In one day, all that changed.
HOW TO GO MAINSTREAM—WITH THE HELP OF MILEY CYRUS
It was 9 a.m., and I was sitting at the newly purchased piano in my apartment, but I wasn’t playing. Instead, I was talking to an ABC World News Tonight correspondent. Behind him was a camera crew, and next to them, in my cramped kitchen that hosted a prominently placed, Costco-sized bulk container of Quaker Oats, was a lighting rig. I imagined my neighbors assuming there’d been some crime committed as they witnessed all the commotion in the hallway caused by the crew’s arrival.
Fortunately, the only crime being committed here was, arguably, of musical variety: getting four million views in a day on a doo-wop version of a controversial Miley Cyrus song. We’d just gone mainstream, and the media wanted to know what this whole Postmodern Jukebox thing was about.
By September 2013, we had built a core following of online fans who loyally tuned in every time we released something new. I had learned to work Reddit somewhat reliably and had been able to solicit consistent funding through Patreon, a brilliant, groundbreaking crowdfunding site started by another popular YouTube musician, Jack Conte of Pomplamoose. Between this and the money I received from my work on BioShock Infinite, I had enough saved up to purchase a real piano, a used Yamaha G2 grand. Forever, I had dreamed of someday owning the real thing; that I was able to make this dream come true felt like a true career—and life—milestone. Confession: The day it was delivered, I slept on the couch next to it.
We had come up with some new pop songs we wanted to remake, including Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and K-pop star Psy’s novelty hit “Gentleman.” No longer camera shy, Robyn was enjoying the challenge of approximating many different vocal styles. I continued to give a genre description in the title of each video, such as “Vintage 1920s Gatsby-style” or “Vintage 1940s Swing” to give the viewer a frame of reference. Some of our critics took issue with this, complaining that it didn’t sound period-authentic, but I was already past caring what the “jazz police” thought; we had something that worked, and it worked well. But my real ace in the hole was something I had been sitting on, waiting for just the right time to play: an NYC doo-wop group named The Tee-Tones.
The Tee-Tones were another Niia subway station find from a year earlier. Listening to them sing “Under the Boardwalk,” she found herself captivated by their rough-and-ready harmonies and street corner sensibilities. Niia may have been an introvert, but she was incredibly bold when she saw performers who interested her, and just as she had with the musical saw virtuoso, she invited the group to join her on a show at Sleep No More. They eagerly accepted, and Niia called me to break the news of her latest project.
“I met these doo-wop dudes, they’re really dope. Can you help me put together a show with them? Like doo-wop stuff but modern and maybe some weird dark jazz vibes, too.”
I knew exactly the sound she was looking for. “Of course,” I said.
The Tee-Tones were a lively bunch. Then ranging in age from mid-forties to sixties, they became kids in a candy store upon entering the set of Sleep No More, playing with the props and cracking jokes as the stewards and managers observed nervously. The Tee-Tones could be ragtag, but they had heart and the kind of authenticity that just cannot be faked or taught. I began to pick up some of the terminology they employed for learning harmonies—a “drop” was when a major chord became minor, for instance—and found that their instincts were really great, despite a lack of formal musical training. My impulse was to compose the harmony lines myself, but it was better, I realized, to let them come up with their own in this case.
I was learning that part of being a good music director is being able to put aside the desire to control the output and allow others the opportunity to do what they excel at doing. It seems like a simple concept, but in practice, it can be a difficult experience—particularly for the ego—to permit things to drift away from your original vision and assume a more collaborative format. Give others a chance, and you just may find yourself surprised—and your ego rightfully humbled. The fact of the matter is that all great projects are collaborations; it’s up to the person in charge to guide the process in a positive and fruitful manner. My tenure with Sleep No More helped me become fairly competent at this, although time would prove that I still had much to learn.
