. A musical project that found the trained thespian and sci-fi star delivering the words of Shakespeare, Dylan and The Beatles as go-for-broke spoken word monologues, the album confounded most and inspired its fair share of “out-of-this-world” and “spaced out” jibes.Thirty-six years later, Shatner – by then an indisputable entertainment industry icon – teamed with producer Ben Folds for his second musical album. As Shatner readily owned with the 2004 LP’s cheeky title, expectations were low.
I suggested to Rob Sharenow, my partner in writing these songs, I said, “Why don’t we do something for kids involving the idea of how connected we are? Because kids don’t know that and we can help by producing a children’s album.” When we finished, I realized it wasn’t just a children’s album: it’s an album for everybody, and I gather adults are taking to it as well. We said to the label, Cleopatra, that we wanted to do a booklet with it, and they made this booklet that’s glorious.
So you made this album with Robert Sharenow, as well as Dan Miller of They Might Be Giants. What is it like working with them? But as you say, there’s so much else going on in the news. Plus, people have their lives, their career, it’s easy to ignore the bigger picture of our planet. What do you think about AI? People of course talk about its dangers, but I wonder if it couldn’t be used to solve some of these ecological problems we’re talking about.