Music

When William Shatner released The Transformed Man in 1968 on Decca, he was still soaring around the galaxy as Captain Kirk on the culture-shifting TV series Star Trek. A musical project that found the trained thespian and sci-fi star delivering the words of Shakespeare, Dylan and The Beatles as go-for-broke spoken word monologues, the album confounded most and inspired its fair share of “out-of-this-world” and “spaced out” jibes.

Thirty-six years later, Shatner – by then an indisputable entertainment industry icon – teamed with producer Ben Folds for his second musical album, Has Been. As Shatner readily owned with the 2004 LP’s cheeky title, expectations were low. But with Folds in his fold and a few more decades of perspective, he warped right past the haters, earning praise (sometimes begrudgingly) from critics and curiosity seekers, particularly on standout cuts like his visceral version of Pulp’s “Common People.” (Jarvis Cocker is inarguably a better singer, but when Shatner growls about those “roaches on the wall,” you can practically see them scurrying on cigarette smoke-stained surfaces.)

Twenty years and seven albums down the road, Shatner’s music career is still eliciting polarized opinions – which he freely admits during a recent chat with Billboard – but it’s clear that the beloved multi-hyphenate has a deep love for musical expression. (And for what it’s worth, 2011 saw him chart on the Billboard 200 for the first time with Seeking Major Tom, while his 2020 album The Blues even topped the Billboard Blues Albums chart.)

Though his new album is a children’s record, the recently released Where Will the Animals Sleep: Songs For Kids And Other Living Things is no lark. It’s a stylistically playful but thematically serious album that touches on climate change and the interconnectedness of life on earth. Songs like “Elephants and Termites” aren’t cutesy sing-alongs; they’re fact-based ecological lessons for kids delivered by a 93-year-old whose interest in the natural world around us still exudes a healthy childlike wonder.

In your recent documentary, You Can Call Me Bill, you talk about being proud of the fact that you’ve maintained your inner child throughout a long career in show business. Is that why you wanted to make a children’s album?

Well, maybe. I wouldn’t say no. But what really is the inspiration is reading, studying, I guess, over the years and my understanding of how intertwined all of life is. For example, I’m now discovering that a single-cell animal in the primitive ocean absorbed another cell that had mitochondria in it [and] became energized by the mitochondria’s energy. And that single-cell entity became the forebear of everything that’s on earth. When you think of the incredible, complex and yet simple line of evolution from the beginning in the ocean… everything grew from the other. And then that becomes us and modern humanity has lost the concept that we belong to everything else. The idea that we are superior and we have dominion over nature? It’s an illusion. We’re all connected. If something breaks in this scheme of life, we’re all affected, as we can see it happening now. We’re on the edge. There are discoveries in science every day that are profound and yet we’re on the edge of disaster with global warming. [His dog starts barking.] That dog, for example, is following its intuition to guard; it’s a Doberman watching the street below it. Max, Max, that’s enough! [laughs]. You can see that dog just listened to me — they’re talking to us. The intelligence level of everything is enormous, we just think they’re dumb because they don’t communicate like we do. Octopus are highly intelligent and, in all likelihood, talking to each other. What I’m saying is, this album is a result of me reading, studying and listening and being so moved by this story of the voyage of life.

I suggested to Rob Sharenow, my partner in writing these songs, I said, “Why don’t we do something for kids involving the idea of how connected we are? Because kids don’t know that and we can help by producing a children’s album.” When we finished, I realized it wasn’t just a children’s album: it’s an album for everybody, and I gather adults are taking to it as well. We said to the label, Cleopatra, that we wanted to do a booklet with it, and they made this booklet that’s glorious. And suddenly we have what I like to think of that’s a work of art involving a theory of nature that everything belongs to each other, and to hold all life as holy and not destroy it.

I can see what you’re talking about in “Elephants and Termites,” which you released a video for. It’s not just a silly song — it has details about how an elephant scratching its back on a mound created by termites could lead to an entire little ecosystem.

That has a great deal of wonder to it, doesn’t it? A hole in the ground from that action becomes a source of life for lifeforms all around.

When you were a child, did you have this interest in the natural world?

No, no, no. It’s not something a child or a young adult thinks of. My life is filled with young adults and it’s all about school and “what college am I going to go to?” They’re totally consumed with making their life. The exceptional child might discover what we’re talking about, but generally speaking, people of a certain age are just involved with existing and their own self. There’s no room in their lives to take the time to examine the world around them, unless they’re exceptional kids. I think this comes later in life. You look around, think, “What’s the meaning of it? Why am I here? What am I doing and where am I going?” Those questions only occur to most people later in life. But it’s a shame because all those thoughts add depth to their life. If at a young age you have an insight into how brief life is, you’re motivated to make your life as meaningful as possible. Which doesn’t mean inventing something strange and interesting, it means building your life with love and appreciation and doing good things for people.

So you made this album with Robert Sharenow, as well as Dan Miller of They Might Be Giants. What is it like working with them?

There’s a beautiful story attached to that. A long time ago, I was doing something that Robert Sharenow was attached to, and we went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant I suggested that specialized in duck. After that, whenever the occasion arose, Robert and I would go eat duck and talk. And that took years. We would go four, five, six, times a year to dinner and what came of that was a wonderful friendship where neither party took advantage of the other. It was all about life and our lives. We became the best of friends. [His dog starts again.] One day he brought a friend of his, and it turns out that Dan Miller and Robert went to university together and they had a musical group. Max!

There’s nature again.

