Previously On Lost Talks Getting Hired by Lost

According to Adam Schatz of Previously on Lost, his is the only "recap-rock" band in the history of the world. What, you might ask, is recap-rock? It's exactly what it sounds like. Along with co-creator and band member Jeff Curtin, Schatz has sung his way through a weekly summary of each Lost episode over the last two years, and, just yesterday (June 3), the duo made its debut on ABC.com.
In March, a man working in ABC's entertainment marketing division ordered a POL t-shirt from the duo. Schatz filled the order and offered a suggestion along with it. "I was like, 'here's your shirt, you should hire us,'" he tells Paste. To his surprise, the buyer responded that he thought that was a great idea. Although Schatz initially dismissed the exchange, a VP of entertainment marketing contacted him several weeks later. To make a long story short, the network hired POL to accompany the season finale of LOST Untangled, ABC.com's action-figure-and-paper-cutout reenactment of each episode.

Although signing with the network is a step up for the band, Schatz and Curtin have gathered quite a cult following on their own. Their weekly recaps, which sum up moments of supreme Lost importance with verses like, "Might I point out, when your nose starts to spout, there's no doubt in my mind that you're going to die," are flavored with mariachi-band-on-acid-meets-early-90's-ska beats, kazoos and occasional DragonForce-grade guitar explosions provided by Schatz' roommate Juan Pieczanski. And though the band's MySpace blithely categorizes the sound as "a maritime kazoo posse," critics from Wired.com's Underwire blog have hailed the recaps with comparisons to Frank Zappa and the Flaming Lips. Their live shows—which feature a band of 7-9 of the duo's friends, fake palm trees, fog machines and, of course, a giant cutout of J.J. Abrams' head—have only increased their notoriety.

The two met when Schatz began playing keyboard for Champollion, a space opera/ballet inspired by the musings of Carl Sagan (like most great space operas) in which Curtin was involved. Although their decision to build the act on Lost was partly a marketing strategy ("We realized it would be cool to access an already existing fan base," Schatz admits.), the two, like any great gimmick masters, are super-fans at heart. And though Schatz says it's been more difficult to pay attention to Seasons Four and Five with a pencil in hard tracking the show's myriad plot lines (we know a little bit about that), he's fallen in love with the characters of Lost. He's especially fond of Daniel Faraday, saying, "I've never heard anyone end each sentence with a whisper so successfully."

Schatz says he doesn't have any spoilers to unveil (we tried), but he and Curtin do have a few predictions. "I think that the bomb exploded at the end of this season and everyone died," he says. "I think next season they'll all come back as zombies and there will be a lot of Lost zombie beach volleyball." As for Curtin, "He thinks the island will be dominated by apes, led by the monkey who starred in Outbreak and Friends, and the four-toed statue will become the Statue of Liberty."

Nothing is set in stone (or carved in hieroglyphics), but the duo is open to performing with LOST Untangled in the future, though they've only so far been contracted for the June 3 episode. Schatz feels that a very special session of recap-rock meshes well with the online supplement to the show. "It's this great multimedia experiment," he says. "We're making TV cool again."

Source: Paste