Director Bill Pohlad cast two actors to play Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson in two periods of his life (pictured: Paul Dano as the young Wilson); Algiers' singer Franklin James Fisher talks about the group’s politically-charged debut album; 28-year-old New Orleans musician Jon Batiste will lead the band on "Late Night with Stephen Colbert."
Stephen Colbert announces his 'Late Show' band leader — New Orleans jazz musician Jon Batiste
Stephen Colbert is re-emerging and making a series of announcements about his version of "The Late Show" on CBS — from releasing a video where he shaved his beard Wednesday, to one introducing his new band leader Jon Batiste on Thursday.
"His music makes the audience feel so good, we may have to install a ‘Do Not Make Love’ sign," Colbert said in a press release.
Batiste is a 28-year-old New Orleans jazz musician who's worked with Prince, Lenny Kravitz and more, and the HBO series "Treme" was partially based on Batiste's family. He previously appeared as a guest on "The Colbert Report," where Colbert shared a spontaneous moment when Batiste mocked Colbert for reading scripted lines; Colbert then threw away his notes.
He followed that up with a performance with his band Stay Human, taking the music from inside to outside the show's studio, leading the crowd in a bit of a party with his song "Express Yourself."
"Get ready for a love riot in late night," Batiste said in a release. "Love riots" are what he calls his trademark roving street concerts. He did one that started at New York City's Webster Hall — and the party even went on into the city subway.
Batiste also posted a celebratory GIF:
Let the good times roll!!!
— Jon Batiste (@JonBatiste)
Let the good times roll!!! @StephenAtHome #LateShow pic.twitter.com/bkAxj7zS5g
— jon batiste (@JonBatiste) June 4, 2015
Batiste grew up playing in his family's band and studied at Juilliard. His album "Social Music" went to number 1 on the Billboard Jazz Album chart. He's releasing his first album on a major label later this year.
Colbert this week also launched a new podcast, his show's website and social media accounts. We'll likely see more of Colbert and Batiste ahead of the show's debut — it hits CBS late nights on Sept. 8.
'Love and Mercy' brings Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson's auditory hallucinations to life on screen
It would be almost impossible to tell Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson’s epic life story, including musical genius and bouts with psychological demons, in a two-hour movie — or even a mini-series. Filmmaker Bill Pohlad and screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael Lerner dealt with that by narrowly focusing the new movie “Love and Mercy” on two discrete periods in Brian Wilson’s life. The first is the time in the 1960s when the Beach Boys made seminal album "Pet Sounds."
"That was kind of a given," Pohlad says. "If you were going to tell the story of Brian Wilson, you had to include that era. It just was like an artist at his creative peak. And then, obviously, that's also where he starts to fall off the edge."
The other is the era in the ‘80s when he was under the treatment of dominating therapist Eugene Landy, played by Paul Giamatti, and when Wilson met his wife Melinda, played by Elizabeth Banks. To pull this off, Pohlad cast two actors in the role of Wilson. Paul Dano plays the young Wilson, while the older version is played by John Cusack.
"As I got more involved in the project and met Melinda and Brian, and got to know them a little bit, Melinda told me the story of how they met."
That meeting initially happened in a drug store, Pohlad says, before they officially met in a car dealership.
"She saw this guy and she thought he was kind of homeless or something, some kind of quirky, odd guy, but he was somehow charming and sweet. And then when they finally met in the car dealership, she found out that it was Brian Wilson."
Wilson struggled with mental illness, while also being heavily medicated by his therapist. The movie largely skips many of what are known as Wilson's "bed years" with its more narrow focus.
"There's two reasons that I was drawn to the story in the first place. One certainly was the musical aspect. This is a great musical genius who's created some incredible, iconic songs, and things that are all part of our lives. So I wanted to tell that in some way, but not like 'Mamma Mia.'"
Pohlad avoids making it a jukebox musical by showing Wilson's creative process.
