Canadian interview
MONTREAL - “You’re from Montreal? Can we talk to you about something?”
Ryan Gosling was on the phone from a tour stop in Boston, with pal Zach Shields, and the two were very excited to talk to a Montrealer.
You see, London, Ont.-born Gosling, better known for his status as a Hollywood heartthrob (The Notebook and indie films Half Nelson, and Lars and the Real Girl), has a band - a pretty good one at that - and it’s coming our way.
“Can you help us out?” he said. “There’s no one coming to our show in Montreal. Also, our talent show - we haven’t had any submissions.”
Ah yes, the talent show. Gosling and Shields are staging one in each city they visit (see the link at the end of this article), instead of having support bands at their shows.
Which brings us back to their band, Dead Man’s Bones, and its album of the same name, which was released Oct. 6. It’s a musical project by two admitted non-musicians, a for-fun idea that turned into something much bigger.
It started with ghosts. Gosling and Shields met in 2005, while Gosling was dating Notebook co-star Rachel McAdams and Shields was seeing her sister. They became friends, discovering a mutual fascination with the macabre.
“My parents moved from a house they thought was haunted,” Gosling explained. “We used to live by a graveyard and they would send me out to play in it. Zach was in therapy because he was obsessed with ghosts.”
“As a kid, I went hunting for ghosts in the closet and the basement,” Shields said. “My mom got worried. I would stay up all night, hunting for ghosts. All I drew was pictures of ghosts. (My parents) decided I should go to therapy for it. I went for a few months, then I became a closeted ghost-lover.”
They shared other unlikely interests, such as a fascination with Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, ’50s doo-wop, ’60s girl groups and kids’ choirs, for starters. Their musical partnership emerged as a sort of by-product of it all.
“We never said, ‘Let’s get serious (about the band),’ ” Shields said. “It just happened. We had this idea for a musical or a play. We were hoping for something like (the work of theatre directors) Peter Stein or Robert Wilson. We decided that we were going to write the music for it as well. But every time we tried to describe it to someone, they would tell us how crazy it was, how it would cost so much - that nobody would give us money for a musical theatre piece about ghosts and monsters.”
“They were right,” Gosling piped in.
“We never made a conscious decision to start a band,” Shields continued. “It all started happening. It still doesn’t feel real, in a way.”
The two began writing and rehearsing songs, with an imaginary kids’ choir in mind. In the interim, they sang the parts themselves. Eventually, a friend mentioned L.A.’s Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir, and they were on their way.
Over four one-hour sessions with the choir, on consecutive Sundays, they etched out a delightfully uncontrived collection of catchy songs with titles such as My Body’s a Zombie for You, Werewolf Heart and Flowers Grow Out of My Grave.
Therein, Gosling sings in a voice not unlike Roy Orbison’s. Other elements are more indie rock - Pitchfork drew comparisons to Bryan Ferry, Beck and Arcade Fire; Rolling Stone seconded the Arcade Fire reference, while tossing in Tom Waits and Sesame Street doing a Kurt Weill musical.
And let’s not forget Del Shannon, or the Shangri-Las.
“When I first heard (Shannon’s) Runaway, for some reason it sounded like a spooky song,” Gosling said. “Also the Shangri-Las - there’s just this kind of eeriness about them, sonically. (The style) just seemed to suit the theme.”
They will perform with a local choir in each city they visit. (In Montreal they’ll be with the Every Kid Choir, which sang on the Dears’ last album, Missiles.) They have created elaborate black-and-white videos for some of their songs. It’s all part of a broader concept to make this more than just a vanity project.
“Hopefully there’s a sense of humour about it,” Shields said. “When you take it too seriously, it stops being fun. A lot of music these days is all about being cool and rocking out. It can be all those things, and have a sense of humour.”
“It’s a genre of film,” Gosling said, “so why not a genre of music? There are cool spooky movies that are not slasher films. Like Hold That Ghost. It’s an Abbott and Costello film that’s quite scary but also funny, with the Andrews Sisters and Al Jolson.”
“Hopefully it doesn’t just end up being a band,” Shields said, “where it starts and stops with the music side. We want to keep the theatricality in it, keep making videos; we did a puppet show for a while in L.A. It’s nice to play instruments, but I don’t want to get too serious about it.”
Click here for more on talent show auditions.
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