These were the considerations in my mind a year later, when the six of us—Robyn, Chip, bassist Aaron Wright, and Gerard Giddens and Scout Ford from The Tee-Tones—gathered in my apartment to remake Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop.” The song had achieved a particular degree of notoriety, not just from its success on the Billboard charts and its bizarre, surrealist video but also from Cyrus’ raunchy performance of it at the MTV Video Music Awards. I had already planned to cover the song as ’50s doo-wop by the time we gathered to record the video, but this recent taboo drama surrounding it solidified the idea. After all, what’s more sanitized than ’50s doo-wop, and what needed to be sanitized more, apparently, than Miley Cyrus?
The session went smoothly. Robyn’s lyrical take on the song’s melody showcased her voice extremely well. Gerard and Scout came up with the titular echo in the choruses, which became something of a signature moment of the cover. I had even purchased a brand-new tube microphone from Guitar Center (which I returned the next day… old habits die hard) to add some analog warmth to The Tee-Tones’ vocals. Listening to the recording for the first time, I knew we had a winner. It was a glorious recording, and its timeliness couldn’t have been better. With the headline “After the VMAs, we decided to class up Miley Cyrus’ ‘We Can’t Stop,’ with the help of some doo-wop singers I met on the NYC subway,” I posted the link to Reddit. The response right out of the gate was amazing. Even our detractors, who usually appeared in the threads to denigrate our work as “mediocre,” were noticeably absent, and those who did show up were, dare I say, begrudgingly supportive. I released the video to Facebook simultaneously, and shares from people of all walks of life began rolling in. The post quickly got voted to the front page of Reddit, where it stayed for quite a while. Then something extraordinary happened.
I woke up the next day to a voicemail and emails from both ABC’s World News Tonight and Good Morning America. I checked the view count on YouTube, and there, on the front page, was our video. The video was already fast approaching a million views, and it would go on to receive another three million by the end of the day. Comments ranged from overwhelmingly enthusiastic to downright vile—in a variety of languages. On September 4, 2013, our version of “We Can’t Stop” was the most-watched video of all the billions of videos on YouTube.
And that was how ABC World News Tonight had ended up in my kitchen. They had been one of a few television shows to reach out in the wake of our video, asking if they could come to our studio. I invited the crew over to my apartment, which was much smaller and much less studio-like than they’d anticipated. They were pros, however, and managed to set up very quickly, just in time for the arrival of the segment’s host.
The interview went pretty much as expected. Since it was traditional media covering YouTube, many of the questions were about money and whether I realized how lucky I was to be able to do this from my living room. I could tell they wanted at least an appearance of an overnight success story that would grab people’s attention. I dodged most of the questions about money—traditional media was still shocked to hear that YouTubers could earn a living—but played along enough to give them good television. In the end, it didn’t matter; we got bumped from the final broadcast, and the segment never aired. It was all right, though; we were already booked to perform on Good Morning America, television’s top-rated morning show, in two weeks.
I felt a lot of pressure in that two-week lead-up. I had convinced myself that this was a make-or-break moment for Postmodern Jukebox, and I wanted to do everything I could to make it a success. Not only were we booked for an on-air featured performance, but we were also going to be presented as the “house b
and” that day, playing the show in and out of commercials and generally hanging out on set before returning to our regularly scheduled lives—by limo, of course. It was going to mean massive exposure for us and a chance for me to debut the idea of Postmodern Jukebox to the world.
I set about assembling my “dream team”: Robyn, Adam, Chip, The Tee-Tones, a horn section, and violinist David Wong. I even had a few Postmodern Jukebox t-shirts screen printed so that I could give them to the hosts. Robyn, meanwhile, was a bit more realistic about the whole thing and was preparing for it as she had for any other video we’d done. She was anxious for it to be over, just so I would stop talking about it.
The producers knew they were taking a gamble by inviting an unknown, sort-of band from the Internet with no representation and a technical rider handwritten on a sheet of notebook paper to play on their respectable television program, so they decided to simultaneously invite dancers from a local dance school to perform in costume to our music, as a visual complement to our act.
