Ryan Gosling is breaking into the top charts with the Barbie soundtrack, but don’t be mistaken, he was a musician long before Ken.
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Believe it or not, Ryan Gosling was once a frontman of the halloween-esque rock duo Dead Man’s Bones. With Gosling on vocals, guitar and piano, and friend Zach Shields on drums and percussion, the two only released one self-titled album and purposely focused on the supernatural and eerie.
The two met back in 2005, where Gosling recalled that Shields was wearing high-heeled boots. “I thought, 'Who is this guy, what am I going to do with this character?'” he joked in the band’s first interview, “And then I thought, 'Well, I guess we'll start a band.” They bonded over their fascination with Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and the creepy stories or experiences they had in their childhood. Soon enough, the two started to write what Pitchfork referred to as a “unique, catchy and lovably weird” album. It was based in low-fi mixing, childish imagination, and anything weird - and it turned out to be quite the indie masterpiece.
The sound that truly cements Dead Man’s Bones in gothic-folk isn’t the lack of electronic instruments, the loose timing or even the childish singing of the Silverlake Conservatory Children's Choir. Rather, it’s Gosling’s natural and unfiltered voice, which gives a hint of nostalgia all while singing lyrics that are slightly unsettling. "I'd hear him do karaoke, or when he thinks nobody's listening, like he's in the other room singing with his natural voice,” bandmate shields told Pitchfork back in 2009, “and it has this old quality, like this 50s kind of croon-ery feel. Every time I would hear him singing, without trying to sound like anything, that's how he sings. So we were trying to record one session and they were trying to make us both sound so modern, which he doesn’t.”
“I was always embarrassed because I sang like that,” Gosling added, “so I always tried to make my voice sound more contemporary.” Yet, it is his old-fashioned vocal quality that is still regarded as one of the band’s biggest strengths. In fact, the argument can be made that his raspy yet sweet tone was hand-selected to sing La La Land’s “City of Stars,” which went on to put him on the map as an actor and musician in many people’s minds.
So, while his more contemporary sound of Ken is his first hit charted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, it’s not as surprising as it seems. To hear where it all started, check out Dead Man’s Bones’ song, “Pa-Pa-Power” above. Maybe he’s not just Ken after all…
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