Sondheim also mentored a fledgling Jonathan Larson, attending Larson's workshop for his "Superbia" (a musical version of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"). In Larson's musical "Tick, Tick... Boom!", the phone message is played in which Sondheim apologizes for leaving early, says he wants to meet him and is impressed with his work. After Larson's death, Sondheim called him one of the few composers "attempting to blend contemporary pop music with theater music, which doesn't work very well; he was on his way to finding a real synthesis. A good deal of pop music has interesting lyrics, but they are not theater lyrics". A musical-theatre composer "must have a sense of what is theatrical, of how you use music to tell a story, as opposed to writing a song. Jonathan understood that instinctively."