Fans are more than ready to bite into The Vampire Lestat when it premieres on June 7 on AMC and AMC+, but until then, there’s a new single to tide over the Beautiful Unwell.
The newest song, “Your Biggest Fan”, is on its surface a swaggering rock ballad with a catchy hook, but for anyone who has read Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, it is something else entirely. It is the clearest, most direct musical adaptation of the source material we’ve gotten so far, and it’s deliciously unsettling.
In the book, back when Lestat was still a human, he was a young actor playing the role of Lelio at a theater in Paris. He begins to notice an unsettling face in the audience, watching him, until one night while he’s asleep in the bed he shares with his lover Nikki, he’s suddenly and violently ripped from his home.
This is Magnus, who takes him to his tower. There, he tortures Lestat, forcibly turns him into a vampire against his will, and then, having transferred his curse, throws himself onto a fire in front of his new fledgling, leaving Lestat alone with the gift he never asked for.
Rice’s own description of Magnus from the moment of the kidnapping:
“Brave strong little Wolfkiller,” it said to me now in a rounder, deeper voice. I stopped, panting and covered with sweat, staring at it and seeing the details of its face. The deep lines I had only glimpsed in the theater, its mouth drawn up in a jester’s smile. “Oh, God help me, help me…” I said as I backed away. It seemed impossible that such a face should move, show expression, and gaze with such affection on me as it did. “God!”
This is the show having Lestat reconceptualize that trauma through his music, which is sort of, you know, the entire point of this season. The Vampire Lestat has, across two seasons of Interview With The Vampire and now its rebranded third, been deeply interested in what its characters do with the worst things that have happened to them — how they tells those stories, who they tell them to, and how much of the telling is itself a performance designed to keep the real thing at arm’s length.
In “Your Biggest Fan”, Lestat is singing from Magnus’ perspective, and turning his pain and trauma into a glossy power ballad. He’s giving his abuser the microphone, sure — but it’s a microphone Lestat is holding. The song is his, the melody is his. Magnus only gets to “say” the words Lestat lets him say. There’s a kind of power in that, and Lestat is taking it.
But there’s also a lot of running away in it, and the song basically admits that out loud. Listen to the pre-chorus:
Don’t let me catch you cryin’
Don’t tell me the spell is breakin’
You’re so perfect in the ragin’ light
I know I’m hard to look at sometimes
But I’m here for the takin’.
That’s Lestat talking to himself, as much as Magnus is talking to Lestat. He can’t look at what really happened to him head-on, so he turns it into a song, throws a catchy hook over it, and makes the fans sing along to it, so he doesn’t have to sit with it alone.
If you can’t already tell this is going to be a season of Lestat trying to outrun things that scream louder than he can sing, you haven’t been paying attention.
“Your Biggest Fan” is streaming everywhere now, including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. The new season of The Vampire Lestat drops on June 7.
