Wealth & Money Quote by Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim is making a heretical claim in a culture that treats lyrics as miniature poems: the best words in a song often look like too few words on the page. "Underwritten" is craft talk disguised as provocation. He is arguing that lyric writing isn’t about verbal splendor but about leaving oxygen for everything that isn’t verbal: melody, rhythm, breath, character, and the audience’s split attention. A lyric has to ride the music, not compete with it.

The swipe at poets isn’t anti-poetry so much as a warning about density. "Language is too rich" means too self-sufficient, too complete. Poetry can afford to be the whole event; a lyric can’t. Onstage, a singer has to act while singing, and the music already carries emotional information. If the words arrive as ornate, fully loaded artifacts, they "drown" the listener by asking them to process metaphor, syntax, and sound at the same speed the band is moving. The result is clutter, not complexity.

Context matters: Sondheim built a career on lyrics that feel conversational but are engineered like clockwork, designed for character psychology and dramatic turns. His point is less that lyrics should be simple than that they should be strategic. Underwriting is restraint as generosity: trusting the tune to do its job, trusting silence and repetition, and letting the audience complete the feeling rather than being buried under someone else’s virtuosity.