Who: Dead Man’s Bones finds Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling and his friend Zach Shields spinning fireside ghost stories into mesmerizing “Monster Mash” sing-alongs with the help of L.A.’s Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir.
Sounds like: The Arcade Fire, Tom Waits and the cast of Sesame Street performing a Kurt Weill musical. Gosling and Shields wanted to collaborate with kids from the start and cite the Langley Schools Music Project’s Innocence and Despair and Nancy Dupree’s Ghetto Reality — two affecting and endearing recordings of untrained grade schoolers singing — as inspiration. “When we first wrote the songs, all the vocals were for the children’s choir to sing,” Shields tells Rolling Stone. “We were never going to sing on the record. But when we were working out the parts for them, we started singing and decided to make it into a duo between us and the kids.”
Vital Stats:
• The guys met in 2005 — Gosling was dating his Notebook costar Rachel McAdams and Shields was dating her sister Kayleen — and hatched their plan to form a band on a road trip to Vegas for Gosling’s sister’s 30th birthday. “We started putting on these performances for our friends in the [hotel] bathroom,” says Gosling. “We’d go in the shower and we’d use the shower curtain as the stage curtain.” The unorthodox performance space and the fact their first song was “a love story about a guy and his butterfly knife” had a lot of their friends thinking it was all a joke. “They were would laugh afterwards and be like, ‘That was so funny!’ And we’d be like, ‘We weren’t kidding,’” says Shields.
• Gosling, Shields and the Silverlake Conserv...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily