Before we get started today, Link has a trigger warning. – If you have a deeply rooted fear of not flying but crashing in a plane, you should probably skip to like the 20 minute mark in this podcast. – Well we don’t know how long we’re gonna be. If you’re still talking about it in 20 minutes, you just threw them right into– – Oh gosh. (upbeat electronic music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we are asking the question, has touring changed us? – Has it? – Has it? – Has it changed us? – Has touring? – How has it changed us? – Changed us? Maybe that’s an odd question, maybe that’s a, well, it’s gonna lead to a lot of self-reflection and I think also, I don’t know, from time to time, we like to verbally process our creative process, ’cause spoiler alert, it has. In a lot of ways. – Yeah so we’ll be talking about how we’re seeing touring in the future, how we’re thinking about our music, how the way that we interact with music as individuals influences the music that we give to you. All stuff about that. It’s gonna be awesome. – Is it? – You’re gonna love it. Yeah, I’m planting seeds in your brain and telling you how much you’re gonna like it. – That’s good, that’s good. A lot of this has to do with making the decision to do the concert that we did at the North Carolina State Fair, which was a bonafide concert, it ended up being two hours. We can get into all that. – Bonafide. – But I’ve been saving, I haven’t had an opportunity to tell you my near-death experience which was flying to the show. – And can I just say that you know, if you’ve been listening to Ear Biscuits for awhile, you know that a lot of times we have these stories that we hold back from each other and then we tell each other for the first time in your presence. – Yes. – On Ear Biscuits. And this one probably more than any one you’ve ever held back has been the most frustrating to me because the little bits that I’ve heard are that you had, this was an intense death-defying experience that may have changed you. – How has my flight to Raleigh changed me? – And you’ve kept it from me– – Because it has. – For weeks so that you could wait to tell it on an Ear Biscuit, so, hopefully all the steam hasn’t been let out, because– – Well I don’t wanna build up the story too much but I do wanna share it because it had me shook. Once again, I’m shook. Everywhere I go, something happens and I’m shook. Shaky shaky, shaky moneymaker. – Is that a song lyric? – It’s just parlance of our times. – I don’t think of our times, maybe of a time gone by. – Shook? – Yeah I mean the way that you used it, I think you made it sound like it was from the 50s. (Link chuckles) – Well here’s the thing, so you flew home a day or two before me because it was around your birthday and then I was trying to minimize my time away from my family, your family was going with you, so, I flew in days later so you were not on this plane. I mean, it just so happened that the hurricane that was coming across the Florida panhandle was predicted to cross over the Raleigh-Durham area where the airport, the Raleigh-Durham– – International Airport. – The RDU. What does the U in RDU stand for? Raleigh-Durham Unternational? – No I think it’s Raleigh-Dur-um. – I think you’re right. It’s the D-U in Durham. – You don’t just go RD, ’cause that sounds like Hardee’s. – Why’s it not RDI, Raleigh-Durham International? – Sounds too stiff. – Anyway. – Raleigh-Durham. – You start to get a little shook, pre-shook. I got a little pre-shook ’cause I’m like, am I gonna make it to the show? I mean, we’re supposed to fly in, we’re supposed to be flying into North Carolina at the same time the hurricane is flying across North Carolina. Matter of fact, there’s a hockey team there called the Hurricanes. – Yep. Appropriate. – They’ve been very successful. – And I was thinking at the time, I was nervous because we were playing the show and you were coming in the day before and then there was the chance that you might not be able to make it because of the coincidence of the hurricane and there was like contingency plans, potentially going to other cities and– – Right, you’re like– – I was contemplating how I would do the show by myself. – Mm-hm. – Because I did not want to disappoint the Dorton Arena goers. All the Mythical Beasts who showed up, but then I was like, we can talk later what that would have been like. (chuckling) Let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t have to do it. – So we’re flying in, it’s like a five hour flight and then in the last, I don’t know, hour and a half, they start, pilot starts giving warnings, like, “We’re probably gonna experience some rough air “with the storm coming across the state.” – But he sounded very calm about it. – Yeah he sounded very calm. But he said, “You know what, “it looks like we’re gonna be able to land.” – We’ve been cleared for landing. – Well it wasn’t like we’re about to land, it’s like, it looks like we’ll be able to land when that times comes like 20 minutes from now or whatever, 30 minutes. – Don’t worry now, worry then. – When we start making our descent. But it seems like we’ll be able to do it. But it was kinda like that, it was like, it seems like we’ll be able to– – I don’t wanna make any empty promises. – (chuckles) Right. – Just in case you all die. – It was a little disconcerting and I’m sitting alone, there’s no one in the seat beside me. – That’s convenient. – I thought that– – Someone to hold. – I thought that was good until I didn’t have anybody to grab. So we do start making the descent. Well as we start coming into Raleigh-Durham, it goes from being clear, you see all these clouds, and I’m like, daggum, that’s the hurricane down there. – You saw it from above? – There’s clouds. Moving clouds, I mean I’ve seen a radar of a hurricane but you don’t really see the swirl when you’re in a plane is what I’m telling you. I learned that. – Can’t see the swirl when you’re in a plane. – And we start the descent and there starts to be some shakin’. I was shook, quite literally. – And how did this initial shaking compare to– – Normal. – Normal turbulence? – Maybe a little bit more aggressive, but I never get worried. I never get anxious because I have this magical ability, like, if there’s nothing I can do, I just check out and I’m like all right. – Yeah. – I don’t have any control– – I’m exactly the same way. I am super worried about getting to the airport on time. – Right. – But as soon as I get through security it’s just like– – There’s nothing I can do. – You know what? This plane could turn upside-down and I’m not in control. – So they make an announcement where, okay we’re gonna be hitting some rough air. You need to buckle up, stay in your seat. And they start the descent, and then– – Secure your peanuts. – We go into the clouds and it starts gettin’ shaky. And about that moment, a woman comes walking from the back up to the front. – She wants to consult with the pilot? – And then a flight attendant, stewardess, I was gonna call ’em but I’m not gonna do that. – Yeah you shouldn’t do that. – Who was buckling herself up stands up and says, “No, ma’am, you have to go back to your seat,” and the woman goes, “I have been holding it “a long time, I have to get in there.” And she goes past the flight attendant, the flight attendant kinda like exasperated, shakes her head. – You gotta choose your battles. – Sits down and buckles up. I’m like, all right, girl. And then– – Peeing on yourself or having your neck broke in the bathroom. – And then– – Which one’s worse? We start going into the clouds and it really starts shaking. It was disconcerting. And then we come out of the clouds and we are in a sandwich between clouds, we are in between two layers of clouds. It was very bizarre. – You see the swirl then? – Still didn’t see the swirl, but then we start going through the second layer of clouds and not only are we getting, is it bumps, but all of a sudden we’re experiencing swaying. – Okay, that’s new, that’s new, okay. – I’ve never experienced this on a plane. – Yeah yeah got it, so a little bit of this. Not this. – A lot of shifting. – This? – So if you, yeah. – Turning on an axis that is going from your head to your butt hole. – If you put your hand, yeah, if you put your hands flat– – For you engineers out there who need the axis. – If you ever seen somebody do the twist, that’s what the plane was doing. The plane was wagging its butt. – That feels like a problem to me. – I have never felt anything like it, and it was just, it made the plane, as huge as it was, feel small like all of a sudden– – Was any part of it enjoyable? – Not at that point, man. It was nasty. – But you still weren’t worried about your life. – I started to be because– – Your wife was. Let me just say, so your wife. – Oh. – Texts me, while you’re in the air. I’m currently on the ground in North Carolina. I’m in Fuquay-Varina at the time. – This is one of her worst fears for herself, yeah. – Actually I was in Raleigh, ’cause I was eating, I went to my birthday dinner that I shared– – You were underneath the hurricane. – With my 16 year old nephew who shares my name. Isaiah Rhett we call him, or we call him Isaiah, but– – What, does he get it on the weekends