The latest project from Shakey Graves is a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Following the release of his fourth album Movie of the Week, the celebrated folk-rock artist — whose given name is Alejandro Rose-Garcia — launched a website giving listeners access to the wealth of material left on the cutting room floor. With the help of an AI generator, fans can rearrange the tracks ad infinitum to create their own unique edition of the record paired with a fictitious film synopsis created by a user-submitted prompt.
“Each song has probably five to eight different versions. Then there’s all of this other stuff that’s not on [Movie of the Week] , whole other albums,” Rose-Garcia says. “You’re going to be able to endlessly scramble the album into unique soundtracks, and then if you want, you can purchase them and we’ll send you the files and you’ll have your own version.
“It might organize it in a way that I could have never thought of,” he continues. “There’s so much stuff. I need to get it out.”
Movie of the Week was initially intended to be an actual film soundtrack. Some friends were making a movie and asked Shakey Graves to pen the soundtrack.
But the director rejected some of the music, so Rose-Garcia began to formulate the idea of expanding on the material and turning it into a soundtrack to an imaginary movie.
“I wanted to go into the recording studio and try to make songs based on a plot. I had some melodies and demos and stuff,” he says. “The plot of the movie was [about] someone from the middle of nowhere who kind of burns out, then looks on a map and kind of decides to go somewhere that sounds fancy. He chooses Century City. That’s the spot. Like, everything’s going to be better in the future. And then it’s like a road trip movie. Then when he gets to Century City, he comes to find out it’s parking lots for other parking lots.”
Working with the same six-piece band he took on tour to promote Movie of the Week, Rose-Garcia recorded lots of material before he began to figure out which versions of which songs would be included in the project.
“The album is the most centered those songs get,” he says. “Those [other] versions that are coming out, they get longer and weirder and rougher around the edges. So all of that will exist in the world, too. But I wanted to show where at least the home base of this is, the kind of sonic unity.”
New territory
The most recent Shakey Graves LP is Rose-Garcia’s most pop-leaning effort to date. Songs like “Evergreen,” “Century City” and “Limbo” are replete with rich melodies that are soft around the edges. Meanwhile, “Ready Or Not” (featuring Sierra Ferrell), “Play Where It Lies” and “Playing Along” are among a few more spare songs that feel more intimate, but also a bit edgier than the rest of the album.
Movie of the Week marks another singular statement for the 37-year-old artist who broke onto the national scene in 2012. After starting out pursuing acting with roles in Friday Night Lights and Spy Kids 3, his stark and intimate debut album, Roll the Bones — re-released in 2021 with a bevy of unreleased material — quickly established Shakey Graves as a fresh voice on the folk scene.
Rose-Garcia’s next full-length release, 2014’s And the War Came, started to expand on his style, adding drums and other instrumentation while retaining his spare, ramshackle folk sound. The years since have found pushing the envelope further with the highly produced 2018 album, Can’t Wake Up, continuing a tradition of pushing his once-solo project into new sonic territory.
‘What it’s supposed to sound like’
Considering the depth and breadth of his previous output, it makes sense that Rose-Garcia plans to touch on all phases of his career during his upcoming set in support of Tyler Childers at CU Boulder’s Folsom Field on Aug. 17. He’ll play solo during the show — recalling the one-man-band approach of his early tours, using a jiggered suitcase as a drum — and, of course, with a band he says is the best unit he’s had.
“Obviously, some of the more large, bombastic production stuff I’ve made over the years has never sounded better,” Rose-Garcia says of playing with his band. “But then also they’re fabulous musicians, so playing these old, more sensitive kind of home-studio stuff, they’re able to do that, too. So we do a little bit of both.”
Like the AI project extending the life of Movie of the Week, fans can also expect Graves to be spontaneous on stage and continue his tradition of rearranging and reinventing songs in the moment.
“Just to keep our mood different or to suit the room, we’ll play certain things in a variety of ways,” he says. “We recorded a lot of [Movie of the Week] live and didn’t build a lot of stuff. We just learned how to play it. We’re really going to try to at least start close to what it’s supposed to sound like.”
ON THE BILL: Tyler Childers with Shakey Graves. 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17, CU Boulder – Folsom Field, 2400 Colorado Ave. $78+