"The idea of showing the creative process was really exciting to me. But the other side of it too really was Brian Wilson as a human being, not as a celebrity, but as this guy who faces very severe mental issues. So the draw hopefully into the story is the music, but what hopefully sustains it is the more human side of it."
The movie features an incredible amount of music, drawing from the components that go into a Beach Boys song. Pohlad had the challenge of finding actors who could act while also pulling off the musical elements.
"Going in, having Brian and Melinda involved was important, and we knew that we had the music. I mean, I knew right away, we're not going to find five actors that can harmonize like the Beach Boys or sing like the Beach Boys — that wasn't going to happen."
Finding any five musicians to harmonize like the Beach Boys would likely be challenging enough.
"I knew we were going to use the original recordings, but I wanted to believe that there was a way to incorporate voices. On the other hand, when I cast Paul Dano, I didn't know that he could sing. I met with him, and we cast him, and then we sent out one of Brian's musical consultants to meet with him in New York to see how things were. And 45 minutes after the meeting started, we get this video text from the guy that's basically Paul Dano singing 'God Only Knows' first time through, without any coaching. It was like, this guy can really sing."
That allowed Pohlad to blend Dano's voice into the songs, with scenes starting off with him before transitioning into the Beach Boys and the actual Brian Wilson.
In order to give the movie a unique musical sound, Pohlad also brought in composer Atticus Ross to do the score, including reworking the Beach Boys' music.
"The most important thing was to try to figure out a way to capture what Brian hears in his head. He suffers from a form of schizophrenia, and part of his condition is that he has hallucinations, but they're not visual hallucinations — they're auditory hallucinations. So that really intrigued me. Cinematically, how do you capture that? How do you get that across? Normally, in cinema you'd want to put some weird lights up or something, but it wasn't visual, it was auditory."
Pohlad wanted to communicate Wilson's own experience in the film.
"When Brian told me or when I got the feeling of what he actually hears, these really complex harmonies and orchestrations and melodies, that he can't really relate to other people until he actually executes them. It's part of his genius, but also he can't turn it off, so it's part of his nightmare as well."
The inspiration for how to depict those hallucinations, Pohlad says: Beach Boys rivals the Beatles' "Revolution 9," which Pohlad thought might be like what Wilson heard inside his head. Pohlad went looking for a musical partner who could help bring that to life.
"Certainly, we were talking about the score too, but I led with the discussion about the 'mind trips,' I called them. And then we started talking about score, and the idea that we have the rights to all of this music. And in that discussion, he pushed it along too — the idea of using tracks and stems from Brian's original recordings and reworking them, remixing them and putting them together in different ways to create a new score, an original score that's still kind of Brian's."
The film is based on Wilson's life story, but Wilson himself admits he didn't write his own so-called autobiography, "Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story." Pohlad had to deal with a man who some may question whether he's a reliable narrator of his own life.
"Are any of us? I'm not sure if any of us are. I mean, certainly there's been a lot written about Brian Wilson over the years — a lot of interviews, and a lot of takes from journalists and all that on who he is and what he's done and all that. So who knows what's real. Yes, there was an autobiography written, but I think Brian has admitted that not only did he not write it, but he probably never even read it."
With all that other information other than the bio, though, Pohlad says he had lots of information to work with and build the film around.
"But then obviously we had Brian Wilson and Melinda to be able to go to and talk to about did this really happen, and how did this happen, and how did it feel, and what was it like."
Despite moments that could be uncomfortable to be on screen, Pohlad says that Wilson didn't have any major disagreements with the film.
"To be honest, Brian is an incredibly kind of innocent, egoless, kind of almost like a child. He's got a purity. And I met him early on and I told him what we were planning on doing. I told him we weren't going to do a biopic, that it was going to be more in-depth, so to speak, which would leave him more vulnerable possibly, but that hopefully he could find a trust in us."
