Iggy Pop Records Jazz Album

Iggy Pop will release a jazz album based on a novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq this spring.

Preliminaires will be based on Houellebecq's La Possibilite D'Une Ile (The Possibility Of An Island). Pop (real name James Osterberg) says it's out in April, but a video that you can see below lists a release date of May 18.

Pop says Preliminaires is a "quieter album with some jazz overtones" he made because he was sick of guitar-based music.

"At one point, I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music," Pop says in the video posted on his website. "I was starting to listen to a lot of New Orleans-era Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton type of jazz, and I've always loved quieter ballads."

Pop sings one of Preliminaires' songs, "Les Feuilles Mortes" ("Dead Leaves" in English) in French. He says another song (that's featured in the video below), "King Of The Dogs," is about "just how cool it is to be a dog and how much it beats human life."

The project's genesis came about last year when Pop was invited to write the music for Last Words, a documentary about Houellebecq's efforts to make a film version of La Possibilite D'Une Ile.

"As I looked at footage of Michel and re-read the book, which I did with intense pleasure when it came out, in my mind, I created music that would have been the music that I would hear in my soul when I read this book," Pop says.

The novel is about a cloning cult that's very much like the Raelian sect, which believes in extending human life through cloning. Pop says the book's about "death, sex, the end of the human race and some other pretty funny stuff." Maybe Preliminaires isn't so strange, then.

Here's Pop talking about the album (click the play button twice to make it work properly):