Most of us celebrate our birthdays with a few close friends, one too many tequila shots, and cake (on which we’ll subsist for the next couple of days as well), but Emmy-award-winning composer, Lance Horne is celebrating it with a unique show at Birdland Jazz on October 20th which will feature performances from some of his friends, like Lesley Gore, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Lauren Flanigan, Julia Murney, Gabrielle Stravelli, Stephanie d’Abruzzo and Julie Garnye. “Lance & the Ladies” will showcase Horne’s acclaimed debut album First Things Last, as well as new songs, and cuts from his opera The Night Before My Wedding. We caught up with him to talk about the show and look back at his exemplary career.

First of all, happy birthday in advance.

Oh thank you! I’ve made it, it’s been a good year!

How did you come up with the idea to have this party?

I decided to have a party because I’ve been touring and doing all these shows around the world I haven’t been in New York all year. I haven’t seen my friends, I haven’t had a chance to make music with them, and I realized that would be the perfect way to come back to Birdland. I’ve been there before with amazing people like Jim Caruso, Alan Cumming, Alice Ripley and Rachel Dratch...and we were trying to find a way for me to come back and perform there. I’m doing a show in Berkeley in California, which ends on October 19, so I thought, great, I’ll just fly in on the red eye and do this show on Monday night, and that’ll be the best way for me to come back to New York City and also the best gift possible, for everyone to come together for one night and make some music.

For a musician to have his birthday party at Birdland must be the same as a kid have his birthday party at Disneyland, right?

It is! It’s totally like the Magic Kingdom of the performing arts (laughs)

Have you had any trouble selecting the songs you’ll perform? Are you being more meticulous than usual?

I haven’t had trouble with the songs because I really let each of the ladies pick what song they wanted, so it took the pressure off of me. I picked the songs I wanted to sing around what the ladies were being drawn to. It’s been great to see who’s picked what song.

Since the event is for both your friends and people who bought tickets. How worried are you about your hosting duties?

I love hosting and I love meeting new people, so I don’t mind. I feel like my house is very infamous in that people are always coming and going, there’s always large groups of people: artists, people’s friends, strangers...there’s a real New York feeling to my house. There’s a piano there, so there’s always music happening. We’re always talking about art and going through music, so all we’re gonna do is take that and put it on display at Birdland, so people can come and be part of it. They’re just friends you haven’t met yet.

What’s on your birthday wishlist?

I am working on new operatic work with the poetry of Neil Gaiman, he is amazing, he’s given me his unpublished poetry (he wrote for Amanda Palmer), so I’m working on that at the New York Theatre Workshop right after this, to find out how we can take it to the next stage. I really want to focus on that piece this year.

How was it to have access to these private “love letters”? It must have been very flattering!

The poems are beautiful and I guess it’s a similar instance to having a birthday party in public at Birdland, where we’re making private things public (laughs). I think that’s part of the role of the artist in society right now: to engage, open themselves up and say “OK here’s all the inside, here’s how it resonates with me, how does it resonate with you? How does it make you feel? Let’s have a dialogue”. I think that’s the difference between performing live and seeing media on a digital platform, it’s this give and take, and Neil and Amanda are perfect examples of that. I’ve known them both since their relationship began, so it’s also very public for me to make this valentine for them through my music. They’re great friends and they haven’t heard it yet, so I’m very excited! It’s great to witness their love of each other and to play a small part in it is another dream come true.

You’ve performed some pieces from the opera already, right?

We had a sneak preview in Sussex at the Latitude Festival in July with members from the English National Opera and Steinway sponsors my concerts there, so they brought a piano to the middle of a field and we did it. The lineup at the Festival this year was amazing! It included everything from Hall & Oates, to Robyn playing her new stuff, along with the classical stuff. I’d be happy to put the whole show there in its full form. It was an amazing experience and it really set the bar high for this piece. I’m talking to them about what I can possibly do there next year.

How important is it for you to create stand alone pieces vs. pieces that only work in the context of the show?

