He’s got that swag like Ginsberg. He’s got that coif like Dean. Actor and noted eccentric James Franco has got a new music project, and we’re a little sorry to report it’s not his very own version of RiFF-RaFF’s surreal trap rap. (Franco plays a version of the neon-dripped MC in Harmony Korine’s new Spring Breakers movie.) Instead, he’s teamed with an old college pal named Tim O’Keefe to start a Motown-inspired rock outfit called, um, Daddy. Here are the insane things you need to know about it.
- It’s called Daddy.
- Daddy is releasing an EP next week — next week! — called MotorCity.
- The video for “Love in the Old Days,” Daddy’s first single, in which Franco gets his spoken word on whilst rhapsodizing about the “old movies of Brando and Tennessee Williams”:
- Motor City’s own Smokey Robinson sings on a track called “Crime.” They met on a flight shortly after Franco had finished watching a documentary on the history of Motown.
- “When I met you, you were my mother, and I played father.”
- The EP cover features Spring Breakers co-stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine wearing bikinis and sporting fake “Daddy” tattoos. This is most certainly not the Mickey Mouse Club Walt envisioned.
- From the press release: “According to Franco and O’Keefe, the motivation behind Daddy is to push beyond the sonic space of music into the surrounding ecology. Daddy investigates the territories of film/video, installation, and performance while simultaneously exploring the connections that form between them.”
- From Franco’s Rolling Stone interview: “The way we come at it is not to be a band creating a record, but from a wider artistic approach – looking at different genres of music, different periods of time, really studying it, and then creating work influenced and inspired by that.”
- He has a master’s degree in poetry.
- This was Franco’s last musical outing:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/9uv9VVpgxpo