Harry Shearer on ‘The Many Moods of Donald Trump’ and the Sacred Sounds of NOLA
“I thought his singing vocal range would be pretty much like his spoken vocal range,” Harry Shearer says of President Trump, who he portrays on his new album of satiric songs, The Many Moods of Donald Trump. “I didn’t see him as somebody who had this really surprising falsetto that he’d been hiding for all these years.”
Shearer originated the material on Le Show, his weekly syndicated public radio program. Then, he recalls, “This past January, I looked back at what I’d been cranking out over the last three-plus years during his ascendancy and thought, ‘Some of these are of the moment and don’t really have a life, but others do’ and I thought that I should take those into the studio, tart them up and put them out.” Song titles include: “I Can’t Believe I’m Me,” “Sonin-Law,” “Acquittal” and the inevitable “Very Stable Genius.”
The Spinal Tap star continues to debut new material on Le Show (including the recent, dark “I Hereby Officially Declare That I Won”), working from his home studio in New Orleans, where he is also contributing voices to season 32(!) of The Simpsons. Although Shearer and his wife, musician Judith Owen, typically take to the road in December for their Christmas Without Tears tour, generating charitable donations while sharing songs and comedy, they will instead offer a virtual event this year.
Since Donald Trump often acts in such a bombastic, almost cartoonish manner, does that make it extra challenging for a satirist?
No, not at all. I’ve referred to him as the greatest gift to comedy since bananas. As I see it, he’s in desperate need of attention all the time. So he has to constantly top himself because he can’t keep saying the same thing or, eventually, even our media will stop paying attention. So that’s a problem only if your stock and trade as a humorist is exaggeration—“He couldn’t possibly say this.”
I view my role a little differently. I just try to observe really carefully and replicate it as accurately as possible, removing the boring parts in between. So rather than exaggeration, it’s going for the essence of it. If you put it all together and take out the pauses, it has the effect of heightening the humor.
The other thing is that a lot of people are basically writing from outside as observers of the guy, which is natural because they are. But I try to fool myself into thinking that I can write from inside his head. So these songs are written from inside what I imagined to be his head, instead of just going, “Look at him being stupid.” It’s a different approach.
What you’re doing is somewhat ironic given that, supposedly, he rarely, if ever, laughs.
No one’s seen him belly laugh, no one’s ever seen him with a dog, no one’s ever heard him rave about any particular piece of music. There are big holes where normal people have stuff.
There are a range of styles on the record. Did you give any thought as to what music he might actually enjoy?
I thought about the music he’s been exposed to, not the music he’d enjoy. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that he’s enjoyed any music because there’s no evidence of it.
If you listen to the music that he plays at his rallies, it’s the most peculiar choice of music in the world. He started out playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which was a strange song to play at a political rally and now he’s playing “Y.M.C.A.” Go figure—clearly, it’s some staff member’s choice.
So I just went through periods of his life and, for example, the up sections of “COVID-180” are reminiscent of what he must’ve heard willy-nilly when he was hanging out at Studio 54 with Roy Cohn. The down section sounds like the late ‘70s rock that he probably was exposed to in other clubs. So I was trying to kind of sum up all the music that was ambient in his experience, even though he may never have really paid attention to it.
You’ve lived for many years in New Orleans, where music is deeply entwined with the city’s identity and essence. What has been the immediate impact of COVID-19 on the culture?
What I’ve noticed is that there’s been sort of a flowering during the summer and fall of musician-initiated live gigs in the streets.
There’s a trombone player in town [Rick Trolsen] who has the great advantage of having his front lawn directly across the street from a public park [in Algiers Point]. People come to this park for twilight concerts and they distance themselves. Unlike the clubs, the people who want to talk through the music put their chairs in the back near the church, and the people who want to listen to the music are right up front, across the street from the front yard. It’s a really good musical experience. We went and saw this brilliant local cellist Helen Gillet and Judith said, “This is great, I want to do one too,” so she did.
Some other guys have gone in and gotten licenses to close intersections in residential neighborhoods. My friend David Torkanowsky, who’s a great piano player, rented a truck with a piano on it—I don’t know if that exists anywhere else in the world—so that he and three other cats could play. I think 60 or 70 people in the neighborhood came out and passed around a tip jar.
You recently appeared as Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls, joining Galactic as part of a livestream benefit for Tipitina’s. Galactic bought the club in December 2018, with the best of intentions, hoping to preserve it. But now the group is in a really dire situation due to the pandemic. What are your memories of that night?
The reason they came in to do that is that it has a musical pedigree unlike any other, in terms of how long it’s been going and how many legendary names from the New Orleans scene and elsewhere have played there. When I was being Derek onstage with Galactic, at one moment, I looked up and saw that banner of Professor Longhair hanging above me and thought, “Holy shit. I’m standing here now.” In New Orleans music terms, this is a pretty sacred place.
Along with a couple of Spinal Tap classics, you performed a song from your Derek Smalls solo album, 2018’s Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing). “Gumming the Gash,” which appears on that record, is rather memorable, if unsettling.
When I was working on that record, Judith was touring Europe with her band. I think they were someplace in Italy and the setlist from the band that was there the previous night was still sitting around. It was full of these horribly grotesque and gross song titles and she said to me, “You need something this gross on the record.” She really encouraged me to have one song that was— absolutely without argument or contention—beyond the pale. I even think she uttered the phrase “gumming the gash.”
There is a really good concert video from the “Lukewarm Water Live” tour. That was a major show. It was a takeoff on the obligatory kind of aging rocker goes solo, makes a comeback, tries too hard, has symphony orchestra behind him. So, of course, this one had two symphony orchestras.
