Music-makers with a taste for the macabre

Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields didn't grow up together, but they were both into the same kind of spooky stuff when they were kids.

"I may or may not have lived in a haunted house when I grew up," says Gosling, 28, the Canadian actor who, for now anyway, is far better known for his roles in movies such as The Notebook, Lars and the Real Girl, and Half Nelson than he is for the band Dead Man's Bones. That's his ghoulishly catchy musical collaboration with Shields, which comes to the First Unitarian Church upstairs Sanctuary tonight for a show that sold out this week.

"I'm not quite sure if it was, but my parents did move for that reason," Gosling goes on, talking on the phone from his home in Los Angeles this week, with Shields also conferenced in on the call from his own L.A. abode. "And my mother had a fascination with graveyards. She would read the headstones and I would play around them. So to me graveyards weren't scary places, they were places that I liked to play."

Shields, a fellow thespian - he's worked with avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson - had a similar taste for the macabre as a boy.

"I was into ghost hunting," he says. "Instead of going to sleep, I used to wear a blanket as a cape and go down in the basement at night and yell at them, 'Show your face!' My mother thought it was a problem. But she was really into Halloween, and used to play the Disney Haunted Mansion record over and over again."

Gosling and Shields' self-titled Dead Man's Bones debut, highlighted by the diabolically catchy keyboard riff in "In the Room Where You Sleep," came out Oct. 6. They met a few years back in Toronto when "we were dating sisters," Gosling says. He doesn't say the sisters were Gosling's Notebook costar Rachel McAdams and her sibling Kayleen, but then this interview isn't about Hollywood gossip. It's about the music, man. Shields notes that though the two couples have since both broken up, they're "still friends."

Because they were dating sisters, the two dudes were often thrown together and discovered shared musical interests. There was that Disney Haunted Mansion record, doo-wop, the Cure, and the Langley Schools Music Project's Innocence & Despair and Nancy Dupree's Ghetto Reality, two CDs of music recorded in the '70s that featured musically untrained schoolchildren creating vibrant, unpolished music that at its best delivered the rush of thrilling, unpolished outsider art.

Though neither was a technically proficient musician, or maybe because of it, Goslin and Shields decided to make music of their own that captured that spirit.

"I don't think we realized how much time it was going to take," says Gosling, who embarked on the project with Shields and Ima Robot producer Tim Anderson, with the help of L.A.'s Silverlake Conservatory Children's Choir, over two years ago. "I think we both wanted to hear a certain record that we had to make in order to hear it."

Gosling sang and danced back when he was a child performer on The Mickey Mouse Club with Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, so he's not a total novice. And Shields was formerly in a band called Dagger, though he says he mainly jumped around on stage and "didn't do anything musical."

"We had to spend a lot of time learning how to play our instruments in order to make the record," says Gosling, who along with playing guitar, percussion, and keyboards (as does Shields) also plays cello on "Buried in Water." "We're about to go on tour so we're practicing a lot, just to have it all come together in tune and in tempo. We're there now, but we just got there."

At the church tonight, DMB will perform with a local choir after an opening talent show of acts who submitted YouTube videos at the behest of the band's well-respected label, Anti-Records, which is the home of Tom Waits and Philadelphians Dr. Dog and Man Man. Among the local talent on display will be Shields' 12- and 10-year-old cousins from Philadelphia, Grace and Lucy Shields.

"I don't know what they're going to do," says Shields, "I told them to surprise me. We wanted to create a vibe at the show where people in the audience might just come up and show a talent that they have, and where you get to see everyone, including ourselves, struggle to make music, or something, on stage in front of people. It's that battle of doing it that's pretty exciting to watch."