Dead Man’s Bones.

I planned on making Dead Man’s Bones (or at least The Gos) my Crush one of these weeks, but felt they (and he) deserved their own post, separate of any schedule and structure. Plus, my crush cup over-runneth this week (Jesse Eisenberg will have to wait until next week – spoiler alert!) and I’m seeing the band perform this Friday. I need to get this all out now!

While I’ve only recently heard of Zach Shields because of his bandmateship with a famous actor, Ryan Gosling and I go way back. Not in real life, but in his fake life and my watching-television life. While I’m sure I watched his episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Goosebumps, and I definitely remember his characters on Ready or Not and (the original!) Flash Forward, I really started falling in love during the run of, what I like to call “Saved by the Bell on a boat”, Breaker High. Not only was he and the show hilar, but it introduced me to Tyler Labine who was also funny and played Sock on Reaper, which was an awesome show and I’m so mad it was cancelled because One Tree Hill sucks, but I digress.

So, according to the ever-factual and completely reputable Wikipedia, Ryan and Zach met while dating Rachel and Kayleen McAdams (respectively, not all together and incestuously). Their friendship grew as they obsessed over the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, and about all things zombie and monster. I, too, love all things zombie and monster. Scary movies with werewolves and vampires, I’m ok with. Scary movies about normal dudes who creep around torturing virgins in innocent, small towns – er – are scary. My heart can’t take those things. If I wore a blood pressure monitor while watching Funny Games, for instance, the thing would explode and the surprise of that explosion would give me a heart attack. I, literally, can’t. handle. it. Anyway, they start putting together what they hoped would be a “theatrical monster ghost love story for the stage” (I’d normally poke fun at the Wiki-author who wrote that ill-written sentence, but it makes complete sense to me), but ended up settling for recording an album instead. They taught themselves various instruments, vowed never to perfect any recording, and enlisted the help of Los Angeles’s Silverlake Conservatory Childrens Choir and producer Tim Anderson, of Imarobot.

I must say, their record is pretty amazing. I’m not only saying that because I’d like to bone RyRy one day, I truly mean it. I mean, for Pete’s sake, I’ve written a television pilot about a kindergarten teacher-slash-werewolf and I’ve begun the process of writing an updated My Boyfriend’s Back-type screenplay. Obvs, I like all things ghoul!

Unf at those outfits!

{ edit// } How the eff did I forget these magical years?