Dead Man's Bones

Dead Man's Bones is an American rock duo formed in Los Angeles in 2005 by actor Ryan Gosling and his friend Zach Shields. Bonded by a shared fascination with ghosts, monsters and old horror imagery, the pair set out to write theatrical love songs about the supernatural, deliberately playing instruments they had never touched before to keep the recordings raw and unpolished.

Their self-titled debut album appeared in 2009 on ANTI- Records, produced by Tim Anderson. It leaned on gothic piano, shambling percussion and group chants, most memorably by folding in the children's choir from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, which gave songs like «Pa Pa Power» and «My Body's a Zombie for You» their eerie, campfire-singalong quality.

Rather than a conventional touring rock act, Dead Man's Bones built a small mythology around themselves, staging Halloween-season shows with choreographed choir performances and homemade visuals. The project has remained a one-album phenomenon, but it is remembered as an unusually earnest, theatrical detour from a Hollywood actor into DIY outsider rock.