Actor James Franco has announced the release of a new album with his band Daddy titled Let Me Get What I Want, which features songs inspired by the lyrics of the Smiths. He has also shared a music video for their song “This Charming Man,” which you can check out right here on MusicTimes.
According to Vice, the origins of the album can be traced back to a book of poetry that Franco wrote titled Directing Herbert White: Poems, which featured a sequence of poems inspired by the Smiths. For Let Me Get What I Want, Franco and his musical partner Tim O’Keefe have set these poems to music, which would make them songs based on poems based on songs, though Franco seems to be aware of how convoluted this all is.
“We took a ten-poem sequence called ‘The Best of the Smiths: Side A and Side B,” Franco explained to Vice. “I originally wrote this sequence as a way to use one medium (music) to influence another one (poetry). The Smiths’ songs provided inspiration for the poems, lending tone and situation. Once I had the sequence, Tim and I took the material one step further and turned the poems inspired by songs, back into songs of their own.”
To take the Smiths influence yet another step further, Franco and O’Keefe have recruited Smiths bassist Andy Rourke to play on every song on the album, because he apparently doesn’t have much else to do these days.
Rather than simply recording an album, however, Franco has turned this into a multimedia project, incorporating films and paintings to go along with each song. Ten music videos were made for Let Me Get What I Want, each opening with a painting by Franco himself, and all of which flow together to form a single hour-long film.
According to Tim O’Keefe, the ten music videos were originally filmed by students at the Palo Alto high school where Franco’s mother teaches. “They developed scripts out of the same poems that we made songs out of,” O’Keefe says, “then shot film based on those scripts.”
According to Pitchfork, Franco also used Daddy's "This Charming Man" for a Gucci commercial he directed earlier this year, which you can check out right here:
In other Smiths news, guitarist Johnny Marr will be appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon tonight.
