Danny Elfman turns eleven
POSTED: January 22, 2021
Last year, on the eve of Halloween, Danny Elfman released a one-off single called Happy. He described it at the time as “an absurd anti-pop song, designed to begin as a very simple pop tune that degrades into something more subversive”.
For those of you who have lost track, Danny Elfman began life as the singer and songwriter for Oingo Boingo, a highly successful new-wave band in the eighties. He then graduated to scoring films and writing themes for television series: The Simpsons, for example.
Happy constituted his first solo music in several hundred years (36 years, fact fans), and earlier this month he announced that he intended to continue releasing music online at regular intervals.
And not just any old intervals either. “Elf” translates into “eleven” in German and so, since he has no German ancestry, he intends to release a song on the eleventh of every month “indefinitely”.
He released the first in this series on January 11. Called Sorry, it “began as an obsessive choral-chant instrumental work, which at the time I called ‘alien orchestral chamber punk’ and evolved slowly into a song”.
Here it comes.
What better time to post this, then, than on January 22, at 22:22?