Ghost Quartet - Dave Malloy (2014)

One of my favorites! It's a great show. VERY nontraditional. An official recording is available for free on youtube, so it's pretty accessible for anyone to watch.

I was exposed to Dave Malloy because of his 2025 musical Octet, and then heard about his other works like Ghost Quartet (and Great Comet). Specifically, I had watched an interview with Dave Malloy about Octet, and they played a clip of one song from Ghost Quartet ("Any Kind of Dead Person"). As soon as I heard that song, I knew I had to watch a recording of Ghost Quartet. More than that, I made an occasion of it and I had a watch party with some friends (and it happened to be during the Halloween season, which wasn't really intentional, but was perfect timing).

With Octet, I listened to the song "The Forest" (and no other song) many times before seeing the full show, and it turned out that the rest of the music was pretty unlike that song... Well, same thing happened with Ghost Quartet -- the one song I listened to a bunch of times was "Any Kind of Dead Person", and I LOVED this song, but it's pretty different from the style of most of the other songs (and gives away absolutely nothing about what the show is actually about, other than the general theme of ghosts, which... should already be obvious). However, the song was the perfect lure (so to speak) -- it did its job! Got me intrigued and excited, without giving away much. Kind of like a good movie trailer. And even though most of the music was different stylistically, I loved that different style as well. If anything, the contrast and the surprise made for an even better and immersive experience, because I really had no clue what I was getting into.

(intending to go more in depth... a lot to analyze with this one.)