Hi all~
Navi here, showrunner for Paperless Pulp Series Two! Since we released E1 “Vlad Ash” last week, people keep askin’ me, “𝕎𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖 𝕔𝕒𝕟 𝕀 𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕟 𝕥𝕠 𝕌𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣 𝕐𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕟?” or “𝘐𝘴 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘚𝘬𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘷𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘥?” or “ɪ ʟɪᴛᴇʀᴀʟʟʏ ᴡᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀ ʏᴏᴜʀ ꜱᴋɪɴ ᴀɴ ᴜɴꜱᴋɪᴘᴘᴀʙʟᴇ ʟᴏᴏᴘ ɪɴ ᴍʏ ʟɪꜰᴇ. ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀɴᴅᴇᴍɪᴄ ɪ̵ꜱ̶ ʀᴇᴠᴇᴀʟɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴛ̴ʀ̷ᴜ̶ᴇ̵ ̷ꜰ̸ᴏ̶ʀ̷ᴍ̶.̵ ̸ᴛ̸ʜ̴ᴇ̷ʀ̸ᴇ̴ ̸ɪ̴ꜱ̶ ̵ᴏ̵ɴ̴ʟ̷ʏ̸ ̶ᴠ̵ʟ̵ᴀ̵ᴅ̷.̴
Needless to say, we figured we’d spread the love early (the Official Soundtrack for Series Two comes out on May 25th!) and put Under Your Skin up on our Bandcamp for all your listening pleasure. It’s a buck to download, but you can stream it a handful of times before the Bandcamp gremlins start asking for that dollar. <3
https://flyingvtheatre.bandcamp.com/
But wait, you may say! There’s TWO versions of Under Your Skin on the Bandcamp page…and one of them is from 2017!? What gives?
How much time ya got?
There’s a long and winding road that ended with the release of “Vlad Ash” last Tuesday. It spans four years of development, the leadership upheaval at Flying V last summer, & a concentrated effort by a handful of folks to get Vlad to the finish line thru a global pandemic. It is a story about how ideas used to develop at Flying V, and the elements of that development cycle we’re working to bring into the new iteration of this company. It’s also a long read, so if you don’t want any of the blahblahblah, no worries! Go enjoy that track (and check out Episode Two tomorrow!)
Annnnyways, back in 2017, I wrote “Under Your Skin” as a diegetic jukebox song for a scene in FVF: A Secret History of the Unknown World. This was one of 30+ songs I made in the month leading up to the show’s opening, and, in theory, one of the least consequential. (It is literally background noise to a scene). I recorded James Finley (vocals) and Mike Winch (violin) during Secret History’s tech weekend, and Neil McFadden (Secret History’s Sound Designer) had the stems for the song (the vocals and the instrumental as separate tracks) in case the vocals needed to be quieter than the dialogue in the scene (they did). Again, it was intricately designed background noise.
Susanna Pretzer (FV’s Literary Manager) was looking for promotional content for Secret History, and I offered to write a parody “Five Facts” article about Vlad Ash, the vampire country singer who sang “Under Your Skin”. That article still exists today, although modern Vlad scholars have disputed some of the facts presented as “blatantly untrue” and “cringeworthy relics of their time”. You can see it here:
https://www.flyingvtheatre.com/2017/06/18/5-fast-facts-about-vlad-ash-vampire-country-singer/
As you can see, the original Under Your Skin track is linked there, including an amazing DIY album cover I made after an impromptu photoshoot with James on a tech break. The mythos of Vlad began to sprout from the seed.
But for a couple of years, that was the extent of it.
In 2019, Jason (former Artistic Director of Flying V) was looking for ideas to develop, and we got to talking about Vlad again. The mythology had already been primed with the blog post and the song, and it was just a matter of figuring out where it would go next. Something I will always appreciate about (how) Jason (treated my ideas) was his willingness to take the time it would take to get it where it needed to go. I can’t speak for anyone else here, but when it came to developing Vlad into SOMETHING, we were setting up for a long process and I felt supported.
Perhaps it would be a concert series, or a cabaret style event? Would Vlad release an entire album in advance of it? Would we tell other musicians stories from this world? The possibilities were endless, but nothing was sticking, and we weren’t really on any sort of deadline to commit to an idea.
After Paperless Pulp Series One ended (December 31st, 2019), we began talking about what stories could fill the second season. Vlad re-emerged as an idea, and I started drafting out what a music podcast-style story about Vlad’s life and death would look like. On February 8th, 2020, I sent my first pitch for a Vlad Ash podcast episode. Here’s a condensed version of it:
“…what I really wanna do moreso than a “Behind The Music” style podcast, is a rip on Song Exploder, which is a podcast where an artist comes on and talks about a song they made, and takes it through the creation process…underscored by early demos, acapella tracks, rehearsal recordings, etc…all leading up to the final song playing in reveal…”
I had a first draft prepped by the beginning of March. And then COVID hit, and everything stopped for a bit.
By the end of April, we were getting back under way and I had a new draft of Vlad. We workshopped it with a cast on April 26th. I still have this draft of the script, and wow, is it different. At the time, everyone was feeling really good about it though, and Vlad continued to develop, with plans to record over the summer. I’d already started talking to Ryan and Josh (our Series musicians) about the music, and they’d even started making some demos.
And then the summer happened. And any Flying V plans went into complete flux.
Coming out of the summer as one of the new Artistic Leaders, with a project (Paperless Pulp) that could be rebooted, I knew that I wanted to continue to develop Vlad. Our production team pushed through the rest of the year, and by the new year, we were rehearsing and recording with our cast, getting new music finalized, and prepping to release it as the first episode of the new Series. As the writer and showrunner of Series Two, I have nothing but love and gratitude to the S2 team that got us here. And, obviously, I have some very complicated feelings about how this idea developed.
I dunno if this is a story that needed telling, but tbh the episode “Vlad Ash” is the story of songwriting, long form development, and searching for perfection through trials and iterations…by extension, it’s kinda the story of these two versions of the song, and everything that happened in between.
I want to make sure that the spirit of development that led this piece is something that we continue to foster here at Flying V, with our company as well as new artists we work with. So I decided to keep the old version up there as a memento. You’re welcome to listen to it. It would feel weird to get rid of it. Every idea comes from a seed, right?
Anyways, our next episode “Cyri, No!” drops tomorrow! Stay tuned, and thanks for listening
~ navi <3
Artistic lead,
r&d department
