It might surprise some to learn I was raised on musicals. My parents loved the classics from the 50′s through the 70′s – The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Oliver!, Fiddler on the Roof, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and so forth. I grew up listening to all that stuff.

So while on the one hand I’m Mister Industrial Crunchy Scary Music and have always had a predilection for scary, aggressive tunes*, I’m also a sucker for well-done musicals, evidenced by the fact that I just bought, on a whim, the soundtracks for Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, REPO! The Genetic Opera and Young Frankenstein the Musical. Granted, these ain’t my parents’ musicals and they have a clear bent towards my horror aesthetics, but still. I’m thankful to The Folks for teaching me to love a cinematic/musical style that so many people seem to hate; when it’s done well, it’s something else. In REPO’s case, the music was better than the movie!

*I still have a mix tape I made when I was 16 comprised of the scariest, most transgressive music I could find as a young Southern Baptist in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1984. Needless to say, it ain’t too scary or transgressive – it’d be another 2 years before I went to art school in LA and found out about Ralph Records, Wax Trax and Nettwork. Skinny Puppy, Severed Heads, The Residents, Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre and Gary Numan changed my life in the fall of 1986.