or something? – No but we shared a birthday dinner together. I rode in a limo with a bunch of teens. (Link chuckles) Awesome, smelled incredible. And I– – It wasn’t the birthday celebration of yacht rock from last year. – No no– – 41’s a lot different. – It’s like a flat tire. – Your wife texts me and says something about, I’m worried about Link being able to land. First of all, your wife texts me when she’s worried. Just FYI. But she (laughs), and so, I’m like– – Well you’re a friend, she can text male friends. I’m cool with that. – I’m like, you know what, you don’t have anything to worry about. I’m currently on the ground in Raleigh. It just feels like it’s raining a little bit, it’s not even windy. It’s not gonna be a problem. That’s what I said. – Well apparently that’s why they gave them the go ahead to land, but I mean, a toddler a few rows back starts screaming, “What’s happening? “What’s happening?” Again– – A toddler? – Yeah, a toddler. – Okay. Like a two year old? – Like a kid who can barely speak is saying what’s happening. – That’s the best kind. – Again and again and again. And I just, it took everything in my being to not turn around and say, “Shut up, we’re crashing! “Just shut up about it!” Everybody else is just kinda like, just getting quiet. What’s happening? – What’s happening? – Now, the week before, I had decided to watch with the family, to introduce them to the amazing television show that is Lost, starting from the pilot episode. Which I forgot that the entire pilot episode, a matter of fact, the whole first season is just a reliving of the most cataclysmic plane crash you could ever imagine. – A plane literally splitting in two because of turbulence. – And I watched this the week before, so I started to feel nauseous. – Did you start looking around and think am I gonna be the leader? Am I gonna be Jack Shepherd or John Locke? Or Sawyer. – Well I’ll tell you exactly what I thought. – I’m gonna be Sawyer if I crash. – Listen. The plane started to beep in weird ways, like alarms started to go off in the plane. – No, that’s awesome. (mimics alarms blaring) Okay, never heard that before. – Yeah and we’re still doing this shimmy-shake, like shake the– – Alarms. – Yes. – What is the kid saying now? – What’s happening? What’s happening? – Still saying that. Okay. – I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I was literally feeling nauseous. I was like, all right I’m gonna grab this. Where am I gonna vomit, my shoe? No, that sack. – Yeah you got a sack. – And I thought to myself, Link, make up your mind right now. You’re gonna survive no matter what happens. I literally had this conversation with myself. – That’s an interesting intent. – And it was weird because again it’s like, I know I have no control and I’m like, I haven’t been watching those safety videos, man. – All you gotta do is jump right before it hits the ground. – (chuckles) Yeah like an elevator. – You’ll survive. – Right. Falling elevator. – Yeah, physics, man. – But literally I thought to myself, okay no matter what happens, just grit your teeth and survive no matter what. If you’re gonna crash or whatever, just have an attitude of survival. I’ve never had that conversation with myself, like just gearing up for it. And then there was more swaying and a huge drop, like phew, free fall, bam! – Oh no! – And we’re in that second layer of clouds. – That’s when the plane splits usually. – And I’m like oh my gosh, please just let me see the ground. Please just get to the ground. We can do this, and then all of a sudden, we clear the bottom bun of the hamburger. – Oh gosh. – Of clouds. And I see the ground. And that ground is a lot closer than I thought it was gonna be. – Oh yeah. – By that point. – That’s not good, that’s what you don’t want. You need altitude. – And of course I know the geography, so I know this is Jordan Lake and we’re approaching in like plane speed, we’re rapidly approaching landing, which is at least good that we’re– – You know where you’re gonna die. – I know we’re gonna– – You got a landmark for your death spot. – No we’re really close to the landing strip. – Okay. – But then, even though we’re out of the clouds, we were still shimmying. – Oh gosh. – I mean again, it wasn’t like once or twice, it was unlike anything I’ve ever felt in a plane. I mean it would be like side-winding on ice in a car. – Anyone throwing up at this point? – Everybody was quiet except for that, even the toddler shut up– – Yeah good. – Once we hit that big drop. – That’s what it took. – So we’re going up and down and shimmying, I’m looking at the ground and I think I’m gonna vomit and die and do whatever it takes to survive, and I’m convinced that, the plane felt so small and it was moving in such an unnatural way that I was, I could totally believe that any point, it could just be slapped on the surface of the earth, just like (mimics whip slashing). That drop we had a few minutes back, if that drop happened right now, we would slam into the earth. We should have put a trigger warning on the front of this video. If you’re really, okay, I’ll do that right now. We’ll slap this at the top, we’ve done it before, we’ll do it again. If you have a deeply-rooted fear of flying– – You should probably say, before we get started today. – Yeah, do that. – Before we get started today, Link has a trigger warning. – If you have a deeply rooted fear of not flying but crashing in a plane, you should probably skip to like the 20 minute mark in this podcast. – Well we don’t know how long we’re gonna be. If you’re still talking about it in 20 minutes, you just threw them right into– – Oh gosh. – The nexus of this conversation. – I think that’s the most dramatic part that we just talked about, so. – Okay. – (sighs) We didn’t get slapped into the surface of the earth, at that point, I see the runway. And I’m like, whatever you do, don’t land. I’m like sending a message to the pilot through my passions. Just, I don’t know what that means, but I was scared. – Your passions? – I was like, I was so passionately hoping that he would not land because it seemed impossible. And then we’re over the runway and we’re about to land. – No. – Yes. – Like how far off the ground? – Like… I don’t know. Definitely like hundreds of feet. – Okay. – 300 feet. – All right. – And thank goodness he pulled up. He pulls up and he doesn’t try to land, and people started clapping. A few people said, “Woo!” And then I heard somebody say, “Don’t clap yet!” – Yeah, was it the toddler? – (chuckles) No, it wasn’t the toddler. – His voice got lower. – And he was right. – He went all the way through puberty in that– – He was right. – Last five minutes. – ‘Cause we had to traverse through both buns of that hurricane’s hamburger. – You gotta go back up to the hamburger. – And it was a lot of the same stuff, but he seemed to power through a lot quicker and then all of a sudden we’re going to Charlotte. We’re gonna land in Charlotte because we’re running out of gas and the sun came out and it was like utopia. – Well the sun didn’t come out, you came to the sun. – And then we went to Charlotte and we landed. I got on the ground and phew, ate some fries from Wendy’s, try to settle my stomach. – Just fries? – Yeah, Jenna wasn’t sitting with me, but she flew with me. So she was many seats back and then, when we got off the plane for a second, they said, “We’re gonna take off and go back to RDU, “it’s cleared up but before we do, “you can get off for a second.” I got some fries and she was gone and then she comes back a few minutes later, she was like, (sighs) “Just had to tell ya, “I just had to get a shot of whiskey.” (Rhett laughs) It’s like, it was traumatic. She seemed a lot more at rest at that moment, and me after my fries. And then we flew back to RDU, I mean, it was like two hours later and it had blown over, you know? – It always blows over, man. That’s the life lesson, you know what? – Oh but I forgot. – It’ll blow over. – As we started the ascent, they said don’t clap yet. And we’re going back through this turbulence, then the sun comes out. – Then you clap. – No. Then that woman came out of the bathroom. – No, no, no! – I swear. – No, no way. Not a chance. – I’m so sorry, I almost forgot, that’s the best part. – Cannot be true. – And I looked at her in disbelief and she strutted down that aisle like she was the one who was piloting the plane. Like she had saved the day. – You’re not making this up. – Cool as a cucumber. – She was in the commode– – She was on the commode– – The whole time? – Through everything I talked about. – Well you don’t know if she was on the commode. She may have been doing some sort of four point contact stance the whole time. – Right, she’s like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, whichever one that one was where he’s like dangling from the spider rope. I don’t know if there’s a seat belt on an airplane commode. – There’s not, I’ve looked for it. – She walked out with her head held, she was like sticking her chest out like a proud rooster. I don’t know why. – So she didn’t wanna seem embarrassed. – She didn’t wanna seem embarrassed. – You know what? – She wasn’t bleeding. – Look confident when you screwed up. I always say that. – Can you believe that though? – ‘Cause now you think maybe she is responsible for all of us living. – Oh my gosh. I made it, guys, but– – Thanks for sharing that. – I’ve flown a couple of times since then and I gotta be honest, a little bit of turbulence brings it all back. Like I started to feel nauseous when we hit just a couple of bumps before. I have a lot more empathy for Christy, who has had made a lot of progress on her fears. So I didn’t try to go into the details with her. – So you haven’t told her the story? – I told her right when we landed, I called her in Charlotte and I was like, “We made it, it was quite a ride. “I don’t think I need to tell you about it.” – Quite a ride, okay. – But I need to tell you about it so thanks for listening. – I’m glad you lived. – Hopefully you listening is therapy for me, so thank you. – I’m glad you lived and made it to the concert so I didn’t have to play the show by myself. (Link chuckles) That’s the main reason. We’re gonna talk about that, we’re gonna talk about touring. But first we are going to let you know that this coming Friday’s Black Friday. – That’s ’cause Thursday’s Thanksgiving. – You know what’s happening on Black Friday? A big ol’ sale at Mythical.store, 20 to 40% off, and it’s Black Friday through Cyber Monday, right? Is that correct? 