Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnant.

At the New Yorker Festival a couple of months ago, we were joined by Sarah Borellis.

Borellis broke out as a star in pop music in the late aughts with the Grammy Awards to prove it,

which he's gone on to have a very different sort of career writing music for Broadway.

So on the one hand, Borellis is busy acting on stage and on television, and on the other,

she's busy as a composer and a songwriter.

Right now, she's adapting Meg Wollitzer's best-selling novel, The Interestings for the Stage,

along with the playwright Sarah Rule.

Sarah Borella sat down to talk with staff writer Rachel Seine and to play a little music, too.

How do you write a song, Sarah?

There are very few times I can think of where I sat down and something just sort of showed up.

I really believe in this idea of kind of, you know, the muses visit the artist at work.

They reward the person who creates ritual or routine around just showing up and writing.

I'm finding that I'm in my 40s now.

I'm 44, and my rituals have changed, and the process changes, but it's evolving.

Reading about your first record deal, though, and how many co-writers they tried to put you with, or, you know, there was a sense at the beginning maybe where they didn't let you follow

your own nose or

trust that you could be on your own and I know that that was difficult. So I mean, how did you

feel like you had the confidence then to sort of say, I need to be solo here? I wouldn't identify

it as confidence. I think it was a kind of desperation. I got set up on all these songwriting, sort of dates with

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