Mike Watt and Petra Haden have teamed up as Pelicanman for Planet Chernobyl, an opera featuring the words of poet Charles Plymell, who published the words that the opera is based on back in 2015. Plymell started working on his piece about Chernobyl after reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices Of Chernobyl: The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster. Watt, who met Plymell in 2006 and has collaborated with him a number of times over the years, first read Planet Chernobyl seven years ago.

“When I first saw it, there were 15 paragraphs,” Watt said in a press release, continuing:

They read like stanzas. Each one was its own little world and kind of like the solar system, like planets around the sun, they were all going around a single idea. I read the 15 stanzas that way, as a libretto, as a story. I saw themes through the whole piece and I wanted to put my bass to it. I let Charley’s words be the thing that informed me and my playing, and when I sent what I’d done to Petra I knew she’d make sure Charley’s words would still be the focus. I knew it was something D. Boon would want to hear.

Haden added:

Watt told me it was something I’d love… When I got into it, it broke me open, Charley’s words and Mike’s bass. That combination pushed me to do the best I could with what I had at the time––which was GarageBand, my grandmother’s mandolin and my childhood violin. I’ve always wanted to sound like I was in a choir or an orchestra. That’s why I love layering my voice, and layering strings. I wanted to express how Charley felt in making the connections between the accident and everything that’s come after, his reaction as a poet, his telling of how it all made him feel.

Hear a preview of the Planet Chernobyl opera below.

Planet Chernobyl is out in full on 6/16 via Org Music.