20 to 40% off everything at Mythical.store. – Whoa, whoa, whoa, can we do that? – I don’t know, I was told that that’s what’s happening. I don’t know if it’s smart. It could be stupid, but whether it’s stupid or smart, you should take advantage of it because this is the time to stock up on everything at Mythical.store. There’s– – Rep us, y’all. – There’s clothes, there’s, what else do we have, Feldman? – There’s clothes, there’s mugs. Good luck with that. – We got mugs. We still got keychains? – Feel like you’re at the round table of dim lighting with your good luck for that mug. – Bracelets. – I said good luck for that mug. – Hats. – Whatever. – We got beanies right now? We don’t have beanies yet. Soon. Maybe. There’s lots of stuff, go check it out at Mythical.store, and you know, equip yourself to be even more Mythical than you already are. – Music is magic, man. Music is a big part of our lives and it’s also a big part of our brand. I mean, of Rhett and Link, of us being… We would be where we are today without music as an aspect of what we started to do on YouTube. – Well we wouldn’t have started, we really wouldn’t have started doing, I mean the core of our comedy when we were coming up was musical comedy. – And we really liked making videos, but at first those things really weren’t coming together. We would write fun songs or whatever, but, we’d make videos for school projects. But it did, when those things came together, that’s what gained us traction on YouTube. – Right, but I guess what I’m saying is the stuff that, I know the first thing that sorta got views on YouTube was the Pimp My Stroller which was a parody video, but the stuff that got featured, the videos that got featured, the videos that went viral were those songs that we had written, songs that we had written with never an intention to make into a music video. The Unibrow Song. ♪ Out of the blue ♪ ♪ My eyebrows grew ♪ The Facebook Song. ♪ Facebook ♪ ♪ Facebook ♪ – Are probably two of the best examples. Songs that we wrote with a live audience in mind. – The Unicorn Rap is what we called on of ’em. ♪ What do you think about Rhett and Link ♪ ♪ MCs extraordinaire ♪ – Actually we didn’t call it that until we decided to make it into a video and we just added unicorns ’cause we thought that would get the clicks. – That actually is a little different ’cause that was only ever intended to be a video ’cause it was like for an intro or whatever. – Yeah that’s true. – But you think about the ones that actually, ’cause nobody really watched that one either, but the ones that really got traction in those early days, they were songs that were written with a live audience in mind that then when YouTube came along, we created music videos for them and that was sort of the beginning of what Rhett and Link comedy was. And in a way, we are returning to those roots, I think that’s one of the things that is happening as a result of us touring. – Well, you know, sometimes I enjoy kinda connecting the dots in what it is we’re doing now. What brought us to this point. Hopefully as a listener, you will enjoy kinda tracing some of that if you’re interested in our creative process or I don’t know why you’re interested in this, but I am so I guess I’m gonna talk about it, but… We decided, I guess the operable question that we’re asking is how has touring changed us? It’s certainly altered and informed our career trajectory, even currently and I’m actually very excited about where it’s going so I can unpack that a little bit. We decided, I mean we decided to do this show at North Carolina State Fair. – Fair. – And just to do a concert just because we were itching to do a show. We were willing to do, we were willing to entertain their offer or their invitation to come because we had toured the previous fall with our Tour of Mythicality, which we were only willing to entertain the possibility of doing that because we had written a book and it’s like if you write a book, you’re supposed to tour in some way but we didn’t wanna do a book tour so we did a stage tour and then we had to like make a whole stage tour thing and then, so this, even having a willingness to go on tour, which is something that people brought up for years for us. It’s something that only writing a book pushed us over the edge to actually do it. – Well we had always shied away from it because one of the things that made YouTube so attractive to us was the fact that we could create things and reach a large amount of people without ever leaving a studio and being able to go to work and then come home and be with our families, and so that’s what YouTube afforded us, and then– – And I do remember that we talked about this particular thing in a whole other podcast, back when we were at some point in the process of the Tour of Mythicality. So it’s not that we have to re-hash that, but I will say that having gone through the experience of the Tour of Mythicality, we’re now like, hey we could, we find ourselves being invited to do more, have more stage appearances to meet more fans and to travel more places. I mean, going to Australia was amazing. That was another Ear Biscuit where we talked about– – And we knew that even though the show was based on the book and kinda goes through some different aspects of the book, we knew, well if we’re gonna get an audience together and we’re gonna perform for them, we know that we’re gonna do some live music because in one sense that’s our bread and butter, that’s something that we really enjoy doing and we think we do it well. We did this exercise where we, for the Tour of Mythicality, where we said, okay well we need to perform X number of songs, like five or six songs, we should at least write a new song for this. – And they need to tie in to kinda the narrative– – Yeah they need to be something that makes sense based on where we’re at in the show. – Right. – But they also need to be the kind of songs that make sense to perform live and that, the result of that was picking some songs that, and this is actually the case, a lot of people are like how did you choose the songs you did for North Carolina State Fair? We’ll get into that, but how we chose the songs for the tour is what songs can we confidently perform live, they will sound good and they will be, the jokes will work for a live audience, and as a result, we ended up going into places like going all the way back to a song that we wrote over 15 years ago, The Middle School Girlfriend Song. Updated it, made it what we think is significantly funnier than it was originally and performing it and then writing a new song and then, anyway, it was a totally different process that really whet our appetite for then saying let’s do this more seriously, take the show to the state fair. – But not take the show. – Not take. Do a special show. – We decided, I can’t remember exactly what made us decide to do, to say yes to that invitation because that’s something we normally just wouldn’t say, well we can’t– – We did it to put, I mean I remember, because after having done the tour, which was incredible in a lot of ways. I mean we talked about it multiple times but being able to be in the room with Mythical Beasts is very special. – So we were open to– – It goes beyond what we’ve been able to experience just digitally with people online. – And it was a home town gig, so we were open to, well maybe we should go, that’d be cool. We saw Merle there, it’s like a lot of memories associated with that. – But the reason we committed to doing it is because we said, if we do this, if we commit to an all-music show at the North Carolina State Fair– – Why did we even think an all-music show? ‘Cause I know what you’re about to say, but, with the idea to just do a concert and not do another Tour of Mythicality stop. – Because we think, because we wanna do something that is even further reaching and broader, more broadly appealing. That was my