Nilo is the BEST. THE BEST... Can I just say... THE BEST.

In all seriousness, he's one of my dearest friends and I love and respect him. When we work together (we've done about a dozen projects now over the years, small and large), the words always come first, but before the words, there's a lot of mutual discussion about the subject matter, often over meals, and spending time talking about our lives, too. We're both storytellers so we have to spend time exchanging stories of all kinds before we focus all of that energy onto a specific tale.

Then, Nilo goes away for a while and comes up with texts. He passes that along to me and I start the musical side of things. I will often move some texts around, or repeat words for musical effect, sometimes ask for more text, or ask him to edit things down, while he has ultimate say on how he wants the texts to go.

Now that I've begun to use a software program called NotePerformer (I've been thus far too impatient to learn Ableton, Logic Pro, etc, which allows the computer to simulate your music), I can actually share with him a pretty good realization of the music before actual rehearsals. I did that with this opera last year, for instance, and it was really helpful.

All this to say -- Discussion-words-music-ping pong back and forth is the order of our work. And even in rehearsals for the opera, just yesterday, we added a line for Diego to sing with Frida right at the very end. This was Nilo's suggestion when he heard the music. The ping-pong, exchanging of ideas is very important for our creative success.

And yeah... censorship seriously sucks. I was shocked and angry how that all went down.