In theory, this was a cool idea. Watching it back, though, it just looked plain weird. The costumes, selected to reflect certain songs in the medley—giant teddy bear backpacks as an homage to Miley’s VMA performance, motorcycle helmets for Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”—probably were so subtle as to be meaningless to a good ninety percent of the show’s television viewers. And, with no choreography—or even stylistic guidelines—the dancers were just freestyling collectively in a manner that could best be described as Brooklyn-warehouse-rave-meets-zombie-parade. Even worse, they received much more camera time than our band did. There are a couple of clear moments in the video that just perfectly capture our dismay at the scene unfolding before us; you could see it in our body language in the brief shots of us.
Awkwardness aside, the entire performance went down largely without incident, and it was an overall positive first experience for us appearing on air. The hosts were kind and plugged us throughout the show. I wanted to present them with the freshly silkscreened t-shirts on air, but the producers, perhaps wisely, had prohibited me from ad-libbing. Up to this point, Robyn and I had been careful to keep our relationship a secret from the public, since the idea of inviting random people from around the world into our private lives wasn’t exactly appealing to either of us. The host, however, decided to bring it up during my interview.
“So Robyn is your girlfriend?”
And there it was; the cat was out of the bag. I was caught off guard and for a brief second irritated—What bearing did this have on my music?—but I knew it would be easier to just have it out there than to make concerted efforts to keep anyone from finding out. Besides, I figured, couples in the entertainment industry work together all the time; how much drama could really result from it?
We wrapped up the show, climbed into our limo (which was actually a Lincoln Navigator; not everything in showbiz is as it seems), and breathed a sigh of relief. We had gone from playing songs in a small apartment in Queens to playing them on national TV before millions of viewers; it was all finally beginning to sink in, and it was still only morning. I took Robyn to Astor Bake Shop—our go-to breakfast place—to get pancakes and just decompress in general. But when we got there, Robyn began to cry; despite her expressed indifference to the appearance, it was a lot of pressure for her, and she felt the weight of my ambitions falling on her shoulders. On top of all that, she was kicking herself for this one note that she was convinced she’d sung poorly on air.
“I let you down,” she said mournfully. “You shouldn’t have used me to sing on TV. Now I’ve ruined your project.”
I hated to see her hurting. She was truly fantastic, and I was proud of how well she’d been dealing with the mounting fame.
“The hardest part is over,” I said, trying to reassure her. “We did it. From now on, it will all be smooth sailing.” I kissed her forehead gently. “Someday, we’ll look back at this day and just think, wow, what a crazy day that was.”
She tried her best to muster a smile, as our phones buzzed with incoming messages of congratulations.
BUILDING THE RIGHT TEAM
There’s a stereotype that creative people tend to be lone wolves who fiercely guard their creations, and I wouldn’t say it’s inaccurate. In an industry where talent is routinely discovered, commodified, used up, and discarded, it also isn’t exactly surprising. Once an artist has reached a certain level of success, however, refusing to trust others can actually backfire horribly. History is littered with instances of ideas by lone-wolf inventors never seeing widespread adoption because of a stubborn refusal on the wolves’ parts to let anyone else touch their work, lest they be exploited.
For a long, long time, I was your typical lone-wolf creator. I had such an intense connection to my project that the mere thought of allowing anyone else into the decision-making process felt like an invasion. I was happy enough acting as Postmodern Jukebox’s manager, booking agent, publicist, art director, and, on one occasion—when I sent a phony letter to an event company that had stiffed us—even lawyer. I was learning a lot and doing it on my own terms. When it got overwhelming, I would just try to remind myself that I was living my dream, on my own terms. On some days, though—and these days were starting to occur more regularly—the scope of the work felt unmanageable. I couldn’t deny that wearing all those different hats was making me a bit dizzy.
