Dust Bowl Blues and Dystopian Futures in South by Southwest Musical O’Dessa

Geremy Jaspar has a confession to make. “I’m a music guy,” he explained, but with a coda. “I’m not a huge musical person.”

He knows music, that’s for sure, having co-founded early 2000s indie rock outfit The Fever, and then launching an award-winning career making music videos for bands including Florence + the Machine, La Roux, and Selena Gomez. When he says he’s not a musical person he means is the classic American theatrical and cinematic art form of the musical drama – which makes it even stranger that he wrote and directed O’Dessa, an Americana fantasy that is most definitely a musical.

Making its world premiere at South by Southwest ahead of its streaming debut on Hulu later this March, O’Dessa stars Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) as O’Dessa, latest and maybe last in a lineage of traveling troubadours, gifted with a mystical guitar made from a tree that was struck by lightning and still burning while the wood was hewed from its core. “That’s the cool thing about musicals,” Jaspar said. “They’re inherently surreal. You can break from reality.”

“I’m a Cabaret, All That Jazz, Bob Fosse kind of guy.”

While he’s not a big fan of musicals per se, Jaspar is still attracted to the narrative possibilities of music, of concept album, “records that tell stories, songs that tell stories, songs that have mini-movies inside of them.” When it comes to musical theatre, it’s the reliance on traditional showtunes that leave him cold, and instead he’s more interested in narratives that use folk, jazz, and rock, like Streets of Fire, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and the video to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” which he watched “endless amounts of times as a kid.” When it comes to more conventional musicals, he said, “I’m a Cabaret, All That Jazz, Bob Fosse kind of guy,” he said, “I think the quote about Cabaret is that it’s a musical for people that don’t like musicals.”

While the soundtrack of O’Dessa embraces funk, pop, and rock, the core of the story and the songs is pure Americana, with both O’Dessa’s life and music hearkening back to the hardscrabble elegies of Hank Williams and the cursed blues of Robert Johnson. “I knew she was going to be a farm girl, I knew she was going to be from the mountains,” Jaspar said. That allowed him to place her in a tradition that goes through Bob Dylan to Woody Guthrie, right back to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Often referred to as the Child Ballads, they were the work of 19th century musicologist Francis James Child, who collected over 300 folk songs from the United Kingdom and America, many of them precursors to much American folk. By melding them with a post-apocalyptic vision for the film, Jaspar created what he called “a dystopian world that felt a little like the Dust Bowl.”

However, that’s the precursor to O’Dessa’s musical journey. As she travels across the world, Jaspar said, “She cuts a path across the history of rock music. She’ll sing ballads, she’ll sing rockabilly, she’ll sing some acid rock psychedelic music. And each step on the road, there’s a slightly different take on American roots music.”

That explains why, when conceptualizing O’Dessa, he started with a plan to write 16 or so songs that would give the film its narrative framework. “You get older, having a reason to write music gets harder,” he said. “I was very naïve and thought, oh, if I write a concept record, maybe I can make a movie around that – not knowing it would take six years of my life.”

Moreover, he wasn’t writing the songs to perform himself. He still had to find his O’Dessa, someone who could convincingly convey the pains of the Dust Bowl that are familiar to audiences through both the music of the era, and the photography of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, whose images of displaced Okies hanging on to the margins symbolize the era. It was, he admitted, a seemingly impossible task, and he was often convinced that the film would never get made, that his friends who warned him that a sci-fi roots Americana musical was a fool’s errand was right.

That’s when he finally met Sink over a Zoom call. “She couldn’t be sweeter or more thoughtful, but I didn’t even know she’d read the script.” However, as she was heading off to film the next season of Stranger Things, he never really thought it would come to anything. Then, a couple of weeks later, he got a video message. “I open it up and it was Sadie. She got hold of one of the songs in the movie, she learned it on guitar, and it was just her in a hotel room, just filming herself singing it, and it fucking rocked me.”

After four years of working on songs and script, he said, “it was the first time I saw the character. … The character is just a figment of your imagination, and you have a sense of who she is, but this was the first time I saw her and heard her, and everything crystalized in that performance.” There was no reason for him to expect that from her: He later discovered she never sings in public but has an astoundingly powerful voice and perfect pitch, and used it all to fully inhabit the character in that brief video and in the film. “She wore the mask of O’Dessa to sing,” he said. “I have no idea what her natural voice is like. She lived inside that voice.”

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O’Dessa

Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere

Saturday 8, 2:15pm, Paramount
Wednesday 12, 11am, ZACH Theatre

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Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s SXSW 2025 coverage.

This article appears in March 7 • 2025.

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