Watch James Franco’s Preview Track from His New Smiths-Inspired Album

Jack-of-all trades James Franco is at it again: his band Daddy,which he started with producer-composer buddy Tim O’Keefe, just released a preview of their 2015 album Let Me Get What I Want, and it sounds a lot like the Smiths. That’s because original Smiths bassist Andy Rourke is playing on every track, and the lyrics are all from poems Franco wrote in his latest collection in a section called “Poems Inspired By Smiths’ Songs.” Can you tell he likes the Smiths?

“The Smiths’ songs provided inspiration for the poems, lending tone and situation,” Franco told Vice, which published the exclusive preview. Once I had the sequence, Tim and I took the material one step further and turned the poems inspired by songs, back into songs of their own.” Franco and O’Keefe started making music when they were both students at the Rhode Island School of Design.

This preview is called “This Charming Man” (it sounds quite different from the famous Smiths song of the same name). You can watch it here:

Let Me Get What I Want is more of a multimedia project than a straight album. Each song is accompanied by a short film, and each short film follows the same characters, so they can be strung together into a sort of movie-loop. And just because this is Franco, who dabbles in everything, each track also features a painting he made in art school.

[VICE]