Back when I was in music school, I naively believed there would come a day when I would “make it” and, from that point onward, be able to earn a great living playing music I loved, with no stress whatsoever. Truth be told, though, stress is an integral part of being successful. Even after achieving a rewarding career, expect the relatively simple stresses of being able to pay your bills to quickly be replaced by the more complex stresses of managing multiple projects and many different individuals. As Notorious B.I.G. once said, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.”
After our appearance on Good Morning America, Postmodern Jukebox began making forays into performing outside my living room and inside private events. Other than Robyn, all of us had gotten our starts as live performers, so the transition was relatively smooth. I had experience booking my own gigs as a pianist and putting together jazz combos for parties, so I felt pretty well equipped to pitch the project to prospective clients, draw up basic contracts, and hire musicians. I wasn’t much of a negotiator and probably often undersold the project, but I was too caught up in the excitement of potentially making a thousand dollars on a single gig to even care. For the most part, I brought my own PA to events and ran sound at the same time, at no additional cost to the client. In keeping with my previous terms of engagement as a pianist, I required only a hundred-dollar deposit to hold the date. Through it all, I held on to my jobs at Sleep No More and Robert Restaurant and managed to still teach a few weekly piano lessons. There was no guarantee that our viral fame would last, and so even when I was running on fumes, I was reluctant to turn down any extra work.
As a group, we played galas for luxury brands, conventions for multilevel marketing firms, and even a frat party at the University of Pennsylvania, a gig that lasted all of fifteen minutes, until campus police were called in to shut down the party. We didn’t have many songs in our catalog, so our sets consisted of a couple jazz instrumentals, six or seven Postmodern Jukebox songs performed back to back, and whatever else we could come up with to fill the time.
One notable early gig was our appearance in 2013 at Worldcon, home of the Hugo Awards for science fiction. The event organizers didn’t have much of a budget, and we barely made a dime when it was all said and done, but that trip was worth it just for the stories, which started with getting dropped off at a Holiday Inn Express only to find out that our room (we had one double room for the five of us) was actually in a different, even lower-budget Holiday Inn Express. From there, it only got better: Our rides to and from the convention center in San Antonio were courtesy of elderly volunteers who often missed our calls because they had fallen asleep. We perform
ed for a small crowd of mostly octogenarians, who, I was happy to see, seemed to enjoy our unusual musical juxtapositions. The trip also gave me the opportunity to have interactions like this one:
ME: Where do you live?
WOMAN WEARING A STAR TREK UNIFORM: In space.
ME: Haha, oh like Star Trek, I get it…
WOMAN: No, actually in space. I live on the International Space Station.
ME: Oh, wow. Didn’t mean to judge you.
ASTRONAUT WOMAN: It’s okay.
As entertaining as these gigs were, we were still firmly in “musical ice sculpture” territory, where we were treated as background music. Part of that was due to the nature of playing for private events: We weren’t there because the entire company was Postmodern Jukebox fans; we were there because the company was throwing a Great Gatsby–themed party and we fit the aesthetic. The gigs paid well compared to what I was used to earning as a non-Internet sensation but hardly enough to justify all the work that went into putting them together.
I was confident, though, that Postmodern Jukebox could thrive as a much bigger and multifaceted production. I imagined it existing as part of some idealized world that blurred the lines between classic and contemporary—complete with guest performers, comedy, and old-school glamour—a kind of a cross, if you will, between Cirque du Soleil and a vintage Comic-Con. What’s more, the Postmodern Jukebox universe wouldn’t operate like the superficial, image-driven, pop chart–centric culture of today; we’d celebrate authentic, mind-blowing talent and the hard work that goes into mastering an instrument and a multiplicity of genres. My ambitions were boundless, but I didn’t have the first idea of how to make the transition from fun event band to true concert act. I had gone as far as I could on my own. And then, in late 2013, I opened my email to find this:
Outside the Jukebox Page 11