Before landing the contract to write the songs for The Outsiders, a hit new Broadway musical that—thanks to its twelve Tony nominations and four wins—just became a bigger hit, Jonathan Clay had, by his own admission, read only five books. Luckily for the Americana artist and his songwriting partner and Jamestown Revival bandmate Zach Chance, S.E. Hinton’s beloved novel of trod-upon teenagers in Tulsa was one of them.
Two rival gangs, a poetry-loving protagonist, literal train tracks to live on the wrong side of—it’s a wonder it took this long for the middle school reading list favorite to become a stage show. As Jamestown Revival, Chance and Clay have been making music together since they were fourteen, about the same age as the novel’s characters. Over Bloody Marys and fries in a Times Square diner, Clay tells me he identifies as a Darrel, the self-sacrificing-and-pissed-about-it older brother forced to raise his siblings; Chance is more Sodapop, a sunshiney oaf. But you can’t spend 25 years writing music without feeling some kinship with Ponyboy, the sensitive narrator who yearns for more than his troubled town can provide.
The duo from Magnolia, halfway between Houston and The Woodlands, had seen only one musical between them when they partnered up with seasoned Broadway music supervisor Justin Levine (Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Here Lies Love) to write the nineteen songs that became The Outsiders. In the nine years that they’ve been working on the project, Jamestown Revival has released five albums and a Christmas EP. Chance and Clay are road dogs, more used to sleeping on a tour bus than in New York City’s East Village, where the late-partying NYU crowd has been keeping them up at night. And as of this month, they’ve directly and indirectly won four Tonys: Best Direction for Danya Taymor, Best Sound Design for Cody Spencer, Best Lighting Design for Brian MacDevitt and Hana S. Kim, and, to cap it off, Best Musical. As we can only assume Ponyboy would have done when he got a college scholarship, Chance and Clay left their comfort zone and hit the jackpot. If they came into the Broadway scene as Greasers, in Hinton’s parlance, they pulled off the impossible and emerged as Socs.
“To Jon’s credit, he was like ‘We should do this,’ ” Chance says a few weeks ahead of the Tonys and a few hours after the guys performed with the musical’s cast on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “I was like, ‘I don’t know man, what do we know about a musical?’ But Jon’s really good about [getting us] to jump in. He’s good at pushing us. He told me he was going to do it whether I wanted to or not.” Clay nods. “That’s how I get him,” he says. “I gotta employ a little FOMO.”
Aside from the pair’s new hardware, here’s what Chance would have missed out on: the “shot of adrenaline,” as he describes it, that they felt inside a Times Square rehearsal studio when they nailed the lyrics to “Tulsa ’67,” the show’s opening number; the chance to weigh in on casting sessions with Angelina Jolie, who signed on as a producer when her fifteen-year-old daughter Vivienne saw and fell in love with an advance performance of the show last year in Southern California (never doubt the power of a musical theater teen); Broadway triple threats leaping from the rusted-out junker that sits stage left, with the energy and disregard for gravity of actual adolescents. Broadway is a new world for Chance and Clay, but despite the Luccheses they wear to walk through midtown Manhattan on one of the first truly hot days of the year, they seem right at home. The adoration from Outsiders fans has helped.
“Jamestown fans that come to our shows, they’re really awesome, and they tell us that they love our work,” Clay says. “But they don’t wait outside by the tour bus and scream for autographs thirty minutes later.”
Chance and Clay have been working on the musical since their manager, who had connections to the show’s production company, called and asked if they wanted to write a few songs on spec. “We wrote our first song two weeks after my eldest son was born,” Clay says. “He’s turning nine in July,” (For context, Lin-Manuel Miranda recently told the guys backstage that he’s almost finished with a new work of his own. It took two years to finish.) The Arcana Group, who put up Urinetown and coproduced Wicked, were looking for an honest-to-goodness band in lieu of a traditional Broadway composer. Chance and Clay whipped up a song that they thought would impress the team. “It sounded like Frankie Valli. They told us ‘this is awful,’ ” Chance says. So they turned in their backup option, “Stay Gold,” an eleven o’clock number for Ponyboy and Johnny Cade based on arguably the most famous line from the novel. It’s a gentle tune, written for piano and guitar, that still manages to be a barn burner. (It’s no coincidence that the show’s strongest songs are its duets.) They landed the gig. “We were ducks on the water,” Chance says. “It was total fake it ’til you make it.” Clay interrupts: “Ducks out of water. Ducks on the water are very skilled.”
