You can breathe a sigh of relief, Womankind. Contrary to the deliberately ambiguous way I’ve worded the title at hand, genre-straddling indie savant James Franco is yet to actually father a child (that we know of) – you’re still in with a shot on that one. Alas, Franco has painfully birthed another slash to tack onto the end of his all-singing, all-dancing, all-self-aware creative arts CV in his newest musical side project, Daddy – a collaboration with musician Tim O’Keefe, which has spawned the first single from their debut EP, MotorCity; a maudlin, nostalgic, sepia-toned, spoken-word track called ‘Love In The Old Days.’
Inspired by Franco’s turn shooting Oz: The Great and Powerful in Detroit, MotorCity also takes its sonic cues from Motown, or soul tracks from movies that Franco enjoyed like Blue Valentine (Gosling <3 Williams) or TV epics like Breaking Bad (Nobody <3 Walt).
The music video for the first track is all kaleidoscopic Instagram filters and pretty young things in their underwear who make me regret that PB&J sandwich I just scoffed. Kinda like Howl, Lite. The artsy short is also very much like the polaroid cover art for the MotorCity EP, which features the stars of Harmony Korine’s upcoming exercise in DTF post-Disney hedonism, Spring Breakers. The film and corresponding cover art stars people I should probably be more familiar with like Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Harmony’s wife Rachel, and Ashley Benson – who is a thing, apparently.
It’s all very Franco. Take from that what you will. MotorCity is out September 25th.
via Rolling Stone
The artist is present at his MOCA LA ‘Rebel’ exhibition opening, which curated different artistic interpretations of ‘Rebel Without A Cause’. This guy! Photo by Frederick M. Brown for Stringer via Getty Images
