17. At Eternity’s Gate
Vincent enters her own psyche - 2025 LIU
This song started as an idea to write a full-on trip ballet. I wanted a moment that lived somewhere between Hair’s acid-soaked hallucination and the dream ballet from Oklahoma!. Musically, I kept asking myself one very specific question: What if Genesis wrote “The Jellicle Ball”?
After version 1.0, the show was rewritten in a major way, and what had originally been a three-part ballet sequence ballooned until it became roughly ninety percent of Act II. Dialogue scenes and full songs were grafted onto what was once a completely wordless descent through Vincent’s psyche. This piece survived as the opening threshold. The moment where reality gives up and abstraction takes the wheel.
I wanted it to feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. To get there, the opening leans on a melancholy electric piano, which slowly gives way to an ’80s-style John Carpenter-y arpeggiated synth. Very “something bad is about to happen but it’s going to look cool.” As the voices start to pile up, the drums finally kick in and we’re gone, tumbling headfirst into a grimy, guitar-led explosion.
Originally, my plan was to let the guitarist completely rip every night. No roadmap, just instinct. For the demo, I asked Eitan to throw something down so I could hear how a real guitarist might navigate the changes. What he sent back was not chaos at all, but a meticulously constructed solo. Equal parts John Petrucci and a deeply caffeinated David Gilmour. It sang. It screamed. It felt inevitable, like it had always been there and it had finally just been uncovered.
At that point, there was no world where the solo could be anything else. That melody is his, full stop. That’s why Eitan has a songwriting credit on this piece.
When I orchestrated the full version for the LIU production, I had the strings reinforce his line in some moments and argue with it in others. Echoing, answering, and spiraling around it. The rabbit hole gets deeper. And once you’re in, there’s no climbing back out.