two weeks to create all the songs before we got all the vocalists, which never happens on a cast album.
You know, on a cast album, you're pressed for time and you're recording it between eight shows a week. And it's a precise, scheduled piece of work.
A hundred percent, whereas we actually got to explore the sound of what this is first and foremost. So it takes a while.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
We spent pretty much this year recording it. Yeah.
Let me ask you this. I, it can't, It's wonderful to have a gigantic success like Hamilton in all kinds of ways.
First line of the obituary, no matter what I do. Fair enough.
But you're still young. And are you able to work on the next thing and the next thing without self-consciousness or concern about that hanging on your shoulders? Yeah.
I mean, I think what's interesting about Hamilton is that no one I talked to thought it was a good idea when I was writing it. But I could see it.
And it was the idea that wouldn't leave me alone. And similarly, with Warriors, that's a movie I spend a lot of time watching, I had a college classmate who actually pitched me this back in 2009 after my first show in The Heights.
Pitched you this idea? Yeah, he said Warriors the Musical. He had gotten the job working for, his name is Phil Westgren.
He'd gotten the job working for the producer of the film, Larry Gordon. And I wrote him back an email in 2009 saying, here's why it could never work.
And most of my objections were just about action sequences and songs fighting for the same real estate. But that email...
What does that mean, songs for the same real estate? Well, I think porno movies, action movies, and musicals are all fighting for the same story real estate. When you can't talk anymore, you sing, you fight, or you fuck.
It's a similar structure at work. Which is which again? your mileage may vary and so for me

um It's a similar structure at work. Which is which again? Your mileage may vary.
And so for me, you know, that to me was like, you know, I've never really seen a convincing fight sequence in a musical. It's always kind of Jerome Robbins dance ballet.
And so, you know. Until Outsiders.
Until Outsiders last year, which actually had incredible fight sequences. Right.
Props to them. And so, but again, that idea kind of was in my head.
And then by the time I'd come up for air after performing in Hamilton for a year and started to actually think about what I wanted to do next, there was a whole section of my brain raising its hand being like, that Warriors thing you said no to was actually a very good idea. That was the thing.
Yeah, that was the thing. And we've been working on it and we have some ideas.
So again, I chase the ideas that don't leave me alone. The ones that just keep coming back around.
And I think part of learning your craft as an artist is learning to listen to your gut when it's going over here, over here, there's something here. You know more than anybody how most people listen to music now.
They listen to singles. They listen to songs.
Yeah. The way to listen to this is as this extended sequence.
All the way down. Which runs how long? It's like 81 minutes.
So that's a healthy, lengthy thing. I joke that we've built a new Zoetrope.
It's like a thing people do. Look through this slot.
We're very excited about it. If only this had been the soundtrack for Megalopolis.
Oh my goodness. It's a love letter to the concept albums of the 70s that I grew up with when, you know, Jesus Christ Superstar.
Tommy. Tommy.
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis. Right.
And then there are even hip-hop concept albums like Prince Paul had an amazing album called A Prince Among Thieves. But you think you're going uphill asking people to listen to 80-odd minutes of music as opposed to four minutes, four minutes, four minutes on Spotify.
But I don't know. I think there was a ritual that people had in watching the Warriors on VHS, which is how Lynn saw it.
You know, it's like, oh, it's Friday night. Let's, like's throw that in and watch it again.
And I think there is an appetite to see something like that or listen to something like that. And we want people to listen to the album in that way.
I totally get that, but it's going to come a time, if it hasn't happened already, where the world's going to tell you, the market's going to tell you, somebody's going to tell you, this is fantastic. Let's make a movie.
Yeah. Again, not interested in a movie.
I mean, we're both theater artists, so I'd be very interested in exploring what the stage version of this would look like. So you're not close to that.
We have literally no plans. But I'll tell you, you know, I remember the real watershed moment for Hamilton wasn't actually when we started playing at the public.
It was when the soundtrack came out in October. And you started having those kind of closed performances.
And I watched the front row start to know all the words better than I did. Like, I watched that happen nightly in real time, which meant they were listening to the whole thing because they couldn't get in the room,

but that Hamilton sung through.

So they would listen to the album top to bottom.

And so, you know, for me, this is like,

well, this is not the oral recording of a thing you can't see.

This is the thing we made.

It is designed for you to listen to it.

You all have the thing we made at the same time, which is enormously freeing for me,

coming off of Hamilton, where it was like so hard to get in for a while. It was.
I remember. Now we all have the same thing that we've been working on for the whole time.
And that feels wonderful. Well, it's a wonderful thing.
And I really appreciate your being here. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Thank you.
That's Issa Davis and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Their new album, The Warriors, just came out.
That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick.
Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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