Pohlad says he told wife Melinda the same thing, who serves a caretaker role for Brian Wilson, but that both were incredibly trusting. Pohlad worked to make sure that Wilson was fully bought in.
"Before we started shooting the film, certainly he read the script, they both read the script, but I wanted to make sure that he really understood it. So we had a table read. I had him sit down at a table and we had actors come around and read through the script. And I thought Brian was falling asleep at various times, and it was a very nerve-wracking period, but he came back like an hour afterwards with these incredibly insightful notes. Not a lot of notes, just very pointed and really well calibrated notes."
Brian and Melinda also gave similar notes after seeing a rough cut of the film. Pohlad says that, when Melinda first saw it, she was stunned.
"If any of us sat down and watched on a big screen actors portraying our life, it'd be kind of weird. In this case, it's some pretty serious stuff going on, for her and for Brian," Pohlad says. "She didn't know what to say. She certainly didn't get up and say, 'I love that, that was great, this is going to be a great movie.'"
Pohlad says that Melinda ended up telling him that she drove around for two hours after seeing the film to settle down and come to grips with it.
"I think it took a little bit of time and other people seeing the movie to bring that kind of understanding that it was actually, maybe doing a good job."
Algiers uses punk rock to talk about social injustice and racism
Rolling Stone named Algiers one of the 10 new acts you need to know in 2015, describing their music as “spiritual, political and confrontational.” Hailing from the suburbs of Atlanta, the band’s songs are about financial corruption, social injustice and racism in the United States — while fusing punk rock, gospel and '80s electronic-rock music.
Franklin James Fisher, the singer for Algiers, joined us to talk about the new album. His voice is distinctly rough around the edges, with vocals that haven't been auto-tuned to death.
"First thing I tell anybody is that I'm not a singer," Fisher says. "I have two older sisters, both of whom were in choir and chorus and all of that. When I started playing in bands, when I got my guitar when I was 13, just kind of singing started out of necessity for me."
Fisher says that using the term "singer" means more to African-Americans.
"It was always very difficult for me, because in the black community, if you call yourself a singer, or if you profess to be a singer, then people expect you to really be able to... you sound like Marvin Gaye or Donny Hathaway, or somebody like that. So I was always really nervous about it, but the more I got into punk music, the more I realized, as long as you get your point across, then it doesn't really matter — you can just let it go."
Keeping auto-tune out of the recording process was another decision made by the group along the way.
"As we started developing our own identity, we also came to the conclusion that it sounds better if it's just human. Because everything nowadays is so auto-tuned and packaged and plastic, it doesn't even sound like human beings making the music anymore. It's just computers making music for other computers."
There's a big gospel influence in Fisher's background. He grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood and went to a white church, then started to also go to a black church that embraced gospel.
"When I was growing up, we were one of the only black families in the whole town, really. And I wasn't aware of it until I was about 13 years old or so," Fisher says. "We would go up and visit my grandparents and aunts and uncles and so forth, and we would always go to church when we were up there. And it was, still is the most exciting thing, man. It's really, really cool."
Fisher says that music in the gospel context has an extra power.
"The music gets into you, and when there are added aspects of spirituality, then the music presents itself as this very powerful force, especially when you're at a very young age."
Fisher grew up in Atlanta suburb Marietta, where they went to a white church because it was a place where his dad knew people, and because it was important in the early '80s to fit into the community in that way, he says.
"We would listen to all this great music that was so personal and so close to us, then when we would get to the church — it was just a really alienating, really weird atmosphere, and it was nothing at all like the music that I knew. But even the church itself, it was very alienating. And I remember when I got into high school, that's when I started noticing that the kids that I went to church with at this particular predominantly white church, I just didn't fit in, and they didn't have me."
Gospel is often about the struggle and the experience of the black community, and Algiers continues that talk of struggle in their music.