reason. – And we didn’t wanna, we’re not gonna keep touring with the Tour of Mythicality anymore. – Yeah, do something that is, what we feel is the best parts of the show and we got more songs where those came from, and we can write some new ones. – And it’s more expected. I think people, at least a segment of the fans, they were expecting, okay if I’m gonna come to a show, you’re gonna perform songs, isn’t that a concert? Well it wasn’t, but it makes sense. – A lot of people who have become Mythical Beasts in recent years think that when we say, when they hear Rhett and Link live, they think they’re going to see Good Mythical Morning live. They think they’re going to see us on stage, eating weird stuff, getting people on stage, but that’s because those people got into the game a little bit late and don’t realize that well, the thing that we’re passionate about and the thing that we love to do and we think the thing that is the most entertaining thing that we can do in a theater or in a Dorton Arena is music. – And I think the other, well, and then here’s the thing we found. I’ll skip to after the show, once we started meeting fans after the show, a lot of people had Tour of Mythicality shirts on. They had been to that show, and then they have been to this concert. So we would always ask ’em, “Which one did you prefer?” And if they had a preference, or I’d say, maybe 60% of the people we asked did have a preference. The remaining ones said, “I love both of ’em.” It’s just like, they’re just encouraging fans. But if they had an opinion it was, I like the concert better. I like what I just saw better. And I think that felt good because it aligned with our own experience which was, man, it was easier to do. And it was kinda, it was in that wheelhouse of we’re performing songs– – Easier to do, I find that an interesting. You think that was easier to do? Wasn’t easier for me. – It was definitely easier for me. So I guess for me it was like, there was no pressure beforehand for me. I can understand why there’s more pressure on you. And like having to play, carry the rhythm on your gee-tar. To play the guitar for all these songs and having to re-learn them. – Or transpose some of them to guitar that never were intended, weren’t written for guitar to begin with. – I have a horrible memory. We had monologues for the Tour of Mythicality. That’s really hard for me. But for some reason, my brain, lyrics and melodies and all that, that’s very easy for me. Of course I’m also not playing a guitar and singing and have to re-learn that but like, I don’t forget lyrics that much. – Well I think ultimately– – So I had it easy. – I would say ultimately a music show is way easier once I actually get what, lock in what I’m doing, but I had not, in fact, again, it goes back to the reason we did it. We did it so we would have to force ourselves to learn how to turn these songs into acoustic songs that we could perform, be able to sing for almost two hours, and so I had a lot of questions about whether or not I was going to get through that and not forget things and be able to play the guitar parts and all that. I screwed up a number of times. Most people probably didn’t notice. I definitely did, but, so I think ultimately, it will be easier. – For as long as it’s been since we played those songs or having never played many of them, maybe half of the songs we had never played live. And then a third of them had never been played on a guitar ever. I’ll give it to you, man, you did a great job. – Well it was all just a track. I was just pantomiming the guitar the whole time. – Oh. – You didn’t know that? It’s just a track. Just really good at looking like I’m playing exactly what you’re hearing. – That’s not a bad idea, but– – All the screw-ups are built in. Just a big show, the whole thing’s a facade. – If you let me in on those secrets, then I won’t spoil them for everybody else. – Okay. – So I was encouraged that people were like, I love this, this is what I want, and plus, the banter in between songs is very much like the unscripted moments of Good Mythical Morning, so it is kinda like you’re getting a Good Mythical Morning experience as opposed to like this theatrical, dramatic, scripted, sculpted experience that was the book on stage kinda thing. So you bring up the point that I wanna camp out on which is, you said, you know if we made a decision to do this concert, we knew in the most general sense, it would lead to something. Every time we do something new, it stretches us, it challenges us, it aligns us. It’s like we gotta hunker down and figure it out, right, and it’s a new creative endeavor and something will come of it. And I think that’s what’s so exciting is having done that once and having, when it was over, it’s like, yeah, we can do this more. You know? – And we are. – We should go to London and do this. – We’re gonna do it at VidCon London. – And we’re gonna do it more. – And then we’re gonna go from there. – But it’s exciting when, even if it didn’t go well, it would lead to something. Everything you do leads to some other decision that you have to make creatively. And I was very encouraged that like, having done it, it’s like yeah, we can do more of it, and then the fan feedback was, yes, please do more of that. So there was also an alignment there. – And it also forced us to write some new songs which is something we haven’t done in, I mean, first of all– – It’s such a big part of who we were and we stopped doing it. – Well we haven’t stopped writing songs, because– – Well that’s true. – We did an album with each season of Buddy System. – I even tend to forget that because I feel like it’s kind of– – And that was a lot of songwriting. – Buddy System is hidden over there. I act like Buddy System doesn’t exist. – We poured so much of ourselves into Buddy System. I know we talk about it every time, and then, so many of you haven’t seen it, but– – Get YouTube Premium if you wanna see it. – We poured a lot of ourselves into it, including a lot of songwriting. But it’s a little bit of a, you know, it’s a little bit of a shame in that so few Mythical Beasts have seen it. But what we have gotten away from is the songwriting process that we employed for the live performances. And to me– – Ever since YouTube started taking off. – Yeah ’cause something happened. Obviously those first couple of songs were written with a live audience in mind so if you were just to listen to this song, just listen to the lyrics, you would laugh. And then once we had the visual component added, we started writing songs knowing that they were primarily going to be received as a music video, and so, we would literally be sitting there writing lyrics to a song and we would say, okay well, this will be the lyric and this will be the thing that we’re showing and so it was this incredibly visual experience where we, ’cause we thought we– – We weren’t writing a song, we were writing a music video. – Yeah, we wrote things with a music video in mind from the beginning, and that’s a drastically different process, and that’s also, frankly, one of the reasons that some of the songs you may have expected us to play in our live show, we didn’t play. And then others, for some people, ’cause okay, one of the things we did in the show is, we had an acoustic set, we started with an acoustic set, including some old songs that people recognize and some new stuff that we had written. Then we introduced some very special guests who was Rabbit Lightning and, we did that kind of as a special thing for the North Carolina State Fair. We don’t know if we’re gonna keep doing that, but it really worked for that crowd. And then we brought out the songs that we felt obligated to play, I mean, I’ll give you my perspective. I know your perspective is a little bit different and I think that the fans reminded me once we talked to them, how I should actually think about it. But we knew that we had to do Epic Rap Battle: Nerd Versus Geek. Epic Rap Battle of Manliness. I’m On Vacation. ♪ But it’s still okay ♪ ♪ ‘Cause I’m on vacation ♪ – [Link] I think he misspelled the word vacation. – Belly Button. ♪ It’s my belly button ♪ ♪ My belly belly button ♪ – And we added So Dang Dark. ♪ I’m not afraid of the dark ♪ ♪ I’m afraid of what’s in the dark ♪ – That wasn’t initially a must-play, but those songs that have the most views of anything that we’ve ever done. The songs that, if you don’t know us from anything else, you might know us from those music videos. – They have the most views except for, you didn’t mention OCD. ♪ I gotta make things right ♪ – OCD. – Doesn’t apply. – Which is, we took a different strategy on OCD. We did play it but we’ll talk about that in a second. And we were very self-conscious. First of all, we knew that we were gonna try to do a show that didn’t cost us a lot of money. So that meant we weren’t gonna have a big screen. Now the Tour of Mythicality shows have a screen behind us that’s an integral part of the show. But that’s a very expensive thing and it raises the cost of us actually doing the show and we were like– – Especially for a one-off show. – If there’s a way to do this show without the visuals, then we should try that. And so we were like, okay, that’s