I know. So Dan and Rob were musicians together and eventually Dan went on to be a professional musician and Robert went elsewhere. But Robert had written musicals for his university and wrote a novel that won a prize. And I had no idea he was a writer. And he says, “We should do an album together,” and I’m, “Yeah, let’s do an album!” I come up with some ideas then Robert starts to write and I think, “Ah! These are great words.” We suddenly catch fire and start writing. We wrote, I don’t know, 30 songs, that became an album called Bill [from 2021] that’s out there now. We bonded and thought, “Let’s do another album” and we did this album on the idea of the connectedness of nature.

Here’s an example. Honeybirds have learned that if they lead native peoples to hives of honey, [those people] take a portion of that hive, leave some for the bees but also some for the birds. The birds have learned that if they guide human beings to the hive, they’ll get a reward. Birds, stemming from dinosaurs, millions of years of existence, they’ve evolved their own intelligence, and suddenly birds and humans are interacting. One flies and the other walks, but they’re communicating. What a miraculous thing. Apes can react to computers. I once talked to Koko the Gorilla in San Francisco. The world is alive with stories of interactions of animals and human beings. I’ve been asked to do another album already [by the label]. I don’t know if it’s a continuation of these kinds of stories, or, it occurred to be this morning, but an album of love stories involving animals. Think of a wolf howling on a winter night. They’re talking. It’s a love story. There’s a whole dialogue going on. There’s a plethora of stories out there of animals communicating to each other. We’re in the midst, right now, of working on interpreting sperm whale songs. They have computers analyzing the variations in their songs, and they’re communicating: “Hello”; “I love you”; “I’m here”; Where are you?” We know meerkats have a dialogue and they have different names for different people they see. They’re actually talking to each other. What doesn’t communicate? Do you think a chipmunk or a squirrel that’s chattering isn’t saying something? The world is singing a song of love and life and communication and we humans, until recently — except for a lot of native people — were deaf to this communication. Everything is alive and intelligent if only we have the ears, the eyes and the sensibility to recognize that. And this album is my blind and deaf way or trying to suggest that. I mean, you can talk to people more knowledgeable that I.

All of this reminds me of your performance of “So Fragile, So Blue” that was filmed for You Can Call Me Bill. I found your performance and the message very moving.

My dream is that we get a lot of personalities to say, “What can we do?” if it comes out as a music video. We’re working on that.

But as you say, there’s so much else going on in the news. Plus, people have their lives, their career, it’s easy to ignore the bigger picture of our planet.

That’s exactly right. We’re so overwhelmed, especially nowadays, with existing. We find it hard to remember the rest of the world which has its own miracle of existence. We’ve heard so many times that global warming can wipe out human beings, but given a short period of time, the earth can renew and something else could take our place, if that was the case.

I went up into space [in 2021] and came down. I was weeping after and I didn’t know why. Then I realized, there was sorrow – I was mourning the earth that I saw. What I’m realizing now is that there’s a fervent amount of work being done by scientists around the world to come up with a solution to global warming: to take the carbon dioxide and methane out of the air, to take the plastics out of the ocean, to purify our water and different farming techniques. We abound with knowledge of how to save the earth. It’s amazing what science is doing right now. If we can hang on for a while, science may absolve us of things it created in the first place.

What do you think about AI? People of course talk about its dangers, but I wonder if it couldn’t be used to solve some of these ecological problems we’re talking about.

We hear about the miracle of AI and we’re obsessed with the possibility of AI taking over and destroying us. I don’t see that one, but people a lot smarter than I are worried. Imagine putting AI, part of the science of discovery, putting science in all its Manhattan Project ability to do something about global warming.

I’m in the same boat as everybody else. The solution is human beings wanting to do something about it. To have a political group saying it doesn’t exist is like sitting in the electric chair and saying the electricity is going to go out. It’s absurd. The first thing we need is all of humanity to say, “My God, we’re approaching the end, we have to do something about it, united.” The second thing is to do something literally about it and I think it can be done. If we’re aided by AI, that’s only to our benefit.

In the last decade or so, you’ve been incredibly prolific in music, specifically. What is it about music making that is so attractive to you?

Well, I’m glad you’re with Billboard, I don’t mind talking to Billboard. I’ve loved music for the longest time. As a kid, in my parents’ home, they didn’t play much music. I’ve long been in awe of classical music and the sound of the human voice, whether it’s the trained voice of the opera singer or the melodic voice of the crooner and everything in between.

Now, I’m an actor, a classical actor, I’m very much aware of the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, along with the music of language — in my case the English language and the onomatopoeia of the English language. But I can’t sing. I can’t sing to the ability that I want to. So I’ve been able to come up with the idea of [making music by] speaking English in a rhythm and hewing as close to the melodic line as I can without extending the note – which I can’t do, although I yearn to do. Making these songs mine leads me to being mocked on one hand and praised on the other. I concentrate on the praise and the joy I feel in being able to make a song mine. The first albums, I didn’t fully comprehend what I was doing, but a couple songs did reflect what I had in mind. Coming to an album I did with Ben Folds, there’s a cover song I did, “Common People,” that exemplifies what I do best with a lyric. It’s with Joe Jackson: We start at the same time, we end at the same time, and we do something completely different [throughout] and yet it works. That’s my best example of what I can do in a song in my own way.

I love your cover of that song, truly. Before I leave you, I wanted to ask about Roger Corman, who died recently. You gave a magnificent performance in his 1962 film The Intruder, which was a daring movie.

I wrote a note somewhere saying the movie he and I did together was very risky. Our lives were at risk at times because it was about integration. The courage he showed — the bravery and the energy — I’ve never forgotten it. Although we didn’t communicate much in the last many years, I thought of him.