Erik Helwig Discusses The Origins Of “Hot Dad” And The Life Of A Comedic Musician

rik Helwig, best known for his work as the comedic musician “Hot Dad,” has been creating music for the better part of the last two decades. Through all the trials and tribulations he’s faced in the music industry during his extensive career, Helwig has managed to adapt and evolve right alongside the internet while continuing to hone his craft. With a lot of upcoming projects on the horizon, and our personal admiration for his works, we decided to interview him to uncover his backstory, creative process behind making people laugh and discern just what it takes to make it as a full-time YouTuber immersed in internet culture.

Q: Welcome, Erik. We appreciate you taking the time to let us interview you. To kick things off, would you fill everyone in on some details about your background, where you’re currently based, and your life outside of Hot Dad?

A: Hi, I’m Erik, and some people call me “Hot Dad.” I primarily make what I refer to as “emotional comedy music,” and also occasionally sketches, shitposts, and poorly edited still image memes. I stream games regularly on Twitch, too. I currently live in Ithaca, New York with my partner (she’s doing a postdoc at Cornell and my career is mobile-ish, so that’s why Ithaca) and our cat, Knish. I actually don’t have a sense of smell. Hot Dad has been my full-time project since 2014, so as far as life outside of Hot Dad, I’m at least sorta thinking about it all the time, even when I’m trying hard not to. I love outdoor things like walks and hikes and exercise generally, so Ithaca has been pretty good for me. These days, I’m more likely to listen to podcasts than music. TV shows, movies, video games (I don’t play any modern AAA titles, though -- too expensive), all thumbs up. I’m really into deals and effective/efficient shopping. I like good beer and food, which is something very surprising to hear these days. ;) I also can’t taste all that well because of the whole no sense of smell thing, so I’m probably not very good at determining whether good food and beer are actually good. Moderate-difficulty electronics repair can be fun. I break a lot of cheap sunglasses by mistake, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Q: Before you got into music as a hobby or career, what did you see yourself doing as a full-time gig when you were a kid or did you always plan to seek a career in music?

A: As a kid, I honestly don’t remember what I envisioned for my dream career. It definitely wasn’t music, given that my parents never worked in creative fields (honestly, I can’t think of anyone in my entire extended family who works/worked in a creative field). My mom was (and still is) a middle/high school guidance counselor, and my dad worked for the DPW [Department of Public Works]. My dad is considerably musical, but he never developed those abilities and thus, assumed he was incapable. He did own a sports card shop for a handful of years in the mid-90s, so I was introduced to collecting/resale at a super early age, which undeniably affected both me and my brother. I played Magic: The Gathering when I was in 4th/5th grade with a lot of high schoolers/local adults.

I really got into video games and computers in the mid-90s, so my dream career guess is just something related to computers. My mom’s uncle was huge into Apple stuff, and she always 100 percent took his advice without question, so we only ever had Apple computers at home (including the classic, garish first-gen iMac that I was told would be able to run PC apps as well as a PC … that was not true) until we got an IBM desktop when I was in 8th grade. I upgraded the video card in that computer, which was my first ever experience disassembling a computer, and it kicked off what became my career in IT for almost the next 15 years. I think I never would have gotten into music if I didn’t have that foundation in tech. It would have been way too intimidating, and given the way I work, I wouldn’t have been patient enough to just have everything I use be a giant gray area that either works, or I need to call someone for help.

Q: So before the days of Hot Dad, we know you were in some other bands initially. Would you mind telling us about a few of your early endeavors in the music world and what those were like?

A: The earliest projects would have been when I was 16ish, but they were often amorphous, and never resulted in anything other than pop-punk/indie/nu-metal covers being performed/practiced. My very first band that actually wrote any material was called Lemon Test and started in 2004 as a cover band the summer after I graduated high school. By mid-2005, we were doing occasional shows and self-recorded and released a three-track CD in the fall. This was pretty much the era of screamo in smalltown Michigan at least, and we were doing this sort of pop-prog alternative thing that wasn’t very well received by scene kids, so we were, I guess, kind of trolls. Our singer had an incredible stage presence, and we brought extra friends (like my friend Alex, who I’d end up founding the YouTube channel with) on stage to play various percussion instruments and guitars that weren’t plugged in. We dressed up in formal attire on our tattoo/piercing-free bodies. It was a weird time.

