I Don't Know How to Love Him

Few songs in the theater canon are this nakedly confused — not performed confusion, but genuinely dramatized internal conflict rendered as melody. The orchestration knows this: it begins almost tentatively, a hesitant piano and plucked strings, as if the music itself isn't sure where it's going. Mary Magdalene's voice is the drama here, and the role demands a singer who can hold intellectual uncertainty and physical longing in the same phrase without resolving them. This is not a love song in the conventional sense; it is a song about the inadequacy of categories, the moment when all the emotional frameworks a person has ever relied on stop working. The melody has an almost questioning shape, phrases that lift upward without fully landing, which mirrors the lyrical content precisely — she is asking rather than declaring throughout. It sits in 1971's rock-inflected theater sound but feels more intimate than its era, more interior. The cultural context is radical: a gospel/rock musical dared to give its central female character a crisis of desire and faith at the same time, and neither is resolved. Listen to it when certainty has left you, when you are feeling something you don't have the vocabulary for, when the frameworks you use to understand your own emotions have gone quiet.