The multimedia Songs About Time is an ongoing project from the Rentals, the revolving-door band founded 15 years ago by then Weezer bassist Matt Sharp. Songs About Time finds Sharp and Co. collaborating with a cast of about 50 filmmakers, designers, producers, editors and artists. They began this year-long experiment January 1 and have since made a new black-and-white film every week, not to mention documenting the process with a daily photo diary and recording three mini-albums. (All of this content can be found on the band’s website.) As if Sharp wasn’t busy enough, he is also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read his introduction.
Sharp: There is a big part of Songs About Time that is simply paying tribute to good old Jean-Luc Godard. You have to have a great deal of admiration for those artists, like Godard, who are able to have such a prolific output without ever getting caught up in all those obsessive details that seem to slow the rest of us down to a crawl. Between 1960 and 1970, Godard directed 33 feature films. In contrast, the Rentals released one song in 2008. Somehow we worked all year long, and in 12 months, we released just one song. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but whatever the case, 2008 became the year that disappeared. I was determined at the end of 2008 not to let another year slip away, and I guess that’s how we arrived here. The majority of those 33 films that Godard made in those 10 years dealt with the Algerian War, Mao-ism and all sorts of ’60s political commentary, but what I believe he gets better then most other filmmakers are the little intangible things in the relationships between men and women. That’s why I chose 1966’s Masculin Féminin, but there’s also other great films like A Woman Is A Woman and Contempt, which achieve that same understanding. Another lesson learned from Godard: If you make a really bad movie, just make sure your title sequences are really good. Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53KROTcwf-Y
