Why Comic Book Music?
Well in a way its time may have finally come. There are so many new genres of music currently that did not even exist as categories until just a few years ago. Comic book music, if you want to call it that, I feel is an innovation that allows contemporary music to intersect with some of the imaginative aspects of our popular entertainment culture. For me personally it had to do with a gut level realization that something very fundamental was missing from the major super-hero movie soundtracks of the last 20 years. Namely, there were no super-hero songs. Sure, there may have been a couple very generic pop/rock tunes about courage or something like that. But we have yet to see any real deal, fan based, content true music talking about the heroes by name, their powers, what they do, their arch-enemies and so on. As kids, we can all remember the classic super-hero theme songs, but it puzzled me why there was nothing new at a higher level in today’s movies that would give us a powerful experience similar to the feeling of a kid reading comics.Tell me how you got started in this type of venture.
Well it was all a bit unusual. It started early last year when I heard that there was going to be a Fantastic Four movie. I had actually written my “The Fantastic Four Song” a long time prior to this but had forgotten all about it. I started hesitantly thinking about submitting it to the movie for the soundtrack and finally gave in against my better judgment to actually record the darn thing. I spent an amount of time calling and networking with executives connected with the movie until I was invited to send my song in. Given the constraints, the tune was turned down. At that point I decided to do the next crazy thing and make a music video out of it with the help of my undergraduate college’s film department. I knew nothing about this world and had to work extremely hard to master enough of the basics of film making to work with my talented student volunteers. After the video was turned down by MTV and company, I moved to having it featured on public TV in New York and Chicago and gained a couple million viewers.Finally, I released "The FF Song" on iTunes and to everyone's amazement it went on to out-rank the FF movie soundtrack as shown by iTunes' power search pages. All of these events kind of sucked me into the process of making this new style of music.
Tell me about “The X-Men Song: A Super-Hero Rock Opera” and how you wrote it.
The X-Opera is a cornerstone example of what I am calling “The New Super-Hero Music.” It is written without regard to any standard convention in today’s music industry and is really meant to be a kind of musical comic book that fans of all stripes will dig.Growing up I was not a big X-Men fan and therefore didn’t know how the comic worked. I certainly had no plans to write a song about them, let alone a full rock opera. But over last winter, I had foreknowledge that the X-Men 3 movie was coming out and I asked myself an innocent question. What would an X-Men song look like? Not having a clue, I went to the library and started checking out the X-Men trade editions from the 60’s to the present. I ended up reading 8 dozen comics or about one a day for 3 months. After the first month I started to have dreams about the music. I trust this, so when both the opening and closing music and lyrics came to me in my sleep I was sort of pulled into writing the song which just got bigger and bigger as I read more.
I discovered that the X-Men series has an ethic that sits on three pillars; conflict, identity and redemption. This is what The X-Opera is all about. It takes the listener through the human/mutant conflict and its identity politics. At the end, the song offers an opportunity to rise above these things through Xavier’s vision and the practice of being an X-Men. The end sequence of the song asks, “Who are you?” and it answers back “I’m an X-Man!” That is the choice the song and life gives you, redemption or endless conflict.
