ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL NOTES
words and music (c) 1993 Nancy Ellen Abrams

At a New Years’ Eve party, I was chatting about songwriting with the managing director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz, our local summer theater festival. I mentioned that I could probably write a song about anything that I could understand. "Here’s our upcoming season," he said. "All’s Well That Ends Well, A Comedy of Errors, and Christopher Marlowe’s Faust. If you can write a song tying them all together, we’d like you to perform it at our big fundraising dinner." It is actually easier to write a song with many constraints than with none at all. Constraints give me ideas. I had thought for a long time that the myth of Faust mirrored the situation of our industrialized world, but putting this thought together with the two Shakespearean titles gave me the inspiration for this song.