Love Quote by Cy Coleman

There’s something almost disarmingly plain about Cy Coleman saying he has “a bunch of albums” he’d love to see re-released, but the modesty is the point. This is a Broadway composer talking like a working musician with inventory on a shelf, not a grand auteur demanding a monument. The subtext: the work exists, it’s good, and it’s slipping out of circulation anyway.

Coleman came up in an era when cast recordings, concept albums, and studio sessions weren’t just souvenirs; they were how a score traveled beyond a theater district and beyond opening night. A re-release isn’t nostalgia so much as re-entry into the cultural bloodstream. It’s a bid for endurance in a marketplace that’s constantly pruning its own memory, especially for mid-century popular music that doesn’t fit neatly into rock canon narratives or streaming-era genre bins.

There’s also a quiet business realism in the phrasing. “Would love” signals desire, but also resignation: rights are tangled, labels fold, masters disappear, marketing budgets chase younger demographics. For composers, recordings are often the only “text” most listeners will ever encounter. If those go out of print, the public version of your career gets rewritten by absence.

So the line carries a gentle insistence: art doesn’t survive on reputation alone. It needs distribution. It needs infrastructure. Coleman isn’t asking for applause; he’s asking for access, for the chance that someone who wasn’t alive for the first run can still press play and find the melody waiting.