Harry Shearer has spent a lifetime slipping inside other people’s heads. Sometimes they’re yellow and live in Springfield. Sometimes they’re rock gods arguing about amps. Sometimes they’re presidents. And on The Many Moods of Donald Trump, Shearer does what he’s always done best: weaponize voice, sharpen it with music, and aim it directly at power.
“I didn’t really know this was going to be the next direction,” Shearer says, sounding almost surprised by the inevitability of it all. “I have a radio show every week on public radio, and I write either a sketch or a song every week about what’s been going on in the news. I just started writing songs as he said things that I found musically funny.” Eventually, the math did itself. “We looked back and realized, oh, I think I have an album’s worth of songs here. I actually had more, but I got to pick the best ones.”
The result is an album sung almost entirely as Trump — not about him, not circling him, but inhabited. “Every song on the record is sung in the voice of Donald Trump,” Shearer says, with one deliberate exception. “There’s only one song that isn’t sung by him. It’s a song called ‘He Lies,’ and it’s sort of like if Leonard Cohen were still around — just a list song of everything he lies about.”
That Cohen reference isn’t accidental. Shearer is meticulous about the musical logic behind the parody. “Every song on the record is a different style,” he explains, “but I tried, in the songs that Trump sings, to have it be in a musical style that he’s at least arguably familiar with from his life. There’s no hip-hop. None of that. It’s music from the era he’s been around.”
The first single, “Son-in-Law,” might be the album’s clearest thesis statement, a New Orleans R&B flip that skewers nepotism with a grin and a groove. “It’s not a parody,” Shearer says, “but it’s certainly heavily influenced by Ernie K-Doe’s ‘Mother-in-Law.’ And I thought it really needed the sauce.” So he brought in the sauce. Members of The Meters. Dumpstaphunk. A band assembled not just for chops, but for cultural accuracy. “This band was chosen particularly for this song because it needed that New Orleans R&B feel.”
The subject matter stuck because it lasts. “In politics, you don’t hire family because you can’t fire them,” Shearer says. “You make a decision that seems right at one point in time, but you’re imprisoned by it for the rest of the time you’re in office. It’s naturally comic — or tragic.” He pauses. “Everything changes every day with this guy. But that situation was for keeps.”
Shearer’s Trump is less caricature than pathology. “My way of putting it,” he says, “is that his portfolio expands to the limits of his incompetence.” The line lands because it feels less like a punchline and more like diagnosis. “Mine comes from the point of view that comes through Mary Trump’s book — that he got screwed up by his dad early on and became a very aggressive narcissist. That’s the guy I’m playing.”
Even the visuals are designed to avoid cheap imitation. The video for “Son-in-Law” uses motion capture rather than prosthetics or makeup. “After doing a television series about the Nixon tapes, I swore that would be the last time I’d spend four hours every morning in makeup,” Shearer says. Instead, he worked remotely with a studio in Sydney, blending multiple technologies at once. “It was the first time they’d made all these technologies play together. Everybody was nervous. But we were delighted with the result.”
The album hops from incident to incident — the altered hurricane map, “Very Stable Genius,” the evergreen deflection anthem “I Never Knew Him.” But Shearer draws a clear line between satire and noise. “I always try to say something,” he insists. “Privately, jokes just come out. But when I’m writing something, I need a point that carries me through the piece of work.”
That instinct has guided everything from The Simpsons to This Is Spinal Tap to his long-running radio work. The target may change, but the rule doesn’t. Satire still has to land somewhere solid. Otherwise, it’s just sound.
Asked how long he plans to keep returning to this character, Shearer laughs, lightly. “Hopefully not much longer.” But until the noise stops, he’ll keep tuning it, keying it, and turning it into melody.
Because if there’s one thing Harry Shearer has learned over decades of voices, it’s this: when the absurdity won’t shut up, sometimes the only thing left to do is make it sing.
Listen to the interview full above and then check out the videos below.
