UNO Documentary: New Orleans Ghost(writer)

Who: Professional songwriter and ghostwriter Eliceo Mury

Film By: UNO student and documentarian McIntosh Legere

Editor’s Note: NolaVie partners with students of UNO professor László Zsolt Fülöp, pairing them with artists, non-profits, environmental groups, and cultural entities to facilitate a live curriculum, that results in a short documentary. UNO student McIntosh Legere interviews Eliceo Mury, a popular New Orleans ghostwriter. This informative interview details Mury’s origins as a poetry writer, how he developed his career as a ghost writer through Twitter, and his ultimate dream job.

[Read the full transcript of the interview below]

McIntosh Legere: So, Eliceo how did you get into being a professional songwriter?

Eliceo Mury: Um, well it was actually a whole accident.

I’m Eliceo and I’m a songwriter and multimedia artist. I was already writing poetry growing up a lot and it wasn’t until I was about 17 that I really started to realize that “oh wait, I have an affinity for writing, and I want to take poetry to the next level and be able to tell a story through more than just the words on the page.” I wanted there to be a rhythm, a life to the words.

So, I just got on Twitter and started making pen pals and connections and joining fandoms for different artists and really trying to create an online persona for myself and my work. And, yeah, that’s how I ended up stumbling upon different opportunities with different artists — through relationships made over the internet. Whenever these artist friends that I have would progress to the next level and start signing with labels and stuff like that, that’s when I think me and the artists themselves realized that we could both actually go somewhere with this, and it wasn’t just a Twitter thread of people kind of bouncing ideas or liking or sharing and stuff like that. It kind of turned into a thing that could be taken seriously, by not only people in the industry, but the masses.

So, basically it starts out with me not being able to fully just deal with something that’s happened in my life, and so I’ll kind of turn that feeling that I have, a frustration, that I’m not able to express or fully process what exactly it is I’m feeling. Then I will turn that into a poem and the poem itself is the structure for a song in my eyes. So, the poem always comes before I write any actual music or lyrics or anything. Sometimes it just goes as much as the poem and I’ll just leave it at that, or I will take the skeleton of the poem and then kind of translate poem stanzas into choruses and to final verses and stuff like that. Basically, make it more like a song and playable to music. This is where I’ll maybe pick up an instrument or two to just kind of help me along the process of making things float in the transition from poem to song.

So, for future plans, I actually am putting a bit of a pause, well not a pause, yeah, a pause on the whole ghost writing for other artists and songwriting in general, outside of personal processing things that happen in life and stuff like that, and transitioning more into something I’ve always wanted to do. The ultimate goal in my life was to become a filmmaker and I have just always wanted to make movies. I feel like being a songwriter has definitely prepared me a lot better to be a filmmaker. Now I’m in film school and I think it allows me to bring a different lens to the filmmaking game because I think sound, music, and scores are really important to films, and tell the story just as much as the stuff that’s moving on the screen. So, I hope to transition from writing lyrics to one day writing dialogue and screenplays, and eventually, direct my own movies.