subject: John Mellencamp Tickets : A Cd/book Package Of Ghost Brothers Of Darkland County Will Be Released [print this page] Mellencamp has been working on a musical with horror author Stephen King, entitled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, since 2000. The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, GA announced on March 30, 2011 that the musical will debut in the spring of 2012 and will be directed by Alliance artistic director Susan V. Booth. Mellencamp's official website reported that a CD/book package of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County will be released in advance of the stage production.
Production on the CD/book package began on June 15, 2009, when T Bone Burnett, who is serving as the project's musical producer, began laying down tracks in Los Angeles, California for the songs Mellencamp wrote for the musical. The recording will be available in a book package containing the full text, two discs featuring the entire production of the spoken word script and songs performed by the cast, and a third CD of the songs only. Mellencamp said the soundtrack includes Rosanne Cash, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Taj Mahal and Neko Case among others singing the songs he wrote.
In November 2010, Mellencamp told the Chicago Tribune: "T Bone and I and Stephen King are working on a musical. All the music has been recorded. We had Kris Kristofferson, Neko Case, Elvis Costello, Taj Mahal, all singing different characters roles. I wrote all the songs, 17 songs. produced. It sounds like the Sgt. Pepper of Americana to me. Forget about the play, just the songs, the way these people sing them. I am sitting there listening to it and thinking, Did Rosanne Cash just kill that song or what! The play is called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, about two brothers who hate each other. If you could imagine Tennessee Williams meets Stephen King.
They are recording the dialogue now and we are putting out a record of the entire show before it comes out. Right now, Elvis Costello, Meg Ryan, Kris Kristofferson and Matthew McConaughey are doing table readings like an old radio play. So you will get all the dialogue, all the sound effects, and all the songs sung by different people so you can follow the story. The CD will come out ahead of time. So many people are involved, it is taken a long time. But we do not have to worry about money or record companies it is our own money we are putting into it, so we said, let is just make something beautiful."
Ryan D'Agostino of Esquire stated in a review of a New York rehearsal of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County in the fall of 2007, "Musicals aren't usually a guy thing. This one, though, is not only tolerable, it's good. It may be the first-ever musical written by men for men. There's no orchestra, just two twangy acoustic guitars, an accordion, and a fiddle. The songs are both haunting and all-American."The Alliance describes the show as a "Southern Gothic musical fraught with mystery, tragedy and ghosts of the past."The official description of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County from the Alliance Theatre website.
In the tiny town of Lake Belle Reve, Mississippi in 1957, a terrible tragedy took the lives of two brothers and a beautiful young girl. During the next forty years, the events of that night became the stuff of local legend. But legend is often just another word for lie. Joe McCandless knows what really happened; he saw it all. The question is whether or not he can bring himself to tell the truth in time to save his own troubled sons, and whether the ghosts left behind by an act of violence will help him or tear the McCandless family apart forever.