just gonna be us up there rapping and if you listen to a song like I’m On Vacation, especially I’m On Vacation, you’re like, oh this is so much about the visuals. So many jokes are referencing what’s happening on camera. If we don’t have a screen, can we still do this? – Does it make sense? – Will it make sense? And also there was a– – And my point is, how many people are there who’ve never heard the song? – Right, you’re right, you’re right. – Or seen the music video. – I’m always thinking about the person who is walking in for the first time probably to a fault. I’m always thinking about the audience who hasn’t heard us yet. – I thought this was the tractor pull. – Right, and so– – But I’m gonna sit down ’cause they’re singing about vacation. – So and we also felt pretty self-conscious about getting up there and rapping, and so we did a, you know, I don’t wanna give away everything that we did because we’ll probably do it again when we tour, but, we have a way of couching the fact that we’re performing these songs that are– – We addressed it. – That are visually motivated. – A couple of notes, I’ll say, VinCon. VinCon, at VidCon London, for that show, there will be a screen. I believe, so it’s not that whenever… Don’t assume that, if you really want a screen, I’m not gonna say there won’t be screens for when we come to your town or whatever the case may be or for VidCon London. The other funny story, you know when we left stage, then we do this quick, well we had this creative way to come out as Rabbit Lightning to kinda make that transition, but my mom told me later that, of course, I’m Lohn Lightning. Hi I’m Lohn Lightning, I come back out there and I’m talking and Lewis, my mom’s husband. Technically my step-dad but I don’t call him that ’cause he married her after I was married and had a child. He’s just Lewis, okay? Don’t worry about it. I love him. I love Lewis and that’s what I call him, okay? He’s not my step-dad. – You could call him Dad, he’d probably think it’s cool. – Just call him Daddy? Papa? That would be Granddad, okay, so anyway, my kids call him Papa. That’s cool. He leans over to Mom. He’s like, “He’s good.” My mom’s like, “What?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s cool that they let them “come out there and do it.” ‘Cause we said, we got some friends who are coming out here. We’re gonna give them some time. They’re trying to make it in the business. He didn’t know it was me. (Rhett chuckles) That’s why he’s not my step-dad! – You should take that as a compliment that you were a very convincing redneck. – My mom spent the next five minutes trying to convince, “That’s Link. “That’s Link.” “Well it doesn’t sound like him.” “It’s an act, he’s playing a character.” “Well, he’s good.” (Rhett laughs) “He got me good,” and you know, he has that catch phrase. – [Together] Good, good, good! (both laughing) – Yeah, he does, my kids learned that. – I’m gonna start saying it, man. – Good, good, good. That’s what he says. Do your pushups. You been doing your pushups? – Yeah, Papa. – Good, good, good. I didn’t know that was you. Good, good– – Now one of the things that I did after. So anyway, writing some songs that didn’t have a visual in mind from the beginning. I feel like I’m always thinking about that, like, the chance that we get to perform for an audience who isn’t completely on our side from the beginning, right? – Yeah. – So when we tour and we sell tickets to a show, we know that the vast majority of people there are gonna be pulling for us, they’re gonna be fans, they’re gonna know the lyrics to the songs, and that’s just an incredibly fun love fest. As Garth Brooks would say in the video that we just watched before this. And it’s just a lot of fun, but there’s a different dynamic, let’s say we’re going to, and we’re not doing this yet, we’re going to like a comedy festival and it’s just a bunch of people who came to be entertained and you have to win them over like a traditional comedian. – Again, it’s– – I’m always thinking about that crowd, especially when I’m writing something new. – Yeah. Ya know? – That’s great. ‘Cause it’s not like you’re gonna lose people who are just gonna love us by making something that is the funniest thing we can make. – And I think that’s why I’ve always been a little self-conscious about getting up there and doing the raps because, you don’t understand, this has over 30 million views on the internet, like people really care about this! – Right. – It’s not just a couple of dads up here rapping. – Right. – That’s a personal problem because a lot of fans said that was their favorite part of the show. But one of the things that I did after that state fair show, I actually don’t even remember the moment that I made this decision. But it was when we decided we were gonna do VidCon London and was like okay, here we go, we’re gonna do some more, which means we’ve got a few months to write some more songs. Pressure’s on to write some more original songs. – Yeah. – And now, I have played the piano in ignorance for years, meaning that, I can sit down at a piano and I can do some things that may fool a layperson into thinking that I know how to play the piano. I don’t actually know how to play the piano. But if you play in the key of C and you stay in the white keys and you, you can make people think that you can play the piano. Right? And I have written some of the instrumentals for our songs have been written on piano but it’s very much like, I’m not playing, I’m just kinda piecing things together, ’cause I know what the notes are. – Uh-huh, yeah. – But I was like, what would it do for us if we incorporated a piano into our act? Could I learn how to play the piano in time for us to actually write some songs on piano and perform them at VidCon London? – Or, my response was, what if we incorporate a guy dressed like a piano in our act. – Yeah. We talked about that for about 15 minutes. (Link chuckles) – No we didn’t. So this is just you in your own little space thinking about this. I mean. – I also– – Your space. – First of all, we have a piano at the house, right? We have like– – Yeah you do. – An upright piano. So what I did is– – I also have one of those. – I sat down at the piano, as I do sometimes, just to kinda mess around. And– – Twinkle the ivories. Tinkle? – And I’ve written a couple of songs like that– – Swirl them? – The Buddy System season two Family Mans. – Tickle. – Family song. ♪ I’m a family man ♪ Family Man song, that was written on the piano, but again, if you listen to it, it’s super very simple rhythm. I sat down to play the piano and I play for like 30 seconds and then Locke is like, “Dad could you not do that right now?” ‘Cause it goes throughout the whole house. And at that moment, ’cause I was also watching a YouTube video about how to play so that you can accompany yourself singing, because that was something I’ve never done because I never thought that I would need to perform it live, I was just like, I’m just gonna kinda chicken scratch, chicken peck this piano enough to then translate it to guitar or put it in Logic on midi or something like that. – Right, right. – But I don’t have to actually play it and sing at the same time. But I was like, well, I’d like to learn how to play and sing at the same time. It can’t be that hard if I can already do it with guitar so of course, you go on YouTube, and there’s like, I learned some mind-blowing things, that I have my hands backwards, not like this. Not like playing like this but I was playing the bass notes, I was doing it wrong, anyway– – No, I wanna know how you were doing it wrong, ’cause this is interesting. – Well, so what I was doing is, and I think that this is a way that you can play the piano is, so your left hand obviously is playing lower notes and your right hand is playing higher notes, to put it very simply, and– – If you’re sitting in a traditional fashion. – Yeah, if you’re sitting backwards, reverse it. Also turn around so you can see the piano. (both laugh) – Was that the start of the tutorial? – Yeah. – Hey, we can make a funny piano tutorial. If you ever learn how to play a piano, we’ll make YouTube tutorials. – I can’t yet. I’ve got a couple of months to figure it out. So what I had been doing when I sat down to write something is I would play a chord, I kinda figured out pretty quickly that if you just separate in the white keys, if you do every other key and you do three of them together, you’re playing a chord. – Yeah, I knew that. – Right? And then I would play some kind of melody with my right hand, which that is a way that you can play piano if you are playing a song that isn’t to be sung because you’re playing the melody in the upper keys. – You’re like playing the elevator version of Coldplay. – Right. But if you wanna play so that you can accompany yourself, and again, if you know anything about piano, you’re like, this idiot doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but I am giving you my layman’s understanding of this which, come to VidCon London, I’m gonna be playing the piano and singing, so, yeah, take that. – We’re also gonna charge you for this part as a tutorial, like this is a paid tutorial. From someone who has not yet learned