Emilia Yu
Maybe you don’t recognize the name Bear McCreary, but you’ve absolutely heard his work. Many times. The prolific composer has scored works from Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, God of War: Ragnarok, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and more. During his career, he’s always been the one handed the story to make the music, but this time, the tables are turned. McCreary takes the creative reins in his new concept album and graphic novel, The Singularity.
“I’ve been working in multimedia, writing music for film, television games for 20 years…About 5 years ago, I thought, something’s missing. I’m enjoying writing music for other people’s stories, but there’s some fundamental part of being an artist that I’m not exercising,” McCreary explains from a press room at New York Comic Con. “It’s like I’m skipping over the scariest part, which is that blank page.”
An initial seed for the idea sprouts. McCreary calls up his brother Brendan McCreary to help write (and later sing eight of the 25 tracks). Exciting, but let’s take it further. Then he calls musicians he knows outside of the family like Serj Tankian, lead vocalist of System of a Down. People really seem to like this, let’s see who else we can pull. He calls musicians he doesn’t know, like Joe Satriani and Rufus Wainwright. Another slam dunk. The sheer artistic range of the album is already impressive, but once again, McCreary felt something was missing.
“I realized, oh man, my 20 years of scoring narrative, it’s still there. I can’t shake it. Narrative is how I approach music,” he laughs. “Laying it out musically, there’s a three-act structure. There’s something there. So I called Kyle Higgins and Mat Groom, who I knew socially. I always admired their work in graphic novels. And I thought, hey, can we make a graphic novel?”
Now the creative director and writer of this project, respectively, Higgins (Black Market Narrative, Massive-Verse) and Groom (Massive-Verse, Inferno Girl Red) call up Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Ramon K. Perez (Tale of Sand, Jane) to illustrate the heart of the story.
While the album came first as the inspiration for the graphic novel, the two pieces influenced each other in foundational ways. Once Groom outlined the core narrative, the creatives were inspired to add three monologue tracks to the album.
Higgins explains, “Those monologues are line for line from the comic book itself. So at a certain point the album inspired the story in the comic, but then the story in the comic inspired how the album grew.”
The story follows the protagonist Blue Eyes who is constantly reborn, losing everything in the process but his traumatic memories that follow him, all set against a grandiose multiversal backdrop.
The novel covers a range of humanistic themes and Groom explains that “We arrived at this point of it really being a story about parenthood, about living your entire life and weighing up all of the pain and the joy…and realizing you can’t put that on any objective scale and figure it out. But you have to do it if you decide to bring life into the world.”
Groom continues, “Having one being experience it over and over again, and having it reinforced over and over again, just how beautiful life can be and how hard it can be. Experiencing the most extreme version of that became the core of the book.”
To cement these themes, McCreary insisted on stripping away all the details first (“the Vikings and dinosaurs,” he laughs), to ensure the bones of the story stood on their own.
“I want you to write a three-person black box theater play. And if I’m not interested, if I’m not turning the page based on what these three characters are going through, what their relationships are, then we’re doing it wrong.”
Even simple collaboration can be a challenge, let alone on this scale with over 50 creatives involved. But to hear McCreary and his collaborators describe it, their work together could only be described as pure, what a young aspiring artist might imagine before the realities of budgets, deadlines, and “creative differences.”
“It is this no ego approach to how we trust each other and build these things collaboratively together so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” says Higgins. He also credits the remarkably driven nature of the team, “When we do something, we’re all in. We like to say at my little creative collective studio, we commit to the bit.”
The seed of The Singularity began five years ago, but according to McCreary, the project has been three decades in the making. In his first live performance as a teenager, the composer-to-be played an original metal song Escape from the Machines. But again, something was missing. Over the years, McCreary revisited this song, first through his own hands on a synth, then those of guitarist Ryan Ho (then an upperclassman in high school, now the successful musician Malay), then two more guitarists at university, and finally, found it in The Singularity as performed by legendary Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.
“I’m waking up in the middle of the night to Escape from the Machines,” he remarks about the recording process. “I don’t know that we have it. I’ve had four guitarists play the riff.”
It was McCreary’s guitar teacher who pointed out the obvious, as Slash was already involved recording the album’s penultimate song.
“He looked at me and he was almost like, hey, dumbass. You should have Slash do it.” McCreary chuckles. “The first thing I felt is I was apprehensive. If Slash doesn’t nail this, what does this mean?”
McCreary had little to worry about.
“It was amazing when I first heard it. Honestly, I almost wanted to cry. That it was there.”
You can find The Singularity via McCreary’s website and on music streaming services.
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