For a final count of nineteen songs, including two reprises, Chance, Clay, and Levine wrote thirty or forty numbers. The Jamestown guys both identify as capital-C creatives, more the type to speak earnestly about the sanctity of songwriting than to shoehorn a character’s death sequence into Act II. But musical theater songs are workhorses, and Chance and Clay adjusted to the need for lyrics to move narrative. Despite some critics’ quibbles with a similar flavor across the soundtrack, the duo leaned into different genre influences for different characters. “We wanted a Bill Withers–inspired song, and then a Levon Helm and the Band influenced–song, and a James Taylor,” Chase says. “The common thread is that we were influenced by songwriters,” says Clay.
“It was like this process of throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and then pulling a bunch of it back off,” Clay says. (Different from their normal routine of writing in the studio, during which they get in exactly one fight per album, then make up a week later.) After 25 years of writing Jamestown Revival songs as a twosome, the parade of collaborators and stakeholders it takes to put up a musical was, as Chance describes it, “something.”
“Everybody had their lane. Our lane was we were songwriters,” Clay says. “We had a book writer, choreographer, director, and we have producers who like to get in everybody’s lane. We have investors. . . . At some point, we started blurring the lines and working together. Songs [eventually] started to absorb book and vice versa. We all put our best foot forward, and then we baked it in the oven. And when you bake it, all the flavors just dissolve.”
Recipe credit, really, goes to Chance’s and Clay’s sisters, whose middle school friendship forced the two boys into close quarters. When they became friends, at age fourteen, Magnolia had a population of about one thousand, Clay says. “If somebody moved in, everybody knew.” The pair were in geometry class together, but they didn’t vibe at first. (Chance was “a new kid coming into school, swooping in on all the ladies.”) But they eventually started playing basketball together, and when Chance started singing along to Clay’s courtside boombox, his future collaborator realized he might have found a vocalist. They weren’t yet interested in country, folk, or Americana, but they knew they wanted to write for two voices; it was listening to Boyz II Men and the Temptations that taught them how to harmonize.
By sixteen, they had cut a three-song EP using software from Best Buy, then recruited their sisters to sell it around school for five bucks a pop. They sang the National Anthem at football and softball and volleyball games, first at their own school and then further afield. The band stayed scrappy through college, first investing their energy in a Myspace page and later an email list to build a fan base.
They moved to Los Angeles in 2011, playing anywhere they could get a gig. “California (Cast Iron Soul),” a song they wrote about that time, off the 2014 album Utah, is still Jamestown Revival’s biggest hit. It’s brighter and bouncier than the Outsiders tracks—meant for driving on the Pacific Coast Highway with the windows down and thinking about how far you’ve come (Old Magnolia / I’ll never get over you . . . Someday I’ll be going home / With a cast-iron soul)—but I can imagine a thirtysomething Ponyboy, now with a job in publishing and an acoustic-electric guitar, singing along. By 2015, Chance and Clay had moved back to Texas, this time landing in Austin. “It was time to get back home and stop living in a world we could never afford,” Clay says. And that’s when musical theater came calling.
On a New York City Sunday in June, the guys swapped their semiperpetual wide-brimmed hats for black tie—a classic tux for Chance, burnt orange and a bolo tie for Clay—and found their Tony Awards seats behind Daniel Radcliffe. They had healthy attitudes until the moment they stepped into Lincoln Center. Clay told himself “the musical is already really successful, we have lines out the door for tickets. I’m at peace. But once we got there, I turned to Zach and said, ‘I really, really want it.’ ” Like every award winner before them, they blacked out during the walk from their seats to the stage to accept their trophies.
When I reached them, ten days after the awards ceremony, they were in Denver, prepping to play Red Rocks Amphitheatre with Ryan Bingham. They were still walking on air.
It’s hard to imagine this “very major chapter,” as Chance says, not changing Jamestown Revival’s trajectory. They’ve been “chasing the muse” in the studio since early June. They’re spending the rest of the summer and fall on tour, playing festivals across Colorado, South Carolina, and Florida, with a few Texas dates sprinkled in—and one in Tulsa. But don’t expect to hear their Tony Award–winning songs. “Maybe [we’ll play one] on a special occasion here and there,” Chance says. “But these songs exist in [a different] world.”