Around that fall, I was informed that there was a family friend who was a talented session keyboardist/producer in Nashville named Tim Lauer, and I was given his email and informed that I should reach out. I did, and shockingly, he liked our sound and invited us there, paying to record us in a professional studio in the early spring of 2006. We had a meeting with a big record exec, and exciting future plans were presented. We did a second trip to Nashville later in 2006 to record vocals, and then everything started to disintegrate after that. The singing on the new demos wasn't working for Tim, and our singer had just graduated high school and needed some kind of concrete plan for his future after appropriate pressure from his mom. Burnout set in, things continued not to “work,” and Tim encouraged us to fire our singer and look for another, which ultimately happened. Given where we lived, it was, in hindsight, a terrible decision, and one I still regret to this day. Lemon Test had become this exciting and zany live act (the juxtaposition of emotional, powerful music and comedic antics -- huh, reminds me of something else), and we more or less let the advice of a single producer talk us out of existence. I still miss the wonderfully weird and confident chemistry of our full lineup. We floundered around for the next year, writing some new material, and trying out only a single person, if memory serves me.

I ended up playing drums with a local singer-songwriter named Kenny Stahl (a great friend of mine to this day that went on to work with artists like The Alan Parsons Project and Chance the Rapper), who eventually, when we decided to flesh out the live show, more or less re-became Lemon Test because I invited Trey and Corey, one at a time, to be a part of it. Things were good (Kenny was relentless, writing/recording/producing a full album with us, and also feeding us with a steady stream of shows), but it started to become clear that we were more his backing band than he was Lemon Test’s singer, and when he ended up heading to Michigan Tech for an audio engineering program, and things faded. Lemon Test attempted to surface one last time in 2009 when we were contacted via MySpace by a lead singer who ultimately seemed perfect for us. Things were actually really great for a spell, and we were cranking out songs that shocked us. There had been signs that our new singer was dealing with mental illness, but none of us fully realized the extent. And then he hit several new peaks, and it wreaked havoc upon the band. Everyone quit but me, and I started learning guitar so I could try to write new songs and teach new guitarists the parts. I suffered through an entirely uncertain rotating cast of replacement musicians, emotional abuse, manipulation, and dishonesty, desperate to somehow salvage what I thought was a one-of-a-kind project with someone who needed me to not abandon him, until I finally walked away about six months later after I could take no more. Honestly, I was so jaded/frustrated/hopeless that I’m still shocked I even continued with music after what I experienced. Hot Dad likely wouldn’t exist without that period of immense struggle and frustration. Some of my earliest “Woman Titles” tracks were written during that awful period. Everything with the music was just so goddamn serious all the time, and I needed something that was stupid and all mine. So that’s what I did, and that was the very first moment I kinda realized I could do everything myself.

Q: Your first video under the Hot Dad name was uploaded way back in 2007, how’d you come up with the “Seinfeld” parody and what was the plan for your channel/brand at the time?

