The music

ABOUT THE PROJECT

IAGO is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s raciest play, “Othello, the Moore of Venice”. This story takes place in a Los Angeles recording studio in 1969.  Othello is a blind, middle-aged African American rock guitar pioneer; Desdemona is a young white up-and-coming folk singer.  They are deeply in love, a beacon of harmony amid the fraught final years of the ‘60s.  But during the production of their first collaborative album, their trusted recording engineer, Iago (a Charles-Manson-type psychopath), wreaks havoc on the lovers.  From behind the mixing board, simply by manipulating who hears what when, Iago drives Othello to madness and murder…

The soundtrack comprises several original “period” songs in various ‘60s-styles, the music and lyrics of which serve as meta-commentary on the play itself.  In the ghostly folk ballad “The Willow Song” for instance (the lyrics of which are Shakespeare’s own), Desdemona unwittingly foretells her own death; “Poison in the Ear”, a Hendrix-inspired psychedelic-rock tune, cross-examines its own titular metaphor across several other Shakespearean tragedies; the soul ballad “I Must Be Found” reemploys some of Othello’s first lines as an Otis-Redding-style Civil Rights anthem; Desdemona’s infamous handkerchief transforms into a mystical blues song, lyrically structured as a sonnet.  And so on.

At its simplest, it is a musical tragedy—one whose songs become darker and more discordant as the play collapses, ultimately succumbing to the same conclusion as Prince Hamlet: the rest is silence. IAGO invites us to consider what it means to be seduced by sound—to be, in Shakespeare’s words, “pierced through the ear.”