how to play the piano. – But– – It’s like, that’s so you, by the way. Like, again, I admire this about you, like, you could become convinced to make a tutorial as you’re learning so it’s just like, all right. Day two of me learning to play piano, this is what you do– (Rhett chuckles) – Yeah, man. Well okay so what I learned and that was a revelation to me is that if you wanna play in a way that you can accompany yourself while you’re singing, you’re playing the baseline with your left hand and you’re playing chords, basically rhythm, and chords with your right hand. – And then you’re playing the melody with your vocal cords. – And you’re singing the melody. And a lot of songs, some of the most popular songs ever written on piano like Let It Be by the Beatles, is like, when you break down the piano, it’s like this is incredibly simple. It doesn’t have to be complex. You don’t have to be Jim Brickman, there’s a shout-out. He’s a professional pianist. – Is that right? – Look him up. I used to have one of his albums. – What? Okay. Please keep going, let’s forget that shout-out. – I think I got it through one of those– – Jim Brickman on Instagram. – BMG Music thing. Anyway, so this was a revelation to me and by the time I finished this YouTube video– – You were in tears. – I felt like, I was on my piano. And I had gone back to the piano and then the kids had been like, “Dad, you gotta stop playing,” at that point I went on Amazon and I said, you know what, I feel inspired. I wanna write some music on the piano, but I’ve gotta be able to do it whenever I want. I need a keyboard, ’cause I need to be able to put my headphones on and play to my heart’s content. – Keytar? Did you mean to say keytar? – Keyboard. So I bought a keyboard, a Casio. I didn’t wanna get crazy, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t wanna get too expensive. – Okay. Does it have the buttons for the beats? (mimics electronic drumming) – It does but I’ve not– – Bossa nova. – I’ve yet to activate those. – Oh you haven’t even activated? – I don’t play beats. – I owned a keyboard at my Nana’s house. – I’ll play the beats for you so you can rap. – Once I stopped playing with the Castle Grayskull, I wanted a keyboard. And I put the stickers for the notes on the keys. Have you done that to your keyboard? – I don’t do that, the stickers are in my mind. – Really? – Here’s something though. This is something that has been super exciting. Now I don’t wanna build it up because– – We may get busy. – The song, I’m only gonna promise that there will be one song on keyboard. – Oh gosh, that’s gonna be hard to justify bringing – A keyboard. – Bringing a keyboard? Okay, there’s gonna be two songs on keyboard. – Can I play too? – Yeah you can hit the high notes. (chuckles) – I think this is a bit. There’s gonna be a bit about the keyboard. – Yeah yeah, we gotta justify bringing it. You’re completely right. – What about drum machine? – We can get into that. But– – I’ll buy a drum machine. – One of the things that I have figured out– (Link mimics drum machine) Is, okay so, my guitar playing is pretty limited. I can play a very reliable rhythm. I can play bar chords up and down the neck. I can play all the standard chords. I can play a few chords that are sevens or diminished or whatever and I do all this mostly by ear so I don’t really know, when I’m playing a weird chord, I have to go to an app on my phone and know what I’m playing. I never took music theory, I just kinda know what chords I’m hitting. But pretty quickly in my experience, if you’re limited like me and you never had a guitar lesson, you pretty quickly just get to the end of what you can do on a guitar in terms of writing songs. Okay I can basically play in any key in the standard rhythms or whatever, but I can only do a few sort of altered chords. It’s mostly just majors and minors, straight stuff, maybe a seventh or something like that. But when you sit down at the piano, and you just– – Does it spread for you? – You combine a few things and you’re like, oh, well sometimes I’m hitting the base note of the chord that I’m playing. Sometimes I’m hitting a different chord from the base note that I’m playing, and the cool thing that has happened is you begin to hear like a genre, like an era of music coming out of the piano. So like, I’m playing, I don’t remember what the chords were, but like, I actually mis-hit hitting a G and a G at the same time and the chord was a little bit too high and then I kinda corrected it, but just going from that step up to the G, it sounded like an 80s pop song. And all of a sudden you start finding that these, the world of music that can be explored on the piano, it just suddenly hit me and I was like, why did I discover this at 41? – Do you think that, ’cause it makes me think, we got a piano in our house and I invested in piano lessons for all three kids and you know, we found a good piano instructor who I listen in on what she’s telling the kids and it’s like an inspirational, it’s like a college music appreciation course. She’s amazing. Also teaching them guitar. Again, a credit to you. I think this is the difference between the two of us. I was making fun of the confidence that you would start, you do a tutorial before you know how to do something. I was really making fun of the fact that you’ll leap in and say, I’m buying, doing what you do. For me it’s like, well I never learned the piano, but I wanna give my kids that. It’s funny that that’s been my application. ‘Cause I did have enough understanding, it’s like, if you can learn piano and understand music in that way, it translates. I just felt like it translates so much more in terms of like okay, then you can move to guitar, or even drums or whatever. Because of what you’re describing that you’re discovering as a middle-aged man, I am curious if our kids, if they’re connecting those dots, or if it’s something that like is within you. All of our kids, your kids too, they played for awhile. – But it’s funny– – They’ve done pretty well. – My kids are very much like me and my wife in a lot of ways, but the things that I see in them. Okay so both of them took guitar. Locke took guitar, Shepherd took piano. They took it for awhile and then they kinda just lost interest. But when Shepherd since, and they both, they still both want to play from time to time. But both of them, maybe Shepherd a little bit more than Locke, took a very different approach which is the same approach that I always took, like, when I learned the guitar, yeah I’ve got the book and learned how to play some Eagles songs or how to do some Lynyrd Skynyrd riff or something like that, but the technicality of getting it exactly the way that the record sounded, I lost interest so quickly. I would get an idea of what they did and then very quickly turn it into something original. I was much more interested in writing songs, and I’ve always been that way and I see the thing with Shepherd will sit down at the piano and he’s supposed to play what’s in the book, what the instructors told him to play, but he’s making something up. – And that’s great, that really is great. I think for me it was– – You really need both in a perfect world, you know? The training and then the inspiration to create your own stuff, but. – If we go back to the Wax Paper Dogz days, neither one of us could play and we were both lead singers in our garage band in high school, right, and then you were the one that made the decision, this double lead singer thing ain’t gonna work. I think for me it’s learning to play guitar or do anything, it’s like, if I feel like I can’t invest enough to do it perfectly, to invest deeply and it be a lifelong commitment, I would just rather not do it. That’s a subconscious approach that I have that’s like, well I can’t do this but I can give it to my kids. It’s very interesting, it’s just a totally different, it’s a way that we’re very different. I just find it fascinating that… Without any particular point. – And I think one of the reasons I started playing guitar in the Wax Paper Dogz wasn’t just because it was a little cheesy to have two lead singers and we weren’t NSync or anything like that, was that, well if I didn’t start playing guitar, we were just gonna play the songs that Vinny wrote. – Right. – Or covers, right? – Right. – If we wanted to actually create, you had to get the instrument to enable the creation. – Yeah we needed fresh rip-offs of The Eagles. – And then that was when we started writing songs that were in no way, shape or form good. But were sort of the building blocks of learning how to play music together, which, that’s another thing that I wanna talk about because something you said. So we were practicing for the concert at the state fair and one of the songs that was not written on guitar, and actually, back when we did The Mythical Show, we collaborated with Dan Avidan of Game Grumps and Ninja Sex Party. Good friend of ours. – Game Grumps didn’t exist. – Game Grumps didn’t exist. – He had just moved to LA, Stevie introduced us. – And we were like, when we signed up for The Mythical Show, we were like, this is a lot. We have to do so much and we’ve got no money because we didn’t ask for enough money to make