I wrote my very first song in my senior year in high school. I think my English teacher was surprised when I showed up with an Elizabethan-style musical rendition of Ophelia’s mad scene from Hamlet instead of the expected essay.

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Playing the Priest in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage in college, I was offered the option of writing music for my character’s song. The idea I submitted was adopted by the grad student who had been retained to write the score. I got a credit in the program.

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Around the turn of the century, I wrote a story about a Beautiful Princess who informed me that I was to write a musical about her called, fittingly enough, “The Princess Musical”. After a short time, I decided to take composition and music theory classes at the Mannes School of Music. I also began to write cabaret songs some of which were performed by people other than myself! About 10 years later, I released a CD of those songs entitled “I Lose My Heart (and other body parts…) The Songs of Paul Bodden”.

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My songs show the influence of my wide-ranging musical interests below, all mixed-up with a big dollop of modern classical music and the whole Broadway musical canon.