About Various Artists: ROGUE'S GALLERY's Son Of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys
Son of Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys, produced by Hal Willner, will be released February 19 on Anti-Records. Executive produced by Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski, the compilation two-disc recording of sea shanties features Tom Waits, Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Sean Lennon and many more. The album is a follow up to Willner’s 2006 production, Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys (Anti-), which was praised by The New York Times calling it “a strong album with heart as well as ideas” and Entertainment Weekly hailing it as “a revelatory folk-song collection with the sea in the leading role.”
Best known for his tribute records, covering the music of Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen among others, Willner came up with the idea for Rogue’s Gallery compilations with actor Depp and director Verbinski while on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (second installment in the movie saga). Of the new compilation, Willner notes, “About a year ago I secretly thought we would never finish. As easy as volume 1 was to coordinate, this was the opposite, but it is a very different record than volume 1. This one seems…happier? Not as much about torture, sodomy and death, which will disappoint some but, we don’t need to repeat ourselves do we?”
Furthermore, USC Ph.D. Candidate and historian of song, Jeanne McDougall, notes this new collection represents many types of “sea-going songs…as they were rendered in the English-speaking tradition—the hard-driving, participatory shanties of work, the sociable sea songs of the dog-watches at rest (if you were lucky), and even the songs sung by those who knew and loved sailors and the maritime world at home.” For further information, see the biography attached.