The Beautiful Children Original Music Project

Author Charles Bock talks about the Beautiful Children Original Music Project.

Question: What is the Beautiful Children Original Music Project? Charles Bock: That’s a MySpace project I started where I had this idea, where anyone can read a book and write -- make a song about it and put it on the net on my MySpace page and I wrote to a bunch of bands to ask them to do it. And so far and through the process, I met some bands, some people that I really love and gotten involved with some people who have been really great. I am waiting for the first song to come in. But it was through that project that I met some of the people who ended up giving me music for the website. Originally, when I built the website, I just put -- I put songs I liked on it. I didn’t know you needed permission. That’s how stupid I am. I was like, “Oh yeah, Nine Inch Nails, rock that. Put the Dead Kennedies on here. Viva Las Vegas.” And I was trying to get the Killers because they are from Las Vegas for the musical website for the project, the original music project and I had some connections and ended up dealing with their manager and their lawyer quite a bit, who is a very nice man. They’re not going to record a song for some dude’s website. That’s just not going to happen, but they are nice people. When I showed him the site with all Nine Inch Nails and Dead Kennedies, he was like “This is the best site I have ever seen. How did you get permission to use these songs?” So then, that forced me to think even harder. I took those songs down because I don’t want to get my butt sued off and I started contacting some other bands and some other people I knew. Some of them who I knew through me sending out letters all summer asking, “Hey can you write a song for me?” I appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine with a T-shirt for a band called The Paybacks who are a garage band that I absolutely love and I struck up a good friendship with their leader singer. She gave me a song. She introduced me to their manager. I am wearing a T-shirt for a band called The Rock And Roll Soldiers. I saw them at Irving Plaza opened for -- I don’t even know who anymore. They were great and I emailed them back and forth. They gave me a song. It sounds like kind of punk-y Rolling Stones thing. The guy MC Chris who is one of the fathers of Nerdcore Rap gave me this crazy Star War song, I asked him for it. I begged him for it and I ended up with a lot of. The Paybacks manager put me in touch with all these bands in Detroit who all gave me wonderful, wonderful music -- Troy Gregory and The Step Sisters, The Octopus, Freer are all Detroit bands, all unsigned and they are really good. There is all of this great music out there and there are all of these tremendously talented people. We don’t know about any of them. No one knew about me, because I was all holed up. The MySpace project is in the hope that I can keep -- that if someone wants to, here is a place where they could post a song that maybe, we’ll get them a little attention and it will be about the book and I think that it’s just a cool art idea to have people make songs about a book that they read and there is no money involved. I don’t want the rights to a song or anything. I just want something new and fun and so far I really believe that it will happen and maybe I am just stupid and may be a year from there will be one song on that site, but even that will be cool because that’s one more that exists right now.