Outside the Jukebox

by Scott Bradlee

  Despite its rawness, maybe in part because of its rawness, “Only Girl” remains one of my favorite videos. We shot it in candlelight—Niia’s idea—to make it look moody, but with my limited cinematography skills, it just came out dark and grainy. The audio, though, was another story, with a happier ending. The arrangement for “Only Girl” was the first I’d written in a more measured style, to complement a specific singer’s vocals. The combined effect of harp, piano, cello, and Niia’s voice was something magical, and it transformed the source material, a slightly raunchy Top 40 dance hit, entirely. Beyond that, it was also my first time recording a “serious” cover. There was no viral hook to this track, just a heartfelt performance by an intensely creative singer, set to a unique arrangement.

  Niia and I collaborated quite a bit in those days, riffing on each other’s energy, often spending hours talking about music and exchanging ideas for projects—What if we did a show with a theremin player? What if we mashed up Nirvana and Katy Perry? With Niia, these ideas were never simply all talk, either. When she stumbled upon an old woman playing a musical saw in the Times Square subway station, she wasted no time in inviting her to perform at one of her concerts (though it fell through due to the budget; who knew musical saw players command such high fees?). I produced some of her studio sessions and an orchestral concert of James Bond themes for her, and she sang on many of my videos, including my thirtieth birthday cover of “Imagine.” Despite shunning the mainstream, Niia’s talent and statuesque poise kept her in near constant demand for galas, launch parties, and other high-profile industry events, and we’d often play those together, delighting in the work but also in the people-watching. No matter how many of these fancy gigs we did, we always felt like we were sneaking into a secret society. For one particularly elaborate gig, we were even provided private transportation… by aircraft. We snapped a lot of pictures and daydreamed about what it would be like to live like the wealthy.

  “You’re going to be wealthy someday,” Niia pronounced. “I just know it. Just promise me you’ll stay grounded.”

  I brushed aside her prediction. Producing a quirky YouTube channel hardly seemed like a recipe for wealth.

  One day, in late 2011, Niia called to tell me that she’d been invited to sing at Sleep No More—a buzzy new immersive Off-Broadway experience playing in New York City—and that she wanted to bring me as her accompanist. I knew very little about the show, but I always enjoyed performing with Niia, so I didn’t need to think twice before accepting. I threw on a cheap suit and tie and caught the train into the city to 34th Street.

  Styled like an old nightclub from the 1930s, the Manderley Bar, with its red velvet interior and elegant round cocktail tables, was the “hotel bar” at the McKittrick Hotel—the faux-1930s hotel that housed the experience. Creepy taxidermy adorned the wall over a bar tended to by stylish, vintage-clad employees. In a dimly lit corner, a fortune teller read a guest’s tarot cards while a pair of actors danced to the resident band’s swing music. It was as though I’d stepped into a dreamscape, and I fell instantly in love with everything about it.

  I don’t remember what Niia and I played that night—so mesmerized and transported by the setting was I—but we must have made quite an impression on the producers, who hired us to perform every night for a week straight during their popular Halloween parties. This was a huge break for me, and so I treated myself to a new suit; it felt earned.

  At the series of Halloween parties, we performed thirty-minute duos, consisting, for the most part, of mashups and hauntingly jazzy covers of pop songs. Our sets were almost entirely improvised, and the crowd was consistently enthusiastic. On one especially memorable night, Reggie Watts came onstage and jammed with us on a cover of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Another night, I announced to the audience that we would take anyone’s cell phone and make a song from their most recent text message conversation—sung by Niia’s pristine voice. This spontaneous party trick turned out to be such a huge hit that we began incorporating it into each performance, resulting in Grammy-worthy songs like “Grabbing a Taco” and “I’m Here, Where Are You?”

