23. Travel the Stars

April 6, 2019 - First draft of Travel the Stars

On April 6, 2019, I wrote the first draft of “Travel the Stars.” It lived on two pages of a Moleskine while I was riding a bus, and later became a demo recorded in the bathroom of a Holiday Inn Express. Pretty appropriate. This song was always meant to be written in motion, in between places.

At that point, I was still thinking of Vincent as a fairly traditional biographical musical. And it felt unavoidable that a show about Vincent van Gogh would need a song about Starry Night.

But I gave myself an immediate rule. A prime directive if you will: it could not be called Starry Night. It could not use the phrase “the starry night.” And it absolutely could not go anywhere near “starry, starry night.” That door was welded shut.

So the real question became: Why this painting? What makes this one so special?  Why not “Two Crabs?” What makes this one essential as opposed to famous?

The answer came through Vincent’s letters. Specifically one to Theo, where he writes:

“Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?”

Collecting those affirming fragments, the song stopped being about a painting and became about access. About finding a place among the stars through the act of making. Art as a way in.

We begin with the paint-stroke motif again. But this time, instead of settling, everything lifts. Resolution through forward momentum. Every voice moves upward until the song breaks open into something pulsing and relentless. It tracks Vincent’s refusal to stop working even as the validation she’s been chasing keeps slipping out of reach. The realization lands hard: the work is the validation.

Onstage, we watch the piece come into being.  Something that will outlive her entirely. As Vincent spills the truth of her life and the world she inhabits, the chorus shifts. Now it asks, where does that lead you?

No longer about being left behind, the question turns forward…toward the future, toward what comes next, toward the unknown she has yet to face.

With that newfound determination…she steps into the completed painting. Into the motion. Into the swirls. Into the living breathing work she created.

That’s how you travel through the stars.  You make your own stars to travel through.

Kaira Gula