Shooter Jennings Turning 'Black Ribbons' Into Video Game

Shooter Jennings' brilliant new 'Black Ribbons' album, a conceptual work about a bleak futuristic society narrated by Stephen King -- the author plays the role of radio DJ Will O' the Wisp -- is a hugely ambitious project, one that calls to mind Nine Inch Nails' 'Year Zero' and Roger Waters' 'Radio Waves,' among others.

Jennings tells Spinner the NIN influence is a strong one. "I thought ['Year Zero'] was a fantastic album," he says. "I loved the whole alternate marketing thing -- that was such a great, cool thing to do, and I can't lie and say that didn't inspire some of the things we're doing with this record."

As part of the Nails' inspiration, Jennings has elaborate plans for 'Black Ribbons.' "I spent six months building this video game in the world of 'Black Ribbons' and I should finish this week and it'll be the website basically," he says. "You'll be in the game, then if you just keep going there's kind of an ending and it kind of takes you into this world a little bit."

The game marries two of his teenage passions, Nine Inch Nails -- who he says, "was the end-all, be-all when I was 16" -- and video games. "I love video games, I love classic games. The game I built for this is more leaning towards the old adventure PC games that they had back in the '90s that I was a big fan of," he says. "There was one called 'Pride of the Dragon' that was all dynamics. This game is kind of similar to that."

The album will have more than just a video game component as he and his fiancée, actress Drea de Matteo, are directing the videos themselves, starting with the track 'Summer of Rage.' "We're in the editing stages, but it feels really good. We should have it hopefully done by next week," he says. "It's a pretty dark concept. We're trying to tackle several videos. We'd like to because we're realizing she has a great idea for direction and I've gotten really good at editing. We work as a good team even though we're like up each other's throats the whole time. This is our first time to try it and I think it's come off pretty good."

By his own account, Jennings is interested in many aspects of media, something he is able to embrace with 'Black Ribbons,' and video games and videos could just be the beginning. "I had the dream to turn this into an animated feature at one point that would just go along with the record," he says. "I'm still in the works of figuring that out and if that would really happen or not, but I definitely think it's not beyond reality because it's something that I love."