Rocker KIP WINGER has been honoured for his San Francisco Ballet score for the troupe's production of Ghosts.
The Winger frontman, who studied ballet in his youth, jumped at the chance to create the score for the ambitious new show, and now he's up for an Outstanding Achievement in Music honour at the upcoming Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee.
The rocker tells WENN, "I met the very famous choreographer Christopher Wheeldon 10 years ago and sent him some music and he liked it, so I wrote Ghosts. The San Francisco Ballet did it and they'll be performing it in April."
And he had a very specific reason for calling the piece Ghosts: "I was working in Nashville. My studio at the time was in an old hospital and I was actually in the end of the hospital, which was a morgue and there was a lot of ghosts in the room I was in. I was getting real spooked and it was so prevalent that I was having conversations with them and myself like, 'Hi everybody, nice to see ya!' while I was writing, so it just kind of peeped into the music.
"I started the first movement and called it Ghosts and the characters developed from there. It started with one Indian ghost but I didn't finish the piece with all these entities in mind. In Nashville there's a lot of history about the Trail of Tears, where they moved the Cherokees out and a lot of Indians died in Nashville at the hands of the cavalry.
"It's definitely got a hidden New Orleans-type vibe in Nashville if you're susceptible to it."