Exclusive: After meeting on Kickstarter while in production on The Avengers: Age of Ultron , Whedon and singer-songwriter Shawnee Kilgore are collaborating together on a six-song EP album. And they’ve never met face-to-face.
Joss Whedon
Danny Moloshok / Reuters / Reuters
Shawnee Kilgore
Courtesy Shawnee Kilgore
For the better part of 2014, Joss Whedon has been working on a project unlike anything else he has attempted in his multi-decade career. It involved many hours of complex collaboration and focused creativity, and followed Whedon as he traveled from South Africa to South Korea to several months in Great Britain.
Finally, the celebrated storyteller is sharing a glimpse at his new opus to the world. No, it's not the trailer for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, although Whedon did just finish principle photography as the writer-director of that massive feature film on Aug. 6.
Nope, it's a lovely, plaintive folk song that Whedon co-wrote while making The Avengers 2 — and it's just the first of a six-song, as-yet-untitled EP album Whedon and his creative partner, singer-songwriter Shawnee Kilgore, hope to release at some point later this year.
“It's been a little bit magical,” Whedon told BuzzFeed of what it has been like working on the album with Kilgore at night after spending his days directing some of the most powerful superheroes in Hollywood. “It is nice to have the balance between something that is genuinely enormous and something that is crystalline and tiny.”
The first single from the EP, available on iTunes starting today, is called “Big Giant Me,” and it's the result of an unlikely creative partnership between Whedon, 50, and Kilgore, a 32-year-old Austin-based musician who first came to Whedon's attention on Kickstarter. “I had a Kickstarter phase — I don't want to say addiction, but there was a period when it was my only friend,” Whedon said. (He's joking, but according to his profile, Whedon has backed at least 41 projects on the site.)
Last March, as Avengers 2 production was just beginning to kick into gear, Whedon came upon Kilgore's crowdfunding campaign for her fourth studio album, and second full-length album. Born in Maine and largely raised in Washington state, Kilgore had been striving to build a career as a working musician for roughly a decade when she decided to turn to the crowdfunding site. For her video, she made her case via large cue cards akin to Bob Dylan's famous video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
“One of the cards just said 'I am learning how…' and then she flipped it: '…to ask for help,'” said Whedon. “And I was like, 'OK!' That struck such a chord with me, personally. … I really loved the music and the sound of her voice.”
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