John Gallagher Jr. clarifies retirement talk and debuts new ‘Swept Away’ song (exclusive)

Don’t worry, theater fans. Despite floating the idea of retirement on social media following Swept Away’s sudden closing last month, John Gallagher Jr. is still open to charting a brand new course back to Broadway in the future. 

“I didn’t get into theater because I’m not a drama queen,” the Tony award-winning actor jokes in an exclusive interview with Entertainment Weekly over Zoom, before swiftly acknowledging that there are “so many more heartbreaking events taking place than a piece of musical theater closing after a month and a half.” 

Still, Gallagher admits that he was left feeling incredibly disillusioned after the celebrated Avett Brothers musical came to a close so soon after it washed ashore at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, especially since he’d been attached to the project since 2015.

“It’s made me reconsider and rethink what I want to do artistically and creatively moving forward, because it’s a lot of work to do these things and then to spend all of these years working on it and have it just vanish before your eyes,” Gallagher says. “Like, I don’t know if I want to put myself through that ever again. So I was being a bit dramatic on social media, but the feeling was that it was like… I don’t have much more of this in me. I really wanted to squeeze every last drop out of this one, and I didn’t get the chance to do that. So it’s definitely set me back a step. But never say never, obviously. The future is unwritten, after all.”

It’s also why Gallagher’s grateful that he and the rest of his Swept Away castmates — including Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe, and Wayne Duvall — were able to record an official Broadway cast album at the Power Station in New York City just days before being notified the production would soon be setting out on its final voyage. The John Logan-penned musical, which was directed by Michael Mayer and inspired by the Avett Brothers’ 2004 album Mignonnette, follows a group of whalers who are forced to confront just how far they’ll go in order to survive after getting shipwrecked at sea.

While the full cast album drops on Feb. 7, Swept Away has already released multiple singles, including Gallagher’s foot-stomping atheist anthem “Ain’t No Man” and Enscoe’s heartbreaking “No Hard Feelings.” Now, it’s celebrating its dark side with today’s release of the spine-tingling track, “Satan Pulls the Strings.” 

Gallagher, a longtime fan of the Avett Brothers, notes that there’s nothing quite like the song — even within the band’s own discography. “It has this feverish, nightmarish, demonic quality to it, while also being like an absolute toetapper,” he explains. “Then you listen to the lyrics and it has this very gothic, mysterious, hard to pin down at times, quite scary lyrical content, and so it fits this moment in the show perfectly. I think that’s why John Logan seized on it and was like, ‘Well, we can’t tell this story without incorporating this song.’”

Music supervisor Brian Usifer, who created the show’s arrangements and orchestrations alongside Chris Miller, tells EW that they pieced together different performances of the track — from the original Rick Rubin-produced version to a “bluegrass-y middle section” gleaned from a live Avett Brothers performance on The Tonight Show — in order to create a unique, rollicking version of the song that fit with Swept Away‘s nautical nature.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

“We’re just trying to find the through line between it, like, what’s the DNA of the song?” Usifer, who also produced the cast album, explains. “We’re just trying to ask ourselves: ‘What is the moment in the story, who’s the character singing, and how can we just use all of our tools that we have at our disposal to give it this special kind of unique, dangerous sound?'”

Usifer adds that the song is a shock amongst the rest of the show’s post-shipwreck songs, which generally feature softer, Jeff Buckley-esque guitar parts. “When we get ‘Satan Pulls the Strings,’ it’s suddenly this dangerous, distorted, electric,” Usifer says. “The guitar player is using a slide on it, which gives it sort of like a twangy, country feel, but we’re trying to signal danger. We’re trying to signal something is not right here, something is wrong.”

Without spoiling one of the musical’s biggest twists, Gallagher describes the song as a “rallying cry moment” for his character Mate, whose psyche begins to fracture after weeks spent adrift with minimal food or water. “He’s losing his mind and disassociating,” he says. “And then also being propped up and giving himself this pep talk from within, sort of conjuring a dark element or a dark spirit that he’s going to need to be able to go through with some of the more heinous acts that he attempts in the show.”

Usifer and Miller also helped to choreograph Mate’s spiral — both figuratively and literally onstage — through the track’s orchestration. “The matrix breaks in that moment,” Usifer points out. “They could have gone this way, but they went that way. And we really embraced opening that door and Pandora’s box and letting that influence the rest of the show in whatever way it would.”

Swept Away (Original Broadway Cast Recording) washes ashore on Feb. 7. Listen to Gallagher perform “Satan Pulls the Strings” here.