  Seeing the Sleep No More show itself was a transformative experience for me. An immersive, self-guided extravaganza of dance and movement, staged throughout the more than one hundred rooms at the McKittrick, it was like nothing I’d ever seen. Instead of watching onstage action from a seated distance, the audience members—all clad in identical white masks—were free to explore the venue’s five sprawling floors on their own, at whatever pace and in whichever order they desired. The space itself was meticulously designed to look, feel, and sound like the set of a Hitchcock movie—a 1939-era hotel with a sinister bent. So flawlessly orchestrated was the whole thing that, after moving through it, I found myself filled with a barely containable sense of possibility and humming with creative ideas. What I didn’t know at the time was that soon enough, this mystical universe would grant me something even more priceless than it already had by way of merely existing: the creative license to produce any musical world I could imagine.

  GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER

  It was a few months after Halloween when Arthur Karpati, a producer of the Sleep No More show, pulled me aside after one of my now regular late-night piano sets at the Manderley Bar. Not one to mince words, he flatly told me that he recognized my talent as something special and wanted to figure out a way to include me on the show’s creative team. He suggested that we create a position for me, a role that would task me with overseeing the group of musicians that performed throughout the night in the Manderley Bar and at the various special events that were hosted after the shows. I was getting a lot of work as a pianist at the time, but I’d never held a salaried position in my life, and it was industry knowledge that a well-paying, interesting gig like this was extremely hard to come by—even for established talent. Furthermore, I saw the massive possibilities that came with such a job: The show was a hot ticket, and I was bound to come in contact with influential people who could help advance my career, not to mention that I would be working among a whole host of talented performers whose creativity and passion for the arts would no doubt fuel my own. I told him to count me in, and before I knew it, I was the music director of the hottest Off-Broadway show in New York City.

  I came away from my tenure as music director at Sleep No More having learned a lot of valuable lessons. On the surface, I learned how to manage people—in particular, musicians with larger-than-life personalities. I learned the importance of giving clear directives in getting things done, how to delegate tasks to responsible people, and how to guide the collaborative process so that those involved are best equipped to make use of their talents and combine forces to produce great work. Although I later added a few of my friends to the talent roster—I favored the use of a rotating cast of musicians, as opposed to a fixed house band—I didn’t have preexisting friendships with any of the musicians who were already in the show, and a couple of them tested their boundaries with me almost immediately. It bothered me at first, but eventually I learned that as long as I worked to contain my ego and avoid taking personally any professional issues that arose, it was possible to hold the line firmly while simultaneously showing respect to others. Having a big ego can be incredibly destructive when you’re in a position of authority because it essentially broadcasts all your insecurities to the people you’re supposed to be leading. To manage effectively, you must develop the ability to stay calm and unreactive at all times.

  Creatively I learned a ton, even just by watching the show again and again and seeing how the individual pieces came together. One of my biggest takeaways was the realization that, when you create art, not everything has to make perfect or logical sense to the audience. In fact, an artistic production can be most interesting when its most surprising juxtapositions go unexplained. The narrative in Sleep No More was, at its core, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in 1939 Scotland, but the play wasn’t a period piece; it
incorporated characters and themes from Hitchcock films, stylistic elements from David Lynch films, and, in one scene, samples of electronic dance music. The mixing of all these influences resulted in a work that is, without question, more dynamic and provocative than any number of “modern” adaptations of Shakespeare. It was tough to describe, and that was in part what made it so compelling.

  A big part of my job was scouting for new talent, which put me in touch with several musicians who would, down the line, come to play pivotal roles in my YouTube channel’s success as well. Two singers, Annie Goodchild and Karen Marie, were both performing in the show before I entered the mix, and right off the bat, their talents were apparent to me. Annie’s distinctive, soulful voice was a perfect blend of jazz and R&B sensibilities, and Karen was a powerhouse vocalist and simply one of the most entertaining performers I’ve ever seen; she could captivate a room of four people as easily as she could a theatre of a thousand. After running an open call audition, I hired two more excellent performers: Ashley Stroud, a singer and dancer who exhibited perfect control over her smooth voice; and Cristina Gatti, a young actress whose brassy voice seemed to have come straight out of the 1940s, despite the fact that she had no prior experience and had never trained formally.

