At the recent launch concert for The Singularity, composer Bear McCreary had a moment that surpassed anything he’d ever imagined, when he first started writing original music for the album. “I told the crowd, ‘I wrote this song when I was 15 years old. And back then, I sat in front of my little Yamaha keyboard and my sequencer, and I was imagining the type of guitarist I would want to play this riff that I just figured out. And let me introduce him: Here’s Slash.’ And Slash walks out on stage and goes into this song. If that isn’t dream fulfillment, I don’t know what it is.”
McCreary has worked as a composer for film and TV for years now, with credits including Battlestar Galactica, the God of War games, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The Singularity, though, represents a first for him: An independently-produced concept album, with 25 tracks that create a cosmic narrative that stretches across multiple realities. And to make it happen, he brought together a remarkable roster of artists, including Serj Tankian, Rufus Wainwright, Corey Taylor, Jens Kidman, Joe Satriani, Scott Ian, Brendon Small, Steve Bartek, John Avila, and, as mentioned, Slash.
While McCreary began working on The Singularity decades ago, he tells Consequence it was only more recently that he realized that there might be a narrative component to the album, “because maybe that’s just the way my brain is wired. I’ve always loved narrative in music.” He then began working with friends from the comic book world like writers Kyle Higgins and Mat Groom, who collaborated with him to “sort of pull the inherent story out of the music, which is the exact opposite of what I’ve been doing for 25 years. Which is really fun.”
McCreary says “it’s fun to imagine that there’s maybe somebody out there younger than me, experiencing The Singularity the way that I felt when I heard The Wall and then found out there was a movie of it, and then found out there had been a tour of it — I was piecing together this experience that is The Wall that needs all those different mediums for you to fully understand it.”
In addition, McCreary wanted to “pay the universe back for all the inspiration that I got from Pink Floyd and Queen and Guns N’ Roses, and then, a little bit later, Muse, System of a Down, Slipknot, Strapping Young Lad, Meshuggah — these are all bands and artists that I started to combine in my head, and felt something really profound when I listened to them.”
McCreary produced The Singularity independently, because “the creative control was of paramount importance to me. I did not want to be beholden to anybody that would then have a say into what it sounds like or what happens with it.” Basically, McCreary says, “this music was financed with my other music.”
