How does Peter Bogdanovich inspire CMAT’s own brand of humour?
Filmmakers and songwriters share a lot of similarities, and throughout the history of cinema and pop music, they’ve always been considered the true creatives, while actors and musicians support their visions.
Considering how these two roles often hold a mirror up to one another, it makes sense that they would often use their individual art forms to pay tribute to one another, using each other’s works as direct forms of inspiration and broadening their artistic scope in the process by approaching it from the perspective of an alternative medium.
To look at a modern example of a filmmaker inspiring the work of a songwriter, you needn’t look any further than Irish country-pop star CMAT’s debut album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, and one of the record’s numerous highlights, ‘Peter Bogdanovich’. Named for the director behind movies such as The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, it’s an early window into the wryly humorous songwriting style that CMAT has established for herself, but it turns out that it’s more than just a case of him being the inspiration for the song.
Throughout the course of the song, the singer fantasises about the many ways in which she might be able to seduce the titular character, all of which are elaborate, far-fetched and beyond the realms of possibility, but behind the requests for him to leave his wife are many truthful elements, and a winking nod to the same devices that he used in his own work.
According to CMAT herself, she took the inspiration for the song after listening to a podcast about the making of The Last Picture Show, and was fascinated by the fact that, mid-production, Bogdanovich left his wife, the film’s producer, Polly Platt, for the film’s leading actress, Cybill Shepherd. “[Platt] was the player who was actually responsible for what I love most about his films,” the singer later declared, but she also admitted that learning about the motivations behind everyone’s individual actions in what must have been a tense environment caused her to think more about the song’s narrative.
The way in which the song is wittily delivered is something that has since become a prominent feature of her work as she’s grown as an artist, but it’s also a great reflection of how much Bogdanovich has impacted CMAT since the beginning, hence it being fitting for her to have a song that cheekily pokes fun at his infidelity on her very first release.
Throughout his career, Bogdanovich was celebrated for how he used humour in his work, and while a lot of it was very dry and self-aware, large amounts of it were also goofy in nature, which is something that can also be said of CMAT’s catalogue to date.
While his passing in January 2022 preceded the release of the song by a month, meaning that he wouldn’t have had the pleasure of hearing it, there’s no doubt that he would have found the fact that a song about his reputation as a serial cheater that was, in turn, inspired by his actual work, a thoroughly amusing thing.
It’s evident from the way that CMAT has continued to present herself as a quick-witted yet self-deprecating talent with words and song that ‘Peter Bogdanovich’ is more than just a tribute to the late director; it’s her self-identifying with the man behind the camera while also admonishing him for his flaws, just as she has so often done in other songs of hers since.
