Apparently Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and her ex-paramour director Spike Jonze are still cool despite being broken up and both having moved on.
According to a very small mention in the VF Movies Rock issue (not online), O will perform on Jonze’s upcoming ““Where The Wild Things Are” soundtrack.
How many songs? VF doesn’t say, but you’ll remember a 16-song collection of raw demos of O’s titled The KO at Home leaked back in December 2006 (prompting some major blog rage from TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek) and some of the tracks sounded like very-early Cat Power with minimal acoustics and slow measures.
While they were dating, Jonze directed the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Y Control” video, their MTV Movie awards live performance of ‘Maps’ and created an Adidas commercial with a song “Hello Tomorrow,” sung by Karen O and written by Spike’s musician/producer brother, Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel – he produced the Yeahs’ Show Your Bones). Clean also produced O’s long-overdue solo album; a record he said would likely come out sometime in 2007 back in 2005. Where is that thing? Perhaps some of these songs will surface on the “Wild Things’ soundtrack? Dare to dream and speculate…
An adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic kid’s book, Jonze co-wrote the ‘Wild Things’ script with novelist Dave Eggers (Vulture says it’s great), the movie is currently in post-production and is due in October 2008 according to the always-fallible IMDB.
Sendak, who has been notoriously protective of his children’s novel did not see eye-to-eye with many of the now long-dead concepts (the book is only 338-words in total), but the current vision of the pic has his strong support. Sendak told the New York Times in October of 2005, “I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made.”
Apparently the budget this film is pretty gigantic, somewhere in the ballpark of $80 million; surely Jonze’s highest to date. Last year O collaborated with electronic artist Peaches and Johnny Knoxville to record the track “Backass” for the movie “Jackass 2” and just recently she lent her voice to the Bob Dylan covers soundtrack for “I’m Not There.”
Download: Karen O – “Pumpkin/Save The Seeds” (from the The KO at Home demo)
Download: Karen O and Kool Keith – “The Teaser”
Download: Karen O & The Million Dollar Bashers – “Highway ’61 Revisted”
Download: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps” (acoustic)
Watch: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Y Control”
Watch: Karen O and Spike Jonze’s Adidas commercial “Hello Tomorrow”