Corey Feldman on New Music, Writing Songs for Late Friends, and Putting His Abusers in a Music Video: Exclusive
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The post Corey Feldman on New Music, Writing Songs for Late Friends, and Putting His Abusers in a Music Video: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.
The second part of our interview with Corey Feldman covers his songwriting and new box set, Love Left 2.1. Check out his thoughts on the 35th anniversary of The Lost Boys here.
Corey Feldman is worried about touring during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because he feels like there’s nothing he can do about it.
“A lot of my friends who are in bands are doing these bubbles,” he tells Consequence. “We, unfortunately, can’t do that, because if I did that, we would lose half of the appeal, because half of the appeal of coming to the show is the meet and greets afterward.”
People aren’t just paying for the music, you see, and perhaps it’s closer to the opposite: The music is the appetizer before the meet. More fun than a convention and maybe more lucrative, too, but the appeal is the same: a picture, an autograph, a piece of Corey Feldman you can own.
“Fans get very excited about coming to say hi and getting a photograph and getting a picture. If you can’t do it, because of COVID, it would basically kill the tour,” he says. “So we have to do it, which makes it very scary. Any band member gets sick, that’s my ass, right?” He explains, “You can’t say, ‘I want to wear a mask during this photo op,’ or, ‘Don’t stand close to me.'”
I ask him if he likes touring, which he takes as an invitation to list his other loves. “Women are my number one thing on the planet,” he says. “Animals, my love for animals. I love animals, I love helping the environment, and things like that. But as far as what I get the most pleasure out of when it comes to the band, it’s about the touring.”
Feldman is hitting the road (grab tickets here) in support of his expansive new four-part box set, Love Left 2.1. It includes Love Left: Remixes, a companion to his 1992 musical debut, Love Left, as well as Coreyoke Cabaret, an instrumental set of the same songs, plus Love Lost, a collection of rarities and demos, and finally Love Left 2: Arm Me with Love, a new collection of songs that builds on the themes explored in his debut album.
Music was actually Feldman’s first — if not love, then at least skill he was pressured into. “I actually started singing before I started acting,” he says. “Because at three years old, you can’t get jobs by going in and reading lines, it doesn’t really work that way, because you can’t read lines yet, you don’t know how to read, so it’s kind of hard to read them off the page. So what my mom would do is she would stick me in a bedroom and she would have me memorize songs. She would put on a record player and she would say, ‘OK, sit there, listen to it, memorize all the lyrics, and when you’re done, come out.’
“And so I would come out and sing it to her and then if it was good enough, I would go into auditions and I would sing, and that’s how I would get my parts. So a lot of the commercials that I got was because I was memorizing and learning songs like ‘Junk Food Junkie’ by Jim Groche, or ‘Put On a Happy Face.’ All of these cutesy little kid songs from the ’70s.”
At the age of 10 he practiced dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” and he began songwriting at 15 by imitating the parodies of “Weird Al” Yankovic. “I think that was the development of my writing career, because I figured out phrasing and I figured out how to do it by comparing notes between ‘Weird Al’ and my favorite artists, where he was doing parodies. So I wrote my first song at 15 years old, which was a song called ‘Runaway.'”
Looking back, Feldman sees parallels between “Runaway,” and the abuse he was suffering at the time. “I was a very distressed, distraught, abused kid at that age. I was wearing all black, I had long hair, not your average kid actor,” he says. “I was in this very dark place, and I was wearing all black every day for a year and it was right before I ran away and got emancipated and right before I got into drugs. The guys that molested me were in the video.”
He continued, “It goes to show you that this was really a distraught cry for help, but I didn’t realize it at the time. At the time, I was just like, ‘Oh, well this is just about poor homeless kids or runaway kids that are in bad shape, and my heart bleeds for them, and this is for them to raise awareness,’ not realizing that I was really writing about myself.”
That video is in the new box set, evidence both of a precocious songwriter and the gauntlet he faced. But while Feldman isn’t running away from his problems anymore, he’s much more excited to talk about all the new songs he’s written.
“The idea was one or two new songs to put on the box set that are in the vein of my first album. Because if you’re going to do a boxset and you’re going to do a remix and remaster, and you’re going to put out a bunch of unreleased material, it’s always nice for the band to do one or two new songs,” he says. “So that was the way I justified the writing and the re-recording and all of that and then the pandemic drove on forever and as that continued on, we continued working and I just didn’t stop and 18 songs later, I’m like, well I guess we got another new album, so we might as well just throw it in as a part of the box set.”
That includes “A Beautiful Soul,” his ode to Ben Keough, who was the son of Lisa Marie Presley. Like Feldman, Keough had been famous since before he knew what the word meant, and like Feldman, Keough struggled with all that extra attention. Unlike Feldman, Keough was never quite able to overcame his demons, dying by suicide in 2020.
“We were very close and I had a lot of respect for him,” Feldman says. “I really loved him. He was a really sweet kid and his death hit me very hard.” He adds, “The words in that song, I wrote to him. It was cathartic, I was in a lot of pain over it because he’s just such a sweet kid, and it’s a terrible loss, just a terrible loss. I don’t want to judge the bad stuff, but at the end of the day, we were very close, he would come over and talk to me about his problems and he would kind of just show up at my house at one or two in the morning and we would sit there and talk all night. Just an amazing person, and such a loss. That’s what this song was about.”
Feldman has also written new songs about his wife (“Without You”) and an ode to fresh starts (“Comeback King”). Reinvention has much been weighing on his mind lately, even, or perhaps especially, because he’s finally settling into his own idea of normal. Might there be yet another act for Corey Feldman?
“Nobody wants to see the same story over and over,” he says. “You’ve got to keep changing the story, keep building on the story to keep it interesting.” This applies to both his career and himself. “As a human, as a person, it’s only about personal growth. All I care about is being a better person, and doing the right things, and trying to find something that’s meaningful in life.”
He adds, “It’s always been a little back and forth with me. Sometimes, I’m hitting it on the head and trolling the trolls, and there are other times where maybe I am taking myself too seriously, but either way, it’s about reinvention I think.”
“We have to keep reinventing ourselves,” he says, “Otherwise it gets boring.”
Corey Feldman on New Music, Writing Songs for Late Friends, and Putting His Abusers in a Music Video: Exclusive
Wren Graves
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