I think that’s a give and take. I like for people to be able to experience something in an extractable form if there’s some way to do it. I feel like we’re living our lives in three minute chunks right now, so if there’s a way that I can create something that sits within somebody’s free time great. But I’m also working with Taylor Mac right now and he’s creating a 24 hour concert on the history of music. If you think of it, that is a 24 hour event of three minute clips, so there’s nothing that going to be as spectacular as somebody witnessing that 24 hour concert. Sondheim said that content dictates form and he got that from Hammerstein and I have that written above my desk. So if the content is telling me something is extractable, great. I’ll put it on YouTube or work on it with someone else. For example at Birdland, there’s a few of these musicals I’d like to perform, but it’s not extractable, so I wouldn’t be able to establish a dialogue with the audience, unless I launched the whole musical, which I’m fine with…

Listening to your songs I get a feeling that you’re trying to create new standards, which is something that’s been missing for a while in pop music.

I agree. I very much hope that we are all, as a group of people, writing things that will last, which is where the name for my album came from. I hope that I’m contributing to the efforts of all of us to reach out to each other over the ages. I’d love it if some of this music reached out to someone that I don’t know in another time or place. I think by making these pieces as personal as possible, they become as universal as possible.

I did a YouTube search of people performing your songs, which made me wonder what’s the best cover of your songs you’ve heard?

There are some great YouTube searches and now that people can get a lot of my songs from my website, I find out almost always after the fact about someone covering something. Sometimes people contact me and wanna do a very specific version. The best cover of any song of mine I got to work on was Rebecca Luker. She did an amazing version of “Last Day on Earth” at Lincoln Center for a launch of the album. I mean Hannah Waddingham sings it in the album, and sings it like there’s no tomorrow which is great! But she wasn’t able to come to New York for the launch, so Rebecca Luker did it in such a magnificent form. She reinvented the song and brought so much of herself to it, that the song became invisible and then I got to play on it. It was a highlight of my career. There’s nothing like watching an artist of her calibre create something out of something that I’d written. I couldn’t have been happier about that. Alan Cumming has also made my song “American” his own and it’s really hard for me to keep up with him when I do it now, cause I think “oh boy! Alan really knows how to do this!” There’s this one girl called Julie Atherton, who’s in London, and she took “Last Day on Earth” and she told me she’d do something with it and just to trust her, and she did it one night at the Apollo Theatre with a gospel choir, as the encore, and brought down the house. I wrote a song for her new album and she has amazing range and instincts.

Since you brought up “American”, I love how funny that song is and I also feel like sense of humor is something else that music lacks nowadays. How do you make songs that are funny one moment, but then break your heart in seconds?

That’s how life is. You’re walking down the street and you’re about to cry and then something funny happens and you laugh. I mean Lorenz Hart in some of his lyrics, “You have what I lack myself and now I even have to scratch my back myself“, it’s a profoundly sad, beautiful and then funny thing. Or that W.H. Aulden one, “Tell me the truth about love. When it comes, will it come without warning. Just as I'm picking my nose”, you go, “oh wait, this is a romantic song, but you just made something kinda funny”. I think John Cleese talks about getting in a groove from closed mode to open mode as quickly as possible and he says it’s done through humor, so I’m always interested in how to get that first laugh. If you get it then you can get everyone happy and open, and discuss things that aren’t that happy. If you can offer some humor as an option, then you can balance the darkness.

Since you’re always working on new stuff, I thought I might as well pitch something to you: a Betty Hutton bio-musical.

Do you know that I’m obsessed with Betty Hutton? Have I said it somewhere. I would write a Betty Hutton musical in a heartbeat! I was talking with Robert Friedman who co-wrote A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, and we were discussing our love for Betty, so I’ll ask him. I wrote a Macy’s Parade song called “The Pharaoh Strut”, Diana DeGarmo sang it, and I dedicated it to Betty Hutton and sent it to her, and Milton DeLugg the conductor had done arrangements for several Betty Hutton pieces so I was in heaven. Sometimes at night I look for Betty Hutton memorabilia (laughs), it is a complete splurge, but I do have some amazing things. She can do no wrong for me.

And now people know what to bring you as a present!

Yeah! Just Google Betty Hutton, give me one of her clips I haven’t seen! That’s free and I would be happy. Or just come to my concert! It’s not free but these women are amazing, I’d pay to go see one of them and here you’ll have nine, plus an all-girl band!

"Lance and the Ladies" is October 20 at Birdland Jazz. Click here to buy tickets.