James Franco Releasing Album and Film Inspired by the Smiths, Featuring the Smiths’ Andy Rourke

James Franco has a band with Tim O’Keefe, his former art school classmate. They’re called Daddy, and they’ve just announced Let Me Get What I Want, an album/film inspired by the Smiths. You can watch the video for “This Charming Man” below, via Vice.

It is not, however, a straight-up cover of the Smiths classic. In Franco’s newest book of poetry, Directing Herbert White: Poems, there are two sections titled “Poems Inspired by Smiths’ Songs”. (Which is exactly what you think it is.) Franco and O’Keefe decided to write songs around those poems, using Franco’s words as the lyrics. So: “This Charming Man” is a song based on a poem based on a song, as are all of the songs on Let Me Get What I Want. Make sense?

Most amazingly, they got former Smiths bassist Andy Rourke to play on every song. 

The album will be out in 2015, and every song will be accompanied by a video that, when watched in sequence, adds up to a single story. Each song is also accompanied by a painting by Franco.

By now, Franco’s a veteran of the business: Apart from Daddy, he also released an EP with DJ/rupture and artist Kalup Linzy back in 2011. He seems to be taking it a little more seriously than Macauley Culkin’s Pizza Underground, at least.

Franco also used a part of “This Charming Man” in a Gucci commercial he directed earlier this year. Watch that below, too. 

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