1
TORONTO — It's three minutes of music that's hard to escape these days.
The song Vagabond by the Chicago band Greenskeepers is featured in relentless TV commercials for the blockbuster video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Vagabond has cracked Amazon.com's top 30 downloads and the song's pounding bass and driving beat have caught on elsewhere.
“I think that's the most fulfilling part, that Vagabond came out of a night working in the studio at one in the morning and now it's playing in the NBA playoffs. It's really strange,” James Curd, a co-founding member of the band, said from Dallas, another stop on an ongoing solo DJ tour.
“It's really becoming the ‘beat people up' song or something because they keep putting that song to like football clips and hockey clips,” he added.
The song Vagabond by the Chicago band Greenskeepers is featured in relentless TV commercials for the blockbuster video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Vagabond has cracked Amazon.com's top 30 downloads and the song's pounding bass and driving beat have caught on elsewhere. (Canadian Press)
Greenskeepers are no strangers to television. Their songs have been licensed to the likes of Grey's Anatomy and CSI Miami. They might not be a household name, but they have friends in high places.
“Not a lot of people know about us but the right people know about us,” said Curd. “And the right people are the people who are music supervisors for interesting things like the game or the TV shows and stuff like that. I just think we're lucky that we have certain fans in good places to kind of help promote our music.”
One such connection is Ivan Pavlovich, a friend who is music supervisor for GTA developer Rockstar Games. Curd submitted a couple of songs for consideration for the game's soundtrack, then shipped over a few new tunes some months later. One of those was Vagabond, which was an instrumental at the time. Rockstar liked it, the band added lyrics and the song ended up being chosen for one of those high-profile TV ads.
Curd, 29, calls Vagabonda “crazy hodgepodge” and “happy accident.”
Some of the lyrics — including the line “I came a long way to see you, now I wish you were dead” — came from an older song written by band co-founder Nick Maurer. Returning from a stint in Germany to Chicago, he was upset that George W. Bush had won a second term as president.
Rather than an ode to Liberty City (the fictional home to GTA IV), most of the lyrics were written in disappointment at Bush-led America.
“Like (the line) ‘The green lady moved away and changed her name,' that's got nothing to do with Liberty City,” Curd explained. “It's got to do with he (Maurer) came here and the Statue of Liberty is like gone. Amber waves of grain ( a reference to a line in ‘America the Beautiful') are gone, like he's just upset he uprooted his life from Germany to come to America and now he just wishes America was dead.”
In order to tie the song to the game, they invited friend and fellow musician J-Dub to inject some distorted vocals that make reference to Liberty City and the game's theme of crime and the underworld.
Greenskeepers are hard to nail down as a band. The foursome (the other members are Mark Share and Coban Rudish) have three albums under their belt and are planning to go back into the studio in July to record a fourth. Share has also recorded solo songs under the band's name, estimating that perhaps 60 of the 100 songs recorded as Greenskeepers over the last decade are his own works.
Asked to describe his band's sound, Curd replies jokingly: “ I don't know, maybe like electronic robot rock?”
His own music, like the song Sea of Faces from the Hand Weight EP, is elegant lounge-ready electronica.
Perhaps the band's biggest song prior to Vagabond is Lotion, from the 2004 album Pleetch. The song, which manages to be catchy and creepy at the same time, is written from the perspective of the serial killer who skins his victims in the film The Silence of the Lambs. The killer keeps his victims in a dried-out well, lowering lotion in a bucket to ensure their skin is kept supple. Hence the song's name.
Curd's striking video for the song has been downloaded more than 500,000 times on YouTube. He took clips from the movie and used editing software to make it look like the killer is singing the song within the movie. The final result is near flawless.
“Editing little videos like that is kind of just like a little hobby I do sometimes.” he said modestly.
Other quirky Greenskeepers projects include remixes of The Incredibles theme and Lawrence Welk music (Welk's children own the rights to his music and liked some of Curd's jazz-swing remixes).
Curd plays keyboards, sings and tries his hand at guitar.
“I'm more of a studio musician, like I can get the sound that I want out of the instrument, but then I've got to clean it up and move it around and fix it up in the computer,” he explained.
The band comes by its name honestly. Maurer used to be a greenskeeper and Curd says the summer they named the band he was addicted to the game, playing it five times a week.
He's also a gamer. And like many, spent a lot of hours in front of Grand Theft IV when it came out.
“I got arrested and killed in about two minutes,” he lamented. “It's a pretty tough game.”
