Joss Whedon's A Secret Folk Musician

Rarely in the past twenty or so years has Joss Whedon not been a busy guy. At one point he was executive producing not one but three shows on the air simultaneously — Bu ffy the Vampire Slayer , Angel, and Firefly — and he used the small vacation time he had between Avengers principle photography and post-production to direct an entirely separate movie instead of going to chill in Venice. Dude's a creative whirlwind, there's no doubt about it. And he's used this energy, this time around, to work on a folk music EP while directing the Avengers sequel, Avengers: Age Of Ultron.

He's not working on this thing alone, it should be noted: As Buzzfeed's Adam B. Vary lays out in a great piece, this entire thing came about after Whedon came across the kickstarter of folk musician Shawnee Kilgore, who was looking to fund her new album. Whedon made a sizable donation, and his kickstarter reward included Kilgore writing a song for him (from her kickstarter: "We can do this several ways. You can give me some words or lyric ideas and I can work them in, or you can just give me a topic, or tell me a story you'd like to have sung for you."). This kicked off a colaboration that's spun off into its own EP, the first song for which is available on iTunes now.

Whedon seems thrilled to be able to balance the gargantuan nature of Avengers with something like this. As he told Buzzfeed:

It’s been a little bit magical. It is nice to have the balance between something that is genuinely enormous and something that is crystalline and tiny.

[...] When I got this idea for a song in my head, it would just play as I was walking to and from the house. It was so small and contained, I was able to sort of focus on it, and it was very liberating. It would relax me, while still being a very difficult little puzzle, but one that you finish, and then you go onto the next one.

This is hardly his first go at songwriting: Whedon co-wrote the music (alongside everything else) for Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, as well as the music for the Buffy musical episode "Once More, With Feeling." He also wrote the theme song for Firefly, which has its own folky qualities:

He also wrote a song for the Lion King 2 soundtrack:

And he and Kilgore seem to be a good — if relatively unexpected — creative match. Here's one of her songs:

You can listen to a clip the first song they wrote together, "Big Giant Me," over here.

It's already doing pretty well on iTunes:

You can read more about their collaboration and their friendship — they haven't yet even met face-to-face — over at Buzzfeed.