Johnny Marr is collaborating with SoCal surf-poppers Best Coast, British songwriter/producer Tom Vek, Brooklyn all-girl keyboard trio Au Revoir Simone, and Nashville alt-rockers Mona on an interesting new project called "Ray-Ban Raw Sounds," which finds the ex-Smiths guitarist presenting the four up-and-coming bands with five different ideas or objects to inspire them to write a song. "It sounded confusing to me at first, too," Marr admits to SPIN. "But it turned out to be amazing." And it resulted in some excellent new music. Listen below!
First, Marr had to nail down the five different inspirations. "I just looked around my studio and life and took the parts of my world that are of interest to me, and then rolled with it," he says. He wrote a poem, took a conceptual photo in his hometown of Manchester, pulled a favorite quote from the famous German philosopher Friedrich Schiller, recorded a piece of music, and presented an old map of New York City's Lower East Side. "I wanted this to tie Europe, England, and America together," he says.
