James Franco and Andy Rourke have recorded an album of songs inspired by the Smiths. The American actor and the former Smiths bassist worked with Tim O’Keefe to make Let Me Get What I Want, an LP based on Franco’s Morrissey-motivated poetry.

This project is the latest release by Franco and O’Keefe’s conceptual band Daddy. It has its roots in Franco’s first collection of poetry, Directing Herbert White, which included a 10-poem series called The Best of the Smiths: Side A and Side B. “The Smiths’ songs provided inspiration for the poems, lending tone and situation,” Franco explained to Vice . “I originally wrote this sequence as a way to use one medium (music) to influence another one (poetry) … [But] once I had the sequence, Tim and I took the material one step further and turned the poems inspired by songs back into songs of their own.”Although Rourke is not an official member of Daddy, he plays on every track. Daddy snuck one of these songs, titled This Charming Man, into a commercial Franco made for Gucci ; the full version was released as a video earlier this week.

This videos is important; in fact, every song on Let Me Get What I Want will have a video, and these 10 clips form an art film. To make the videos, the musicians enlisted teenagers at a high school in Palo Alto, where Franco’s mother had organised a film-making programme. “[The teens] developed scripts out of the same poems that we made songs out of, then shot film based on those scripts,” O’Keefe said. “While they were doing that project, we took all of the raw footage we had for each song and brought in editors to put together our film.”

The heavy meta opus will be released in 2015.

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