Tomorrow
A Demo a Day: Day Four.
Tomorrow and the following number Saved are of a piece: they introduce Thomas and Maggie to each other, and establish the dialectic between the two as they explore issues around faith throughout the opera.
It’s a pretty enough tune, but by design, the minor-key Tomorrow clunks in after Prepare Yourself to put a damper on the evangelists’ happy spreading of the Good Word, because Thomas isn’t buying it. A Beatles-esque somber french horn threatens to sink the mood completely, but Maggie rescues the dour confrontation in the second half of the tune. It changes from D minor to D major, weaving in an instrumental variant of the main 3-4-5 melodic line and leading into Saved.
Tomorrow and Saved were composed in 2020, over a decade after the rest of the opera was completed. An earlier version had a more hostile encounter between the two, a song titled Lord Only Knows, which lives on only as a reprise in Tribulation. (I have dubbed this a phantom reprise; I’m not sure if such a thing exists, but I’m coining it here.) When I dusted off the libretto in preparation for recording the demos, I realized that I had left a big hole in the development of the characters and decided to fix it. The story now flows better and Thomas is slightly-- though only slightly-- less of an asshole for it.