it. – But we gotta do music videos. Because that’s part of what we do. – And she was like, well I know a guy who A: is a good musician, B: is very funny, who might be able to help you guys write all the music that you need to write for this. And so we were like, yeah, we’ve never done that. We’ve always written our own stuff and there’s this sense of pride with not getting any help, but then we were like, you know what, let’s see what happens if we collaborate. So the Have You Ever song– ♪ Have you ever ♪ ♪ Have you ever ♪ ♪ Feel free to share ♪ – Basically the chords, and in large part, the melody was written by Dan. – Actually– – And a lot of the lyrics. – I think specifically they were written by Ninja Brian. Because– – Oh the music part. – I don’t think Dan, I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think he plays anything. I think he’s like me. And I think that Brian is like you. And he plays keys and plays all the multi-instrumentalist. Ninja Brian from their band Ninja Sex Party. – ‘Cause we said we wanted to do something that was like Hall and Oates. – I don’t know. – Or did they just, is that what they just came back with? Because that’s kind of– – Here’s what happened. Yeah, they have such a 80s soft rock sound. I mean look at, they put out two cover albums like Toto and stuff on it, it’s amazing. He just does that, they do that on instinct. So we, yeah we determined we want a song called Have You Ever that’s like, things that you can relate to but then increasingly goes to crazy things that just, it falls apart. – And we may have written some jokes that he could take and turn it into lyrics but it was– – He wrote, they came back with a demo for us. First time we had ever collaborated with somebody musically, it was over email. – ‘Cause we never met Ninja Brian. – Not at the time, no, and we were like, well he lived in England or something. – He was studying in England at the time, yeah. – Or he was a professor. I don’t know, lots of weird stories going around. You can’t believe those guys. Anyway, the demo came back and it had this 80s vocal effect on it, we’re like, damn, this sounds like Hall and Oates. We didn’t like the chorus so we re-wrote the melody of the chorus and worked with our producer Mark on it. – Okay yeah. – That’s a part of the process that I really enjoy. Again, I like to take something and tweak it. I like to perfect things so starting from nothing, thin air is like, is a nightmare for me, it’s like gettin’, it’s like a plane crash. Give me something. – The thing that you said when we were practicing in Have You Ever, there’s a moment at the end where you just start going nuts singing. – Yeah. – Now first of all, I had to translate this very Hall and Oates 80s rhythm that needs to be a drum machine and a keyboard into guitar which, it loses a little bit of its Hall and Oates-ish-ness-ness when you translate it to guitar. But, you made the point when you were trying to memorize that last part and we kinda changed the lyrics a little bit from what happened in the video, that you were like this is a melody that I never would have come up with naturally and so it’s difficult to lock into my brain. – Right. – We had the same experience when Ben Bram, we partnered with him to write the– – He produced Pentatonix. – Yeah he’s a Pentatonix producer. – Won a Grammy. – Who helped. We basically wrote the lyrics for… – Barbershop quartet. – If I Had Another– – Me. – If I Had Another Me. – Had another you? – Buddy System season one song. And then he turned it into a four-part barbershop quartet song. – He gave us the individual tracks to learn, they call them the stems, and it was very challenging. – It was so difficult for us to sing, because when you sit down to write a melody, you are referencing a cacophony of all the music that you have listened to and kind of sung along to that you’ve connected with and kinda your brain has melded to. And for us, if you reach into this jukebox of our past, there’s gonna be this mix of things and one of those things is gonna be a lot of country music, right? – Oh yeah. – So not just Merle Haggard, not just old country, but Brooks and Dunn at the time that Brooks and Dunn was popular and Diamond Rio, and Clint Back, Garth Brooks. There’s a lot of that. – There’s a lot of country, it’s not all country. – It’s not all country, that’s one element of it, right? – Yeah. – But then you’ve got R&B, soul, even some like, getting back into, for me, and I assume you as well, Elvis and Chuck Berry and that kinda thing. But these songs are all, for me especially, a lot of it is kinda coming from this southern rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, country, R&B, but a lot of southern music, you know what I mean? And if you just listen to the melodies and they way that they kinda come out when they naturally start singing something, they can kinda be tied back to all those genres that influence and that’s one of the things that excites me about the piano is that, it throws you into a different place that just naturally doesn’t come from somebody who’s limited in what they can do on the guitar like I am. – Yeah. – But it leads to situations where if you collaborate with somebody and they come up with a weird melody, it’s very difficult going from that note to that note. My brain has never made that connection before. – I would consider music my main hobby. I think that the main things I like to watch are music documentaries. I’ve started just the habit of just laying in bed and listening to music. And then I started not just listening to music, on headphones, while my wife is already asleep or something. She usually goes to sleep before me. I just lay there, listening. I just love to analyze. But then starting to watch music videos. Like I got on this Chicago kick, I was telling you about this where I was like– – You were telling everybody about it. – Yeah I couldn’t stop talking about it. – There were like three dinners that we went to. I don’t know when this is coming out. We recently took a trip for, to shoot some GMM in another place. I don’t know when this episode’s coming out in reference to when those are coming out, so I’m not gonna give away what it was. – You mean Memphis? – Can we talk about that? – I don’t know. Who cares. We went to Memphis, went to St. Jude. We’re talking about it– – It was awesome. There’s gonna be videos about it. – I can’t keep this stuff straight anymore. I can’t wait to go back to my hotel room and just listen to music by myself and have my own quiet space. – But then– – I started watching Chicago, the band– – The next meal. What I’m getting at is the breakfast after the night. We would get together in the morning, we’re getting ready to shoot the next video and we’re all in the hotel lobby eating something. And you would start talking about what you experienced in the documentary and I kinda looked around and I was like, who in this group is actually listening to Link right now? And my impression was no one. (laughs) – Did you know that Chicago the band, I mean the first lead singer who passed away in a tragic situation that I don’t wanna go into, but then the second lead singer was Peter Cetera, this amazing vocalist. And then I’m watching these weird videos on YouTube where they’re like, where he’s leaving the band and it’s really weird and the songs are amazing. You’re My Inspiration. They brought in a third lead singer, and they, Chicago re-vitalized their band across three amazing vocalists. That’s just not something that anybody can do. Until the next night when I discover Genesis did it. Let me watch the VH1 Behind The Music on Genesis until I fall asleep. – Are these just uploaded to YouTube? – Yeah they’re ripped on year, 4:3 ratio. I guess the point I’m making is that I love music, I love how it moves you. When you talk about melodies, I mean, I’m so obsessed with hip-hop because it seems to me to be changing so much quicker than how I’ve experienced any other music changing. And it’s a puzzle to figure it out and to appreciate it and not just write it off and once you hear someone who’s amazing at it, like okay, you can reduce what Migos does to, again, I don’t wanna go off on all these tangents. – We should do this in another podcast. – And you study the rhythms, it’s like, okay it blows my mind. If I listen to Post Malone, not just because I’ve met him and he says he likes us and he seems super cool and that makes me super cool if I listen to him, I came to a conclusion one night, in my cans. The dude is a melodic genius and I’m not saying that because he thinks that our show is entertaining. – But that helps. – There’s a certain moment where you can just listen to music and you’re like I get it and I understand how difficult it is to invent what he did. Hip-hop is the place where– – And it’s super distinct too. As is demonstrated by the episode that we had him on GMM, where I did Mary Had A Little Lamb. ♪ Mary had a little lamb ♪ ♪ Its fleece was white as snow ♪ ♪ And everywhere that Mary went ♪ ♪ The lamb was sure to go ♪ In his style. You start realizing that, you know what, he invented something. It’s completely– – Everything comes from something, but like– – It’s derivative. Everything