A: Our first comedy video was actually uploaded to the Lemon Test YouTube channel in 2007 (it actually just got blocked in January of this year because it had a Genesis song in it), and it was a drum instruction parody I conceptualized/co-wrote called “Alex’s Drum Time,” which ended up being a minor success on the Something Awful forums. It unsurprisingly starred my friend Alex, who I would launch dotflist with, the channel that would eventually become Hot Dad after he left to go to college. After “Alex’s Drum Time'' did well, we felt empowered to start making other comedy videos, so we established the dotflist YouTube channel and proceeded from there. The Seinfeld “parody” was just based around this concept that we were really into at the time, originally experienced on “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,” the idea being that you parody something where it’s clear that you don’t fully understand it, or obviously have never seen it before. It creates something surreal and goofy that still ends up semi-grounded because the characters all have familiar names/relationships and viewers can easily cling to that structure while getting totally lost/confused by the bizarro things happening. I still love that idea to this day. As for the channel, we just wanted to make videos that made us laugh, ultimately. Also, I think Alex is super hilarious and could be/have been a comedy star, so I was trying to be the Bob Zmuda to his Andy Kaufman. He was definitely always the star, and that’s how I liked it. We had a lot of ideas at the time (we felt like they were good ideas, too), and we did our best to make them a reality. They ranged from sitcom “parodies” to fake instructional videos to a fully scripted Twin Peaks ripoff show called “Svenom” that we did a bunch of episodes for. He did stand-up comedy sometimes too, which we’d also post to the channel.

Q: After the first couple of years, how did your channel evolve into what it ultimately became? Was it something you did naturally or was it a specific concept you had in mind all along?

A: There was never a specific idea/goal in mind during either phase of the channel. I’ve always just fumbled my way along until there’s enough substance that it feels like maybe there was a good reason to actually start in the first place. The channel as dotflist existed until around the same time my final band dissolved around summer 2010. That winter, Alex had enrolled in some college classes and I was doing the band stuff (struggles), so we weren’t getting much done, and YouTube as a career didn’t seem particularly realistic. We decided to move the band to Ann Arbor in June to try and find new members and opportunities, and Alex agreed to come along for the summer before planning to head out of state to college in the fall. We pooled our money together and bought a Canon XL1 that we planned to use to film something ambitious during those final months, and then we’d figure out where to go from there (if we’d go anywhere from there). Ultimately, things were not meant to be -- the XL1 arrived with mysterious issues, we ended up buying an XL2, but after an unforeseen nerve-wracking two-week shipping delay, the unit arrived completely dead. By the time we got the repaired unit back, summer was over, and Alex left for college.

I never liked that we had built up this niche community of like 250 subscribers who really got us, and then walked away entirely. They felt like friends, and it kinda felt like I was abandoning them. I occasionally shot little things over the next couple of years that I thought were appropriate for the channel, but it never felt the same without Alex, and my video editing/visual art skills were subpar compared to his. Given that my serious composition journey had begun in 2010, I was capable of assembling things that were ostensibly songs. And then one day in 2014, I started singing my version of the “Girls” theme song while my partner was watching the show in the other room and thought, “Why not record this stupid thing instead of just singing it to myself?” And once it was recorded, I synced it to some intro footage (a simple video component I barely had to edit), uploaded it, and ultimately, that’s when Hot Dad was born. Over time, Hot Dad has gone from something snappy and goofy to something a lot more poignant (I hope), and that’s felt natural for me. I do X and if it feels right, I do more of it, and I try to do it better. If I don’t like X anymore, I try Y. I just wanna be earnest and honest. And I prefer to come up with my own concepts -- I’m not really into covering the hot topics or getting involved with YouTube drama. I think that’s made it hard for me to grow beyond the size where I’ve been stuck the past couple years, but it’s also made the fanbase far more loyal and genuine.

Q: You're currently up to around 366 videos on the channel, which ones do you think have been paramount in helping Hot Dad rise to the level of renown you have today?

A: “I Really, Really, Really Like This Image” is obviously huge, and the biggest success by all metrics. Viewers like wholesome content and viewers also like old people Facebook, so it just effectively combined those two worlds. I loved the Naked Banana meme, and I wanted to do a tribute to it, but using only what was there, well, it felt kinda small and restricted. So I expanded the lyrics, and Peter tried out some other tacky, wholesome images and ultimately settled on the classic hedgehog. He made the right choice. The banana appears at the end because I didn’t want to obfuscate the source -- the original, genuine or fake, is by far one of my favorite memes. People love to sequentially post the lyrics, piece by piece, in comment sections, and they also like to debate the specifics of the narrative/motives of the participants. I think that’s been a boon as far as interaction goