Broken Frontier

On July 6, 2006, in a studio in Portland, Oregon, musician Lara Michell entered the studio to record “Love the Way You Love,” a song featured in LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE, a comic book written by author Jamie S. Rich and drawn by Marc Ellerby. The comic is published every three months by Oni Press, and the second issue is due at the end of September. In it, the fictional band Like A Dog performs “Love the Way You Love” for the first time, and now readers can download a version of the song and listen to it while they read--a unique experience in the world of comic books.

Lara Michell sings and plays guitar on the track. It was produced by John Askew, head of FILMguerrero records and the man behind Tracker, who previously stepped into similar territory by creating the ambient soundtrack to the Blankets graphic novel. While that was a background score, “Love the Way You Love” is part of the story being told on paper. On “Love The Way You Love,” Askew played bass and Michael Schorr (formerly of Death Cab For Cutie and The Long Winters) played drums. The final product is available in advance of the comic, and can be downloaded at www.myspace.com/laramichell.

“Writing a comic book about a rock band presents an interesting challenge,” Rich said, “as there are less opportunities to describe how the music sounds than there are in prose. When I got the idea of writing a title song for LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE, Lara was the first person I thought of.”

Lara Michell is a well-known performer in Portland. She has released three solo albums and was the guitarist for the popular group Carmina Piranha. Currently, she is part of two different bands: 1930s swing jazz sextet The Stolen Sweets and pop/rock band Dirty Martini, where she teams up with two other songwriters, McKinley and Stephanie Schneiderman.

“Jamie sent me some lyrics that he was working on for his script,” Michell explained, “and from there I came up with some chord progressions and musical transitions, and we worked on the melody together and finished it off. The concept was that this would be my cover of the song that LIKE A DOG would have recorded in the early ‘90s. The fictional band is inspired by British music like the Smiths and Ride, but maybe with an ear towards ‘90s radio. So, this became my take on that.”

LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE is a comic book soap opera that was spun out of Rich’s prose fiction, including CUT MY HAIR and his latest novel, THE EVERLASTING. For more information on LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE, visit http://www.onipress.com/graphicnovels/gn.php?id=145

For more on John Askew and FILMguerrero, visit www.filmg.com