James Franco starts a band

James Franco’s renaissance continues with the multi-hyphenate star dipping into music again. Somewhere between shooting films, going to college, playing director and heaping a handful of other projects on his plate, Franco found time to start a band, Daddy, with friend and musician-artist Tim O’Keefe.

Daddy will release its debut EP, ‘MotorCity,’ on Tuesday. ‘MotorCity,’ was written and recorded while Franco was on location in Detroit filming the upcoming ‘Oz: The Great and Powerful’ alongside Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz. While one film inspired the project, the cover art comes from another one of Franco’s projects. His young co-stars of ‘Spring Breakers,’ including Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens pose on the cover in bikinis sporting fake Daddy tattoos.

In a heavily worded announcement for the project issued on Friday, the motivation behind the band, according to Franco and O’Keefe, is “to push beyond the sonic space of music into the surrounding ecology. Daddy investigates the territories of film/video, installation, and performance while simultaneously exploring the connections that form between them.”

The real question here is how does the music sound? ‘MotorCity’ pulls from funk, soul and classic Motown sounds (Smokey Robinson lends his vocals to a track) and Franco riffs about love over a slow-moving folk groove. The Daddy members met as students at Rhode Island School of Design and collaborated on a handful of projects, including Franco’s 2011 Endless Idaho installation at LA’s Gagosian Gallery. Franco’s last musical endeavour was an EP with New York performance artist Kalup Linzy called ‘Turn It Up,’ which was released last year.