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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 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.
Obviously your musical influences are varied, but what is your favourite music? What’s inspired you along the way?
It’s so varied. My Dad trained to be an operatic tenor, so I was really heavily exposed to classical music as a kid. And I took classical piano as well, for eight years. I was the one kid in school who didn’t like rock ’n roll. I was humming the Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle records in my head as I walked through the hallways in high school. And then rock ’n roll came and smote me when the Beatles played that chord, the start of “Hard Day’s Night”. I discovered Brazilian music pretty early on and fell in love with it. I’ve always been listening to jazz and later bluegrass. And then of course, the huge, diverse pile that is New Orleans music. And because my wife is a musician, there’s always music around, and she has a lot of the same influences as I do.
Your wife, Judith Owen, is Welsh. Do you live part of the time in the UK, or do you visit?
We’d come over to London about three or four times a year, we have a place there. Judith, being British and having grown up in London, always yearned for a foothold in London. We do spend a huge amount of time in New Orleans. That’s really our home. And then we also have a place in LA, which is where we are right now.
With everything else that you’re doing, how do you find the time to come up with an hour-long radio show every week?
Every week I think, “This is stupid, I shouldn’t be doing this”. And then I feel the pull to do it. It’s partly because I have a trepidation about taking any time off from it. Time slots are a really precious thing in radio. And if you give it up you’re probably not going to get it back.
Now, of course, it’s so ridiculously easy to have self- expression and public exposure, thanks to all the digital tools, YouTube and all the rest. But starting when I started, it was really the one place I could be that I could have my little space to create and think up new characters and write, every week. But it’s totally my baby. That’s really why I keep doing it, because I don’t have to ask anybody permission to do anything. I think of stuff, I do it, it’s done. It’s aired. Next.
You’re an actor and a musician, a satirist, you’re an artist, you’re a writer. Is there anything that you haven’t done that you would like to do?
I have this film which is something I haven’t done. I did one really low budget little comedy film. This is a middle low budget musical comedy with a political theme. Aside from that, I mean, I have never done anything on ice.
I think that would be fun. Spinal Tap on Ice, for instance.
Yeah. I try to get stuff done that I want to do. I did a solo project with Derek Smalls a couple of years ago. And we did a live concert tour and shot it, the concert video will be out very soon. Because of the world of music he exists in, it was preposterously pretentious and bombastically huge. So, we couldn’t do it a lot, but I definitely wanted to do it a few times.
I think the Trump songs will go down a treat in the UK not only for the Americans here, but because British people are so invested in American politics. Two years ago there were massive anti-Trump protests in the UK, but he also has his keen supporters here. Trump’s personality just has an effect on people, worldwide. He’s a uniquely American type.
You have to go back to somebody like PT Barnum to get his ilk. I think, in essence, the best way to understand him is he’s, at base, a salesman, that was his big skill. He sold his own wine, he sold his own steaks, he’d slap his name on everything. It’s fun to go back and look at his commercials for Trump Steaks because they’re exactly the kind of, as he himself used to say when he had a larger vocabulary, “harmless hyperbole”. His euphemism for lying in those days. If you watched him when he was nothing more than a blowhard New York Real Estate guy, all the behaviours were present then that are present now. I don’t know if you know this, but, in the 90’s, he would call up the tabloid newspapers in New York, pretending to be his own press agent, dropping tips like “Marla Maples said it was the best sex she’s ever had”. And they knew it was him. And they printed it anyway. And that’s the dance. He’s wooed the media ever since. They can’t help themselves and he knows it. Cause his modus operandi is “Made you look!”.
And now we have an election coming up.
My personal thought is that Americans, except for, you know, a rather self-selected few, don’t really like to pay all that much attention to politics every day. I think the American kind of preference would be “We vote, and then you go and do what you’re supposed to do, and leave me alone for a while”. And Trump has upended that norm as well, demanding public attention every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t something called “Trump Fatigue”, where you just don’t want to hear about this stuff every day anymore.