  One evening, following one of my late-night mashup piano performances at the Manderley, a young woman came forward to compliment me on my “transpositional skills.” She was beautiful, and a few minutes of conversation revealed that she also possessed a quick wit and a bubbly personality. We exchanged numbers, and the following week I took her on a date to a local dive bar. (I was no longer poor, but when it came to dating, I was still very cheap.) Her name was Robyn, and she knew about “transpositional skills” because she was secretly a singer herself.

  Although Robyn had been singing for most of her life, she’d given little thought to actually performing in public; she was happy in her current job, working at a nonprofit that helped refugees find jobs. We soon began dating and occasionally wound up doing karaoke at local bars. My performances were generally jokingly over-the-top renditions of ’80s power ballads that may or may not have involved me removing my shirt, but her antics-free performances consistently stole the show. I was a little surprised that she never tried to pick up singing gigs on the side, but I didn’t press the subject. I got it; she didn’t want to be thought of as a cliché, as just another aspiring singer with a day job in New York City.

  Corralling all the Sleep No More musicians—each of whom had unique tastes and aims—into giving great performances gave me perspective on how to manage my own artistic priorities. I could see how people’s passions for certain kinds of music were what made them great musicians, and watching their passions emerge and evolve was a great reminder to me not to leave my own by the wayside.

  The new job at Sleep No More kept me busy, and the steady income allowed me to move out of Agatha’s basement and into a nicer building a few blocks down with stainless steel appliances (including a stove, which was still a novel concept to me) and a view of the New York City skyline. In some ways, my life had become more stable and comfortable than ever before, but, wary of not letting my own unique passions get sidelined, and aware of how important it was that I keep actively developing them, I felt the itch to resume making videos in my new place.

  One night, I was taking audience requests on my slightly buggy, TEDx-featured streaming site Emote CTRL, sitting on the couch in my new apartment, with my red keyboard facing the laptop camera. Robyn, who had by now officially become my girlfriend, was with me, and I wanted to give her a chance to sing in a low-pressure setting. She took to it instantly. We had the online chat audience requesting songs flipped into different genres and Robyn singing continuously while I turned the songs into ragtime, reggae, and other styles on the piano. She was quick at following the changes and would often come up with funny and witty ways to highlight the new genres. The audiences loved her, and she was loving performing for them. One request that came through the chat feed that initially stumped us both was “‘Thrift Shop’ as ragtime.” Neither of us had heard of the Macklemore song “Thrift Shop” that was currently climbing the charts, but we could tell by the repeated requests for it—all by different viewers—that this song was destined to be popular. I pulled up a recording of it online, and we listened to it once through to get a feel for it. Then, embracing the kind of close audience feedback that had helped spark previous success, I began playing a ragtime version of the sax riff while Robyn sang the lyrics in a jazzy manner. The chat feed went crazy.

  The impromptu jam on “Thrift Shop” was so compelling, in fact, that I decided I would use it to restart my Postmodern Jukebox series on YouTube, which had been languishing since I’d started my full-time job at Sleep No More. I imagined giving it a full hot jazz treatment, with piano, upright bass, and drums.

  “That’s cool! Which singer are you going to get to sing it?” Robyn asked, when I shared the idea.

  I pointed at her. She seemed taken aback.

  “Me? Why don’t you use one of the professional singers you work with? They’re amazing! No, I don’t think I’m ready to do this.”

  “You are definitely ready. Trust me, it’s going to come out great.”

  “No.… I’m not a real singer. I don’t really know jazz—or whatever. I listen to Ke$ha.”

  Robyn had a knack for self-deprecation, but managing the Sleep No More musicians had given me a strong gut feeling for when someone was and wasn’t up to a task, and most of it had to do with their commitment. Even if she was reluctant to admit it, I could tell that Robyn wanted to do this badly. And so I called her out.

