I Wanna Be a Legend Lyrics – EPIC: Cut Songs

Detailed Annotations

Before the thunder of wars or the whirlpool of gods, Epic: The Musical once whispered a smaller, youthful wish: I Wanna Be a Legend. Though ultimately excised from the score, the song lingers online like a half-remembered dream—its few surviving lines revealing young Odysseus confiding in his lifelong nurse, Eurycleia, about a boy’s hunger to etch his name upon eternity. Scholars note that composer-lyricist Jorge Rivera-Herrans later recycled melodic DNA from this draft into the released number “Legendary,” binding past and present in a single musical strand.

Overview

The fragment sits chronologically well before The Troy Saga; Odysseus is still a prince, Ithaca still a backwater. The dramatic tension is internal: ambition versus obscurity. While the final musical arcs show him battling Cyclopes, sirens, and gods, this embryonic scene places the fight inside his own chest. The sparse lyric becomes a teenager’s manifesto, voiced in private yet aimed at the cosmic scoreboard of Greek legend.

Character Dynamics

Eurycleia’s presence is vital. In Homer she is the first mortal to recognize Odysseus upon his return; Herrans rewinds that trust to its origin, letting the nurse serve as conscience and confessor. While the draft supplies no spoken reply from her, the subtext is nurturing skepticism: she knows the cost of fame and may fear the boy’s naiveté. This mirrors their canonical bond—half maternal, half advisory—later echoed when she helps expose the disloyal maids.

Thematic Elements

I wanna be remembered.

I wanna live forever.

I want the world to know my name.

Long after I’m gone.

I wanna be a legend.

I wanna be a myth.

’Cause this is how they won’t forget me in the end.

I wanna be a legend.

The repetition of wanna hammers home urgency, while each succeeding line widens the ambition’s scope—from personal remembrance to mythic immortality. Placed in an Odyssean mouth, the lyric foreshadows later boasts in songs such as “Full Speed Ahead” and “Storm,” where hubris and heroism intertwine. Yet the draft also asks: what price must a boy pay to convert flesh to legend? That question threads the entire musical, biting hardest when Odysseus later cries, “When does a man become a monster?”

Musical Techniques

Though no official demo is publicly released, bootleg clips hint at a gentle guitar motif—Odysseus’s signature instrument across the show—wrapped in a modest 6/8 sway, almost lullaby-like. The softness contrasts with the triumphant brass of “Legendary,” underscoring that this is aspiration, not achievement. Herrans often plants leitmotifs early, letting them mature as the story darkens; here, the seed of heroic fanfare is merely a cradle song.

Historical References

Homer never records a young Odysseus announcing grand designs—his kleos (“fame”) is earned retroactively by deeds. Herrans’s addition humanizes him for modern audiences: who, at seventeen, hasn’t yearned to sign the sky with their initials? The scene also gestures to Greek oral tradition, where bards kept heroes alive through song. Odysseus grasps that lesson even before leaving Ithaca: life is brief, but a well-scored story can outrun death itself.

And so this cut lyric survives the cutting room—brief, bare, and beating. It reminds us that every epic legend begins as a private whisper, and that sometimes the whispers we never hear still shape the songs we eventually sing.