The message in the lyrics of "But She Was Not Flying":
"I know a woman with a scale in her hand
They bound and gagged her with the laws of the land
She couldn't tell what she was measuring
So they tilt the scale to meet their own personal ends
Saying, 'I'll shoot your son if he's out of line'"
Fisher says the band's message is born out of a frustrated place he was at with the deaths of several of his friends.
"A lot of my friends who have been murdered, and a lot of my friends who committed suicide as a result of social injustice. And, by both my friends who were killed, sometimes it's institutional violence and sometimes it's individual violence, which one could argue is residual of institutional violence. But just this really, really dark place I was at, and just not feeling like there was any sort of justice on this Earth, for things like that happened."
"But She Was Not Flying" is specifically about a friend of Fisher's from high school, who was killed in Atlanta.
"You don't feel like there's any justice, and [the song's] kind of broken up into these two sections. In the very beginning part, underneath all of that noise and all of that frustration, you have a very traditional call-and-response gospel form that's talking about what's going to happen when I get to Heaven, and I'm going to see my friends, and everything's going to be all right — if I get into Heaven, because I might not make it, because all of this other crap is happening, and that's the kind of stuff that makes me want to resort to violence and get my own justice, because there doesn't really feel like there is any at this moment in time."
The writing and performing of these songs comes in the wake of the deaths of rallying points like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.
"I think music and art in general should always reflect the times and the culture, and what's happening on the streets. And in an ironic sense, it seems like most of what you hear right now being played on television or on the radio, in the mainstream anyway, it doesn't deal with the reality that people are living at all. I mean, it seems to me, in the past 10, 15, 20 years, music in popular culture has been very much about escapism, and at the very best, I think music has the ability to inspire people and mobilize people to actually do something to want to change things. Because I think it should be. Art should be a dialogue."
Fisher says that he thinks about musicians from Nina Simone to the D.C. hardcore scene when it comes to creating a dialogue about things that matter with the listener.
"We're talking about institutionalized violence against people of color in the United States," Fisher says. "I think it's always groups of people who don't try to put themselves on a pedestal, and people who don't try to glamorize who they are as individuals, but they're always about creating a community and a discourse between their audience and themselves. And that's very much what we try to do — and we just want to be part of that tradition."
Algiers' self-titled debut album came out this week.
Metal fans prove the most loyal on Spotify; YouTube shows you where bands gets the most listens
You’ve probably suspected it all along, but it’s true: They’re listening in. No, not just the National Security Agency and its controversial surveillance program, but music streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and even YouTube.
These companies have been keeping a close eye — or is it an ear — on the who, what, where and when of what we listen to musically. Spotify recently made public some of the data it’s collected from its users and the takeaway might come as a surprise to fans of mainstream pop music.
The data shows that metal has some of the most loyal fans on Spotify.
While pop artist the Weeknd may have hundreds of millions more plays on Spotify, it’s metal bands like Cradle of Filth that have attracted long-term loyalty on the streaming platform.
As for YouTube, it’s taking analytics one step further and adding a geographical twist. On a site the video-sharing giant recently rolled out, anyone can see where YouTube’s top 10,000 most popular artists are getting the most plays.
Take John Legend — he’s getting the most YouTube attention not in Los Angeles or New York, but in Quezon City, Philippines.
Country star Kacey Musgraves? She’s most YouTube famous much closer to home in Houston. But that’s not really a huge surprise for the Texas native.
But what if you’re an established but lesser-known band — like a band on the Frame today, Algiers? They’re not currently one of YouTube’s top 10,000, according to a quick search on the YouTube Music Insights site. YouTube may soon let smaller artists like Algiers track where in the world their songs are getting the most plays, which can help bands plan their long-dreamed-of summer tour.
As Apple readies its own streaming service, it makes sense that competitors like Google, which owns YouTube, and Spotify would want to make nice with artists.
After all, the vast majority of artists with videos on YouTube aren’t making any real money from those thousands of plays. And while Spotify might be raking in the dough, the artists on its service aren't getting rich either.