THEATRE Lydia Parker Interviews Harry Shearer About His New Songs And Much More Harry Shearer
Harry Shearer is best known as an actor and musician, having starred in ‘This is Spinal Tap’, ‘A Mighty Wind’ and ‘For Your Consideration’, amongst many other films, and as the voices of Mr Burns, Smithers, Ned Flanders and over twenty other characters on ‘The Simpsons’. He is a documentary maker (The Big Uneasy), a multimedia artist and a political satirist, with Grammy nominations for his albums ‘Songs Pointed’ and ‘Pointless’ and ‘Songs of the Bushmen’. He is also host of his own radio programme, ‘Le Show’, which has been running in one form or another since 1983 on public radio stations and as a podcast. His latest satirical songs, ‘The Many Moods of Donald Trump’, are being released once a week and include a hilarious video of his song ‘Son in Law’, with Shearer as Trump, created through motion capture technology. The Many Moods of Donald Trump is going to be an album, with songs released one at a time each week until the US election. What was your inspiration for doing a Trump song cycle, so to speak? I do a radio show in the States, Le Show, and it’s on in London as well, on Soho Radio London. It’s a weekly show, and I make fun of the news, so obviously I’ve been writing a lot of both sketches and songs about this guy. The radio versions are kind of like demos and so I went into the studio with my friend and producer, CJ Vanston, and we made proper 18
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recordings of them. And almost all of them are sung in the voice of Donald Trump. So I thought, “I’ve got to make a video or two, and I want them to look like it’s Donald Trump singing”. I’ve had some experience with motion capture animation. I was in Australia with my wife in mid-March, and just before they closed the borders I happened to meet a guy who has a visual effects studio down there, Matt Hermans. So then I came back to the United States, shot my performance here and, Covid-style, was Skyping with the studio down in Sydney every few days. We’re just in the process of doing the second video now, so it turned out to be more fun than I would have expected to work this way. Son in Law has a very catchy tune which got completely stuck in my head! Which song will be in your second video? The second one is called “Executive Time”. Trump’s daily scheduling includes huge gobs of time, hours in a in a block called “Executive Time”. No further explanation available, so one is free to speculate on what he’s doing during that time. He clearly watches a lot of TV because he’s always referring to it. So that’s part of what I imagine that he’s doing during Executive Time, is communing with his pals on Fox News. What has it been like getting into Trump’s mindset? There are many weeks where I’m proud to say that I’ve never mentioned his name in an hour of my radio show. But there are weeks when it’s demanded of me. I had to get into the mind of another similar character, Richard Nixon. I did a series for Sky TV on the verbatim conversations in the Nixon White House tapes. But there are differences between them. One, Richard Nixon, no matter how “out there” he was, still abided by the then-failing American tradition that you had to dress it all up with a façade of dignity. If you listen to the tapes, he’s absolutely as whacked out and as racist and unpleasant as Trump. It’s just he did it in private and believed you had to hide that from the public. And Trump, I think uniquely, has no sense of shame. You’d think “Why would a guy who sort of revels in this semi-fraudulent state of being the richest man anybody knows…so successful he’s only had eight bankruptcies, why would that resonate with his voting base?”. And I think it’s because his resentments, his grievances are always on his mind. He’s on a loop about that stuff. He can’t
keep it to himself. And strangely I don’t think this was a strategy. That’s what resonated with people, is that sense of grievance. They had been poorly dealt with in the recovery from the Great Recession and this guy had a grievance as strong as theirs. The other difference is that Trump grew up with one of the worst fathers. My song “Very Stable Genius” is after a phrase he’s used about himself several times. And if you let it sit with you for a while and not just slide past you, you realise every word of that phrase is defensive. As if he’s replying to a father who says, “He’s a stupid and worthless piece of crap, and crazy to boot”. “No, I’m not stupid, I’m a genius. I’m not crazy, I’m stable. I’m not just occasionally stable, I’m very stable“. You know, it’s like, there’s a conversation going on there, you just hear one side. Each song is so different stylistically. With “Covid 180” I definitely picked up on the 1980’s disco, Studio 54 reference, as that was Trump’s hangout then. What was your inspiration musically for the other songs? “Stormy Daniels” is sort of a torch song, so it felt like it needed to be kind of melancholy. We know nothing about Trump’s musical tastes, I just looked at the chronology of his life and tried to keep my choices, stylistically, within the confines of what he might have been exposed to. “Very Stable Genius” is one of my favourites because it really sounds like Trump could have written it. If I just close my eyes and listen to it I can start imagining Trump as this crooner or lounge singer, singing his greatest hits. That’s a picture I’d like you to cherish. I’m trying to write from inside Trump, so that song contains what I consider a sort of signal in terms of mixing up Da Vinci with The Da Vinci Code. “Son in Law” was inspired by a hit song in the 60’s, recorded in New Orleans, sung by Ernie K-Doe, called “Mother in Law”. And it’s the only song on my record that was recorded in New Orleans because it needed New Orleans musicians on it. It needed “the sauce”. These are guys who didn’t have to be told how this song sounded or how to play it. It’s in your bones if you’re from there. This one was recorded before Covid, just before Mardi Gras. And then my producer, CJ, was getting other instrumentalists in after Covid struck, socially distanced and solo. So, the record was built that way.
