It’s three minutes of music that’s hard to escape these days.
The song “Vagabond” by the Chicago band Greenskeepers is featured in relentless TV commercials for the blockbuster video game “Grand Theft Auto IV.” “Vagabond” has cracked Amazon.com’s top 30 downloads and the song’s pounding bass and driving beat have caught on elsewhere.
“I think that’s the most fulfilling part, that ‘Vagabond’ came out of a night working in the studio at one in the morning and now it’s playing in the NBA playoffs. It’s really strange,” James Curd, a co-founding member of the band, said from Dallas, another stop on an ongoing solo DJ tour.
Greenskeepers are no strangers to television—their songs have been licensed to the likes of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI: Miami.
“Not a lot of people know about us but the right people know about us,” said Curd. “And the right people are the people who are music supervisors for interesting things like games and TV shows”
One such connection is Ivan Pavlovich, a friend who is music supervisor for GTA developer Rockstar Games. Curd submitted a couple of songs for consideration for the game’s soundtrack, then shipped over a few new tunes some months later. One of those was “Vagabond,” which was an instrumental at the time. Rockstar liked it, the band added lyrics, and the song ended up being chosen for one of those high-profile TV ads.
Curd, 29, calls “Vagabond” a “crazy hodgepodge” and “happy accident.”
Some of the lyrics—including the line “I came a long way to see you, now I wish you were dead”—came from an older song written by band co-founder Nick Maurer. Returning from a stint in Germany to Chicago, he was upset that George W. Bush had won a second term as president.
Rather than an ode to Liberty City (the fictional home of GTA IV), most of the lyrics were written in disappointment at Bush-led America.
In order to tie the song to the game, they invited friend and fellow musician J-Dub to inject some distorted vocals that make reference to Liberty City and the game’s theme of crime and the underworld.
Greenskeepers are hard to nail down as a band. The foursome (the other members are Mark Share and Coban Rudish) have three albums under their belt and are planning to go back into the studio in July to record a fourth. Share has also recorded solo songs under the band’s name, estimating that perhaps 60 of the 100 songs recorded as Greenskeepers over the last decade are his own works.
Perhaps the band’s biggest song prior to “Vagabond” is “Lotion,” from the 2004 album Pleetch. Other quirky Greenskeepers projects include remixes of “The Incredibles” theme and Lawrence Welk music (Welk’s children own the rights to his music and liked some of Curd’s jazz-swing remixes).
The band comes by its name honestly: Maurer used to be a greenskeeper. Curd plays keyboards, sings and tries his hand at guitar. He’s also a gamer. And like many, spent a lot of hours in front of “Grand Theft IV” when it came out. “I got arrested and killed in about two minutes,” he lamented. “It’s a pretty tough game.”
