About Songs for Slutty Girls

 

Imagine the perfect night out, the kind of night that you never want to end. It’s filled with the perfect cocktails, your best friends, and every song that plays seems to fit the moment. This is my vision for the future of musical theatre.

 

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved live theatre, but even more than that, I’ve loved pop music. There are sprawling rock songs for when I’m driving in my car, and I feel invincible. There are electronic dance ballads for when I’m heartbroken but can see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is an R&B song with a chunky bass line for when I'm three drinks in dancing with my friends. I’ve always loved going to live concerts, hearing stories from my favorite artists, and letting the music take me to places outside of myself. This is the vision I had when I began writing Songs for Slutty Girls: immersive experiences that relate unique storytelling through pop music. I want people to dance in the aisles, raise a glass, and get reacquainted with their inner badass during my pieces.

 

Songs for Slutty Girls was born in the summer of 2014. It was born of necessity: I desperately needed a channel for the sexual awakening I was going through, and I was frustrated by the lack of songs in the musical theatre cannon that addressed female sexuality in a way I could relate to. Since then it has had many iterations and continues to mature at a rate that coincides with my own growth. It’s a sad sort of relief to look back at your sexual experiences as a 21-year-old, laughing and crying in equal measure. It’s mostly exciting to just know that you’ve survived it and that you’ve captured it in some way.

 

 

In this way, Songs for Slutty Girls has become a vehicle for me and audience members to ask questions like “What does the word slut mean and how do we give it power?” “What does it mean to be a sexually liberated individual in the age of social media?” and “How do our sexual experiences shape us, for good and bad, without us even realizing it?” My hope is that these questions are more easily digestible through songs that make us laugh and dance and cry.

 

 

Selfishly, writing this show has helped me capture the experiences that myself and many other women I know have gone through. I hope to pass these experiences along: to young women who may question if they are normal; to older women who haven’t had the chance to question and explore; to men who still have no clue what is going on. As a result, the piece has become increasingly personal.

 

 

This listening experience has been adapted to radio play format from previous versions of the show that have involved my insanely talented classmates from Pace University. It has been a great joy to bring some of these same performers and friends back to develop this show, and the journey of Slutty Girls would not have continued if not for them. I was also so lucky to work with an insanely talented group of women musicians for this project. Watching them rock out during this recording process reminded me how important representation is in this male-dominated industry, and I’m so grateful to them for bringing their incredible musicianship to this project.

 

 

I’ve often read that you should only be writing something that terrifies you, that makes you feel like you have something to lose. I hope that all who listen are equally excited, sad, disgusted, and jubilant to hear the stories in this piece because that’s how I felt writing and living them.

 

-Kailey Marshall