Summon a Comeback
Actor and bandmate Zach Shields released self-titled LP in 2009, toured briefly, then disappeared... until next week
Dead Man’s Bones, the indie duo featuring Ryan Gosling that put out an excellent debut album 17 years ago and then disappeared, have revealed they’re reuniting for new music.
Gosling’s partner Eva Mendes had been teasing new music from the actor and his bandmate Zach Shields, writing on social media that she was “Trying to summon new music from Dead Man’s Bones,” and then, “He came through on his promise to me”:
The video, which combines Dead Man’s Bones with Halloween-themed music and children’s vocals — their first album was a collaboration with the Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir — promised “new music” would arrive on October 27.
Dead Man’s Bones’ self-titled album arrived in 2009, but despite some well-deserved buzz for the LP, the band apparently ceased to exist soon after. Gosling became an even bigger Hollywood star with a demanding production schedule, and the circumstances that formed the duo also changed: Gosling at the time was dating Rachel McAdams, whose sister was dating Shields.
Described by Rolling Stone in 2009 as “Arcade Fire, Tom Waits and the cast of Sesame Street performing a Kurt Weill musical,” the band drew inspiration from Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride as well as the Langley Schools Music Project’s Innocence and Despair, a cult Seventies LP (unearthed in the early 2000s) where untrained grade schoolers sang pop songs from the era.
“When we first wrote the songs, all the vocals were for the children’s choir to sing,” Shields told Rolling Stone. “We were never going to sing on the record. But when we were working out the parts for them, we started singing and decided to make it into a duo between us and the kids.”
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Dead Man’s Bones, arguably one of the best ventures by an actor into music, cultivated in its own cult over the past two decades, and also resonated with musicians: Cat Power covered the duo’s “Pa Pa Power” in 2021, and the duo’s music has occasionally popped up in movies and TV series, especially after Gosling’s Best Original Song nomination for Barbie‘s “I’m Just Ken.”
Gosling has been prone to viral stunts when promoting new movies in recent years, so hopefully Dead Man’s Bones’ comeback is a genuine attempt to recapture the duo’s original magic and not just an attempt to tell people that Star Wars: Starfighter arrives in theaters on May 28.