Exclusive: Jeremy Jordan's 'How Glory Goes' and 2 Other Tracks From Floyd Collins Broadway Album

Adam Guettel and Tina Landau's Floyd Collins is currently enjoying a long-awaited Broadway premiere via Lincoln Center Theater, which, of course, means a Broadway cast album is on the way—Center Stage Records is set to release it digitally and physically July 11. But �뵺�� has an exclusive first listen to several of the songs. Keep scrolling to hear 2025 Tony nominee Jeremy Jordan’s take on the show’s “How Glory Goes,�� Jordan and Jason Gotay singing “Daybreak,�� and Lizzy McAlpine’s “Through the Mountain.��

Jordan's Tony nomination, for Best Leading Actor in a Musical, is one of six the production is up for at this year's Tony Awards, also including Best Revival of a Musical. Also nominated is Bruce Coughlin, for his orchestration of Guettel's score.

Coughlin says Floyd Collins launched his career when he orchestrated the Off-Broadway premiere 30 years ago in 1996. One of his most notable contributions to the score was his idea to have a harmonica player throughout. "I had a hunch it would be amazing," Coughlin told us. "There was one demo that had a little harmonica part. And it sounded so cool, I wanted that all through the show."

Harmonicas are not exactly common in a Broadway pit, so it's maybe unsurprising Coughlin knew nothing about playing or scoring for them when he started his work on Floyd. Coughlin's first call was to Rob Paparozzi, a harmonica player and New York session musician. More recently, Paparozzi also coached Timothée Chalamet on the instrument for the latter's performance in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.

READ: How Broadway's Floyd Collins Compares to the Real-Life Story

"He was like, 'Oh Bruce, I'm happy to do this. Most arrangers don't know what a harmonica can do. It would be so great if you could use all the possibilities of the harmonica in this orchestration,'" Coughlin remembers him saying. After a few days of a harmonica intensive, Coughlin had his toolbox ready to write one of musical theatre's more unique instrument parts, giving the entire score an appropriate Kentucky flavor. Thanks to Paparozzi's expertise about the instrument's full capabilities, Coughlin was also able to use it surprisingly dramatically, showing it as adept at providing color as it is mimicking the mournful yearning at the heart of Guettel's score.

Adam Guettel, Ted Sperling, and Bruce Coughlin Tricia Baron

Now, if you're wondering how Coughlin is up for a Tony Award when he orchestrated the show in 1996, that's because this time around, things are pretty different. After hearing a few of the songs in a concert at Town Hall—a dramatically larger venue than Off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons, where the musical originally made its New York premiere—he was struck by how small his instrumentation suddenly sounded. "I was so disheartened," he remembers. "It made me afraid of another production in a bigger house." And the Vivian Beaumont, home to the musical this time around, is definitely a lot bigger than Playwrights.

Coughlin was tasked with expanding his original work, adding two violins, a cello, and a reed player to the existing ensemble of bass, guitar, harmonica, piano, percussion, violin, viola, and cello. But that didn't just mean writing four new parts and placing that on top of what was already there. Coughlin says they could have elected to expand things by adding a second player to all of the formerly solo string parts, doubling what they were always playing. But, he says, two violins are hardly ever the way to go. You need three for them to sound good. That setup meant that entirely new string parts had to be written, bringing the string set-up fully into six parts.

Coughlin also added a reed part to give the ensemble more foundation, having it focus on the lower reed instruments like bassoon, contra-alto clarinet (another rarity in musical theatre), and bass clarinet. "[The original orchestration] is so much strings that it can sound sort of ethereal times, and I was afraid of that with a big space," Coughlin shares.

Coughlin says his work on "Daybreak" is pretty straightforward—the main objective was to stay out of the way of Guettel's beautiful music. "His sense of harmony is next level," he says reverently. "You just really don't hear much like that in the theatre. I think the combination of theatre plus classical plus hill country music, that odd combination is so unique."

Listen to Jordan and Gotay sing "Daybreak" below.

"Through the Mountain," sung by Floyd's sister Nellie (recording star McAlpine in this revival), was one of a handful of songs Guettel wrote on guitar.

“What's interesting about his guitar writing is that he had never played guitar before," Coughlin says. "He taught himself to play to write this show, so he has a very interesting and personal way of playing guitar. He'd be working out a song and figuring out chords, and if he had something he kind of liked but he couldn't get the chord to sound the way he wanted, he'd just retune the guitar." As a result, the guitar part calls for lots of fairly unique alternate guitar tunings, meaning that while there's only one player, you'll see several guitars in the pit. "The guitar part, here, is his," Coughlin says of "Through the Mountain." "It was a matter of wanting to have the hill country sound be more ethereal in this one, because of who Nellie is. There's a lot of solo fiddle lines, and violas trying to sound like fiddles."

Listen to McAlpine sing "Through the Mountain" below.

"How Glory Goes," the musical's finale and best-known song, was not written on guitar, and features a pretty prominent piano part that Coughlin says is also all Guettel. "Adam is a great pianist," says Coughlin. "A lot of times you can use the piano part as is with Adam, which is definitely the case with 'How Glory Goes' and much of The Light in the Piazza." Coughlin won a Tony Award in 2005 for orchestrating Piazza along with Guettel and music director Ted Sperling.

"It's an interesting song because it builds to the return of that cave canon," Coughlin says of the song's ending. "That went through several iterations, in terms of the orchestration. Originally, I had in my mind that it should sound like distant country fiddlers somehow, and I did some fiddly stuff at the end. It didn't quite work. We ended up with some arpeggio strings going higher and higher, which works especially well, I think, because so much of the singing is off the beat, and the piano has a lot of off beats. The strings kind of ground it."

Listen to Jordan's "How Glory Goes" below.

Jordan is starring in the title role, alongside Gotay as Homer Collins, Sean Allan Krill as H.T. Carmichael, Marc Kudisch as Lee Collins, McAlpine as Nellie Collins, Wade McCollum as Bee Doyle, Jessica Molaskey as Miss Jane, 2025 Tony nominee Taylor Trensch as Skeets Miller, Cole Vaughan as Jewell Estes, and Clyde Voce as Ed Bishop. The cast also includes Dwayne Cooper, Jeremy Davis, Charlie Franklin, Kevyn Morrow, and Zak Resnick, with understudies Kristen Hahn and Happy McPartlin; and swings Kevin Bernard, Justin Showell, and Colin Trudell rounding out the company. Casting is by The Telsey Office's Patrick Goodwin.

Based on a true story, the work follows a cave explorer who discovers a cave he thinks could be the next goldmine tourist attraction, only to become trapped inside on his way out. Above ground, one of the country's first-ever media circuses develops tracking the efforts to rescue him. The musical was among the first major professional credits for now Tony-winning composer Guettel (The Light in the Piazza) and book writer-director Landau (SpongeBob SquarePants, Redwood). Landau is also at the helm of this new staging.

READ: Floyd Collins' Upcoming Broadway Debut Isn't About Why Now—It's Why Always

The production features sets by dots, costumes by Anita Yavich, lighting by Scott Zielinski, sound by Dan Moses Schreier, and projections by Ray Horng Sun, with dance sequences by Jon Rua, orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin, and music direction by Ted Sperling. Bonnie Panson serves as stage manager.

Lincoln Center Theater is producing Floyd Collins in association with Creative Partners Productions and Mark Cortale & Charles D. Urstadt.

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