Is there anything Johnny Depp can’t do? From TV Week pin-up boy in 21 Jump Street to breakthrough dramatic actor in Deadman and on to box office fame and fortune as part of Pirates of the Caribbean, it seems he’s the man with the Midas touch.

So it makes sense that he’d turn his attention to the musical arts – and thank heavens he doesn’t have his own Dogstar. Instead, he teamed with Pirates... director Gore Verbinsky to hatch a plan to record an album of sea shanties, pirate laments, land-locked blues and traditional material represented by some of the modern musicians of our times able to imbue it with the necessary spirit. Noted punk label Anti- jumped on board, with the increasing inventive Brett Gurewitz getting full-steam behind the project.

Recruiting musicologist and producer Hal Willner to bring it all together, Rogue’s Gallery is like nothing else you’re likely to hear in 2006. “They told me about it and I immediately got excited and jumped in,” Willner notes. “It has everything that appeals to me about a project that I know nothing about. You get to learn, and it’s a journey, and you discover things. It’s a completely unexplored treasure-trove of folk music that’s not with scholars or maritime museums.”

Assembling it required very, very heavy research – it took Willner longer to delve into the project than it did to record the forty-three tracks that make up the double album. “There are a number of sheet music books and sailor poetry books that the songs came from,” he explains, b”ut basically there is fortunately a lot of things recorded from the 40s and 50s and 30s from all different ports that were documented by sailors, many from South Australia, and places like Liverpool, Cape Cod, and Maui. I was able to get a lot of field recordings of old sailors doing these songs.”

Rogue’s Gallery is also a bit like a who’s who of music – it features everyone from noted names such as Nick Cave, Bono, Sting, Lucinda Williams, Bryan Ferry, Van Dyke Parks and Lou Reed to newcxomers such as Ed Harcourt, Jolie Holland, and Akron/Family. “It’s a mixture of people I’ve worked with in the past and people I wanted to work with,” Willner explains. “Basically we picked a handful of people and went to different cities and spent a few days there and called around. We wanted to keep it very spontaneous – every track is a story in itself, so there were certain tracks that were more interesting.”

This led to impromptu performances like Rufus Wainwright and his mother Kate McGarrigle duetting on “Lowlands Away”, completing it in a mere four takes. On a record like this it’s not one solid artist, so a lot of pressure is immediately removed and there’s a sense of adventure to it, that wouldn’t necessarily work if it was an artist’s record.

Once everything had been completely recorded, Depp and Gorbinsky listened to everything and responded enthusiastically. “They were really happy with what happened,” he says, “and I consulted with them in regards to which tracks to leave off this volume, and which to keep on, and they were happy with what they heard and said ‘whatever you want to do is fine’. I had complete freedom even though they gave me their opinion.”

Willner is now hoping that Rogue’s Gallery sells well enough to ensure that they get a chance to put a second volume together, as they already have 17 numbers recorded that were left off this session. Yet this is not the biggest project he’s been involved in – instead, that was the 1988 recording of Walt Disney tunes by the likes of Tom Waits and the Replacements. He first earned kudos for Amarcord Nino Rota, a tribute to the music of Federico Fellini that brought together the disparate likes of Blondie’s Debbie Harry and the then unknown jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. “When I grew up the radio stations I listened to in the 1970s were still freeform radio,” he says of his initial influence. “I always heard music as a collective, and it wanted to hear these kinds of things, and twenty-five years later I’m still allowed to make them.”

Originally conceived last northern summer as the sequels to the original Pirates... were being completed, Willner started researching in the autumn, with the first recording session taking place in mid-March, and it was all finished by the end of May. “If we’re allowed to do a second edition I’ll go back to all the ones I didn’t use – some of them weren’t quite finished, and they’ll need another look, and we’ll re-cut a bunch of new things.”

Of favourites, he says that Lou Reed’s take on “Leave Her Johnny” just amazed him. “How he turns every song he covers into sounding like something he wrote is truly amazing. Bryan Ferry’ “The Cruel Ship’s Captain” is one of the truly great performances that I’ve ever heard anywhere; he just nails it like he is that character, and he sounds like he’s singing from the prisons of hell.”

The project itself was one that ran as smooth as can be. “We all have a little sailor in us, and it is all music that we relate to in someway. It’s hard for me to pick a favourite because there’s so many I love for so many different reasons. There’s nothing I don’t love. I’m very, very lucky. It’s very carefully sequenced, and we just wanted to tell a story and keep shuffling the cards and start from Baby Gramps and end with Ralph Steadman – there was a journey that I wanted to create, and the record sort of sequenced itself. It goes through the emotions.”

Rogue’s Gallery is out now.