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The James Franco File: 10 Ridiculous Things About the Actor’s New Band Daddy

James Franco new band Daddy video Love in the Old Days

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.

  1. It’s called Daddy.
  2. Daddy is releasing an EP next week — next week! — called MotorCity.
  3. 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”:
  4. 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.
  5. “When I met you, you were my mother, and I played father.”
  6. 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.
  7. 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.”
  8. 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.”
  9. He has a master’s degree in poetry.
  10. This was Franco’s last musical outing:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9uv9VVpgxpo