  “You’re doing this because you know you’ll regret it if you don’t. Don’t be a coward. Don’t be a perfectionist.”

  She rolled her eyes, all too familiar with my tendency to get preachy about perfectionism.

  “Okay, Scott Bradlee,” she said, gently mocking me. “I’ll learn it. But if I don’t do good, I’m going to cry.”

  Robyn turned out to be a quick study and came up with some really great phrasing for the lyrics. Her melody was evocative of a lot of late 1930s swing tunes, so I threw in a middle section that loosely quoted Louis Prima’s 1936 staple “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Once we had it roughly figured out, I called up Adam and Allan and set up a time for us to record. I dragged my microphones and studio gear—my ever-constant reminder of my own personal credit crisis of ’05—out of my storage closet and pushed aside the living room sofa to make room for us to set up shop.

  Still new to bourgeois apartment life, I was afraid that my new neighbors might not appreciate the blare of a full band, so I decided to keep it low volume by stripping down the drum set to a single snare and by not amplifying Adam’s upright bass. I positioned the camera on a tripod facing the plain white wall of the living room. We had just enough space for Allan’s snare drum, Adam’s bass, my bright red keyboard, and, in the corner, for Robyn, who wore a vintage-inspired dress and a flower in her hair. After a bit of rehearsal, I hit the Record button on both my computer and the camera, then gingerly climbed back into the cramped space behind my keyboard to count off the song.

  I’m gonna pop some tags

  Only got twenty dollars in my pocket…

  We were off to the races and settling into a nice groove, if a bit of a quick one, given the sheer number of words in the song. Adam and Allan gave a few playful “gentlemanly” nods to one another throughout, and Robyn did her own approximation of how she thought singers from that era moved their hands (what YouTube viewers later called “washing an invisible car”). It was a really fun arrangement to play, and for me it felt especially good to be recording again.

  The session went smoothly, and afterward, I bought falafel sandwiches for everyone—my go-to form of compensation in those days for the musicians I collaborated with on YouTube. I already knew that what we’d just recorded was quality work, but after everyone left and I sat down to listen to it, it occurred to me that we m
ay have caught lightning in a bottle. Only time would tell.

  I did my best to prepare Robyn for her YouTube debut by explaining that some websites might share the video, and some commentators on those sites might leave nasty comments. I told her that it was very likely the video could get upward of ten thousand views—which was a bit hard for her to fathom—and that the only downside to it going viral would be that some people get their kicks from publicly deriding anything that’s currently trending. She didn’t seem too concerned, though.

  “I’ll be fine, it’s only the Internet,” she assured me. “It’s not real life.”

  From the instant I shared the video to my Facebook page, I had an inkling that it was going to be a success, but I had no idea just how successful it would prove to be. The video was getting a tremendous number of shares, and people all over the world were telling their Facebook friends about this “vintage” cover of “Thrift Shop” that they had to see. I went to bed that night satisfied that I’d done my job and confident that the video was bound to rack up ten thousand more views by morning.

  I was off in my estimate by a factor of ten: Instead of ten thousand views, it had racked up one hundred thousand and earned itself a spot on the front page of Reddit. The video was getting tweeted several times a minute, and it had already spread to influential websites like Huffington Post. We were billed, alternately, as The Postmodern Jukebox Band or ScottBradleeLovesYa, depending on how hastily the author of the post had checked the facts. When I woke up, I had several texts from a very panicked Robyn, who had stumbled on the Reddit thread and discovered a smattering of unkind reviews of her performance among the positive ones. She hadn’t been as prepared for the nastiness of the Internet as she’d thought she’d been, and that’s understandable. It’s one thing, as an artist, to brace yourself mentally for potential negative reception of your work. Actually experiencing it, though, can hurt like hell, especially the first few times you put an act of creative expression—a part of yourself—out into the world. Convinced that she had failed, Robyn was in tears. Obviously, she had not failed, and I offered to take down the video if it was upsetting her that much. She said no, though, that she’d be okay.