is derivative, right? – But that’s what’s intriguing. – He pushed it into a place that’s original. – To bring it back to what really matters– – [Together] Us. (both chuckle) – I get a lot of joy out of that. It gets very frustrating, I know it, at many times when we’re trying to, why isn’t this song written? It’s over, we got it. Because it’s like painting, man. I’m not gonna tell you how. – Well– – It’s fun. I’m just really glad, the answer of the question for me is what did touring do for us is that it reconnected us with our passion for music, our connection to music and how that’s a part of what we create. It’s just such a different way to create. – And I specifically– – And then the live performance of it. – I’m specifically excited about, I mean even the songs that we wrote that those of you who came to the NC State show heard, the songs that were written with a live audience in mind and the songs that will be written with a live audience in mind, I’m not saying that they won’t then one day turn into music video, but it always works– – I believe they will. – It always works that way, so if you write something that is funny with just sound, you better believe that adding a visual is only gonna make it funnier. It doesn’t always work the other way though. If you start with, and you have the video handicap right from the beginning and then you try to perform that song live and people don’t have the visual reference, they may not get it. So I’m super excited about that because I think it’s the comedy quotient of those songs is that much higher. But it’s also just, we’re kinda discovering that we didn’t think it was gonna be a part of our greater strategy, but I think that playing music live for people, at least in moderation. Not crazy world tours where we’re gone for months at a time but short stints in places is a part of what we’re gonna do creatively. – In the next phase of our creative endeavor. We’ve come back around to it. Yeah so I think that’s the answer to the question. That’s the huge takeaway is, as we think about 2019, that’s an aspect. Some opportunities start to come out of the woodwork, you know, some really cool stuff that, we got an email two days ago. It was to play at a particular venue, that’s like, oh that would be exciting. – Yeah and the interesting thing is that we, that was very vague, by the way. I love the vagueness of that. A certain venue that would be very exciting to play at. – I can’t say that, I can’t say that. – No, but I am very excited about– – ‘Cause if it doesn’t happen– – You can’t talk about it. – I don’t want anyone besides me to be disappointed. – An interesting thing I could not have told you, ’cause you go back 10 years. We’ve been doing YouTube 12 years but, you go back 10 years and that was when we were already in the throes of full-time YouTube, 2008. We started our business, we were doing this thing full-time. We were doing a bunch of music videos, that was our bread and butter. And at the time, Flight of the Conchords was kind of in their heyday, like their special had come out, I don’t remember the exact year that the two seasons on the HBO but it was right around that same time, right? It’s been like 10 years. – I think it was 2006 though. – And so in terms of comedic, musical comedic acts, you had Tenacious D, you had Flight of the Conchords, you had Lonely Island. Of course Weird Al, I’m sure there’s others that we’re missing. But interesting thing is is that 10 years later, I would have told you that there were a bunch of musical comedy duos out there or trios that are playing music and doing what we thought we were gonna do back in the day and then kinda, YouTube sorta changed our plans. But here we are in 2018 and Flight of the Conchords has a new special. Tenacious D just released a new album and the– – YouTube series. – The YouTube series that’s got Jack’s, Jack drew all that. I watched the first episode the other night. It was hilarious. – Oh it is? – And (chuckles) the animation was so crazy because he drew these pic, it’s actually genius the way that he did it. It’s like, it’s not animated, it’s like a storyboard. It’s like watching a storyboard but it totally works. – When he was here– – He told us a little bit about it. – He was apologetic. Comedically apologetic. – I love the approach. I say that to say that a decade has passed, all this incredible entertainment has been created, but really when you ask people to name musical comedy acts, it’s kinda the same people. We kinda got lucky that, I’m super excited– – I honestly don’t consider us in that group. – I don’t consider us in that group at all, which my point is is, our aspiration, ever since we saw Flight of the Conchords on the HBO special, we were on the road doing like a college tour in like 06, or maybe even before that, maybe 04, and we saw that special on HBO in the hotel room and we both got mad. Because they were so much funnier than us. Just so much funnier, right? I still think that they’re a lot funnier than us, and I aspire to be that funny, but what I’m getting at is that I am at the age of 41 getting ready to learn how to play the piano so we can perform a song in London. Two songs. You can hit the high keys. I am super excited about what this next phase can bring. I mean and hopefully we will be mentioned in the same breath with those guys at some point, right? My point is that they got old too and they’re still doing it. Nobody came along to replace them. Now we’re old too. (both chuckle) But we got a lot more music to play, man. A lot more music to play. – We got a lot more music to play, y’all. – I’m excited about it. – Yeah, I’m so grateful that we decided to do the NC State Fair show and then it led to, hey let’s do more of this. It’s a sense of momentum. And it’s not at the expense of anything else. Good Mythical Morning or the other things that we’re writing. – Yeah we found a way to– – ‘Cause there are other things that we’re writing. – Lots of things that we’re working on that we can’t tell you about yet, but, music is one of them and those of you who’ve been asking, is there gonna be more of this? Yes, there is gonna be more. And hopefully at some point, we’re gonna be coming to a place near you. – Can we end this with You’re The Inspiration by Chicago? We can’t, can we? – I think that’s illegal. – We can’t. You know what you need to do right now. Right after this is over, you need to play Chicago. – Bring it up in a different tab right now. – You’re The Inspiration. And just play that. – You can play it right now. – Play that for yourself. You hate that, Feldman? You hate– – You hate that song? – Listen man, you’ve gotta approach it with an open heart, man. – You’re the meaning in my life. – The vocal treatment. And then go over and listen to some Band of Horses. And you tell me, you don’t like them either? He don’t like them either. Well that’s your problem. – You don’t like Fleet Foxes? – Listen to some Band of Horses and see how that vocal treatment is like a Chicago rip-off. Yeah that’s why you hate both of ’em. I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to– – Wow. – All of a sudden you’re responding as if I’m talking to you. I know I’m looking at you. So anyway, You’re The Inspiration. Music is an inspiration. I think that song was written to music. If you listen to the lyrics, you can tell it’s not, but let’s just say it is. – That song was written to music? There’s a good chance of that. – Do you know that, there’s that Average White Band song– – I don’t know what you mean. – Well I’ll illustrate. There’s that Average White Band song– – Pick Up The Pieces. – No. Not the one without lyrics, you dummy. Listen– – It has a few lyrics. – He wrote a song– ♪ Pick up the pieces ♪ – He wrote at least one song, maybe multiple songs to music. Whoever wrote the song loved music so much that he wrote a song to it. ♪ Music ♪ ♪ Sweet music ♪ – Oh, a song written to music, yeah. ♪ Queen of my soul ♪ (chuckles) Music, you’re the queen of my soul. – Wow, that’s powerful. (chuckles) – All right we’re developing a playlist now. So that’s You’re The Inspiration– – Inspirational songs? – No, leads to Band of Horses with that same vocal treatment. – Ooh, a playlist that starts and then goes through influences, influences, influences. – That’d be hard to do. No we’re just gonna skip to– – No you can do it. – Average White Band. You’re the queen of my soul. – That is an interesting playlist though. You go back to– – Are we still recording? We’ll talk at you next week. – Like a fiddler in the Middle Ages. – Thanks for hanging out with us and for indulging in us just analyzing our own creative– – Yeah, that was very self-indulgent. That won’t happen all the time. Sometimes you just need to talk about yourself. To hear this Ear Biscuit in its entirety and make sure you don’t miss an episode, follow the links in the description to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are available. – [Link] To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. – [Rhett] To watch more of our daily show Good Mythical Morning, click the playlist on the left. – [Link] And don’t forget to click the circular icon to subscribe. – [Rhett] Thanks for being your Mythical best.