The motivation behind Daddy, the newly formed band comprised of artists James Franco and Timothy O’Keefe, is to push beyond the sonic space of music into the surrounding ecology. Daddy investigates the territories of film/video, installation, and performance while simultaneously exploring the connections that form between them.

While sampling has been an established and prevalent method of modern music making, Daddy’s approach moves beyond the ‘art of sampling’ into the act of appropriation. Not just appropriating a genre of music, but the moments it inhabits, and the characters that embody it.

Like many bands before them, Franco and O’Keefe met as students in art school. While in school, they collaborated on many projects including Franco’s 2011 Endless Idaho installation at the Gagosian Gallery in L.A. before forming Daddy in late 2011.

Drawing from the individual practices of both Franco and O’Keefe, Daddy brings together the interests and talents of these two artists. Franco continues his exploration of identity. Through appropriating and recontextualizing material from his work as an actor, director, and individual, he questions the existing boundaries between. O’Keefe, the musician behind , brings to Daddy his imaginative sense of sound and play, creating evocative arrangements that merge together the assumed separations between time, space, and cultures.