The Characters Part 0: Introduction
Music that tells stories. Writing narrative songs has always been an intimate part of the project. The Decemberist’s “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is a classic in the genre, and has been a strong influence. In fact, we plan to release a cover of this song as part of the second album…
I am blessed with being surrounded by many multi-talented musicians, and since most of them are also vocalists it seemed natural to have multiple vocalists in the band, each playing different characters with their own stories. A band with characters is not so unusual either, showing up in all sorts of genres – think Ziggy Stardust, the Gorillaz or GWAR…
Are there any other examples of bands with musicians as characters that you can think of?
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24 April 2009 at 2:27 pm
the spice girls? don’t think it s quite the same style though…
28 April 2009 at 4:04 pm
The Wu Tang Crew. So much so that they spawned an array of bad movies and computer games.
28 April 2009 at 4:07 pm
Bad movies and computer games… definitely in the pipeline :D
30 April 2009 at 6:37 pm
Interstellar5555?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstella_5555
A. :)
20 May 2010 at 2:50 am
Forgive Durden put out a CD where they did a whole musical thing, in which they brought other vocalists from other bands to play certain characters ‘Razia’s Shadow’
12 January 2011 at 8:06 pm
A bit of a late reply, over a year after the fact, but The Protomen do this to great effect. They perform a rock opera based on the plot of the Megaman video game franchise, and each player has a persona – while also representing specific characters in a story that is woven over the course of each album.
11 April 2011 at 6:45 pm
Rhapsody wrote a book and then wrote an album based on the book. They even had Christopher Lee do voice overs on it. Not quite the same thing but still :)
2 August 2011 at 1:25 pm
There’s an amazing French band called Dionysos who made two albums based on stories written by the lead singer. One is Monsters in Love, that tells short stories of monsters and freaks who fall in love in different unlucky ways; and the second one, the most recent who had also a book named “The Boy With The Cuckoo-Clock Heart”, and which is going to have an animated film directed by Luc Besson (definitely worth a view). And, coincidentially, it also has a really good steampunk feeling to it!!
Along Clockwork Quartet, is the best retrofuturistic band I’ve heard so far:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuQRrPYzIw — The video of their greatest hit, Tais Toi Mon Coeur
And some other very good ones…
http://grooveshark.com/#/search?q=Le+Jour+Le+Plus+Froid+Du+Monde
18 September 2011 at 6:48 pm
Emilie Autumn?
21 January 2012 at 9:19 pm
Evelyn Evelyn, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley’s project!