Out of Their Heads: An Interview with Kooman and Dimond

The names Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond shouldn't be foreign to this blog -- just in my post last week, I talked about their new album Out of Our Heads (Have you gotten that yet? What are you waiting for?!) but this musical theatre writing team is also behind shows like Dani Girl, Golden Gate, and Homemade Fusion -- to name a few. With a CD release concert coming up next week at The Birdland, they were generous to take the time to answer some questions about the upcoming album, writing less traditional musical stories, and connecting with their fans:

(Todd Buonopane singing "To Excess")

Me: How did you two meet? What about your collaboration process has made you guys so successful as a team?

Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond: We met in a lyric writing course at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael was an undergraduate studying composition, and I was in the graduate playwriting program.

It’s hard to define exactly what it is that makes us work as a team. We like to think that we complement each other pretty well. We have similar aesthetics and senses of humor, which is probably critical, and are also both drawn to clean, dynamic storytelling. At the same time, though, we’re very different people, and some of the contradicting aspects of our personalities, experiences, and worldviews probably adds an interesting element of contrast to our work.

Me: There are so many great themes of love and loss and general rationalizing/reasoning serving as a throughline in all of the songs. What was your underlying thread that you wanted to hold all these songs together?

Kooman and Dimond: When it comes down to it, we wanted the album to be a collection of our strongest songs. There wasn’t necessarily an overt thread that we were looking for to connect everything, we really tried to go about putting together a cohesive album that represented our best work.

That being said, it’s probably not a coincidence that there are a number of undercurrents running through many of the songs, particularly touching upon the themes that you mentioned. Love and loss aren’t exactly uncommon areas of exploration for songwriters, and a lot of what we set out to express can fall into one, if not both, of those categories.