James Franco Is Making A Smiths-Inspired Album With A Member Of The Smiths

Man, that James Franco is one talented cat. Sure he acts, but he also paints, writes poetry, and is making some pretty compelling music as one of half of avant garde conceptual art project Daddy. Along with design school pal Tim O’Keefe, the two are ready to drop Daddy’s third LP Let Me Get What I Want in 2015.

Daddy’s upcoming LP is based off a ten-poem sequence, by Franco, titled The Best of the Smiths: Side A and Side B. Franco tells Vice the poems were inspired by The Smiths‘ songs. In turn Daddy took Franco’s Smiths-based poetry and made them into original tracks of their own. Still with us?

If you give album cut This Charming Man a listen (below) you’ll probably think, ‘Hmmm, this kinda’ sounds like The Smiths’. Well, that’s because Franco and O’Keefe enlisted The Smiths’ original bassist Andy Rourke to play throughout the album. That’s meta, baby!

As for the very artsy clip for This Charming Man, that comes from students in Franco’s mum film class. “We created the record at the same time James’s mom ran a program teaching kids how to make films,” O’Keefe told Vice. “They developed scripts out of the same poems that we made songs out of, then shot film based on those scripts.”

Daddy then complied the raw footage, brought in some editors, and voila. The clip begins, as will all videos for Let me Get What I Want, with a painting by Franco inspired by his ’93 high school yearbook. This Charming Man is one of ten videos that will directly follow on from one-another to make an hour long film, the neither has a beginning or an ending.

Rather then simply releasing their music in the plain old usual manner, Daddy plans to put out their multi-media work somewhat like art installations. Ah, to be talented with lots of money. You can check out the clip for Daddy’s This Charming Man below.

Watch: Daddy – This Charming Man

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