Tonight’s episode of Psych, “Shawn 2.0” features a special guest-star as Curt Smith appears as himself on the USA Network series. Smith spoke to reporters via conference call this week to talk about his appearance. Speaking about how he came to be on the show Smith explained, “It initially came about that James [Roday] and Tim [Omundson] from the show came to a Tears for Fears show at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles and then somehow managed to wangle their way backstage. I have no idea but security was very lax that night.
“And I was introduced to James backstage. And then he said, you know, would you come and do a guest spot on the show? And I thought well why not? The show is amusing. The kind of humor is kind of right up my alley because it’s pretty much chock full of sarcasm.”
When asked about the difference between shooting a music video and a scripted TV series, Smith had this to say: “Well you have to talk. That’s the biggest difference. What’s hard is that you’re talking someone else’s lines, you know, someone else has written them for you.”
Further elaborating on the experience of shooting the episode, Smith added, “The experience was great. I just flew up to Vancouver for two days because the shock/horror is it’s actually not really filmed in Santa Barbara. And, you know, it was just a couple of nights in Vancouver.
“I’ve got to say it was a boiling hot day so that was – that was not that pleasurable that bit of it when you’re sitting in the sun trying not to sweat. But it was kind of easy. I was already used to it with videos before. Although, you know, in a short video you’re normally called upon a lot more often than you are doing one part in a show. So it was an awful lot of sitting around in a trailer waiting to get called. That was a little sort of strange that you spent most of the time doing nothing. But the filming was great.
“I actually was tweeting while I was up there and I think I summed it up in one sort of sentence when I said it was like being at a two day frat party which it pretty much was.”
In addition to appearing the episode, Smith also did a cover version of the Psych theme song. Asked how he went about redoing such a popular theme Smith said, “Well taking cues from James primarily I made it as retro as I possibly could with some humor. So basically what we get is the visuals of the, you know, the closing credits and everything which the theme song goes over and then we play with that.
“So rhythmically you’ve got to match that so that it all kind of fits in and there’s an explosion and different things. So basically it was a mixture of going back to very old synthesizers and adding some humor to that as well which, it was actually a really enjoyable experience I have to say.”
Smith is also working on a an album of new material with each track being a collaboration with a musician he’s met through Twitter. He’s released two singles so far with more to come. I spoke to him about this briefly on the call.
“I definitely want to keep doing some collaborations and probably make an album where they’re a bit to release some kind of special edition of it at the end. As I finish a track I’ll release it. I’m going to do that for every song. And then if it seems like a wonderful cogent piece of work at the end then I’ll release it as some form of CD package.”
Check out tonight’s episode of Psych at 10:00 PM on USA featuring Curt Smith and guest-star Nestor Carbonell!
