INTERVIEW: John Anealio on SF Music, the Musical Creative Process and More
John Anealio writes songs about science fiction and fantasy and other geeky things. Alternate-tuned acoustic guitar picking, soaring synthesizers, and catchy pop hooks power his odes to androids, princesses, and vampires. His newest album, available on his website JohnAnealio.com as well as iTunes is the Chuck Wendig named album Laser Zombie Robot Love. He also recently released a free single to commemorate the fall of Felix Baumgartner from space to the ground. He is the co-creator and co-host of The Functional Nerds and has come up with theme songs for a variety of other podcasts as well, including the one for the SF Signal podcast.
I decided to sit down with John to learn more about him and his writing and creative process…
Paul Weimer: Laser Zombie Robot Love is your newest album. But where did the idea of doing geeky songs, as opposed to, say, covers or homages to Rush or Emerson Lake and Palmer come from?
John Anealio: For years, I was a straight-up folk/pop singer/songwriter. My songs were about relationships and other typical subject matter. As my writing grew, I started to write about all kinds of things. The first CD that I put out as a typical singer/songwriter included a song about vampires and one titled Orbit. At one point, I decided to focus my writing on subjects that would appeal to genre fans and tech geeks. Part of the idea behind this stemmed from my then, new found interest in blogs and podcasts. I was reading all of these Sci-Fi review blogs and I thought if I wrote songs inspired by the books that these folks were reviewing, then they’d probably enjoy them and maybe even spread the word about them. That was the start and it pretty much worked. However, it quickly changed to writing about all different subjects and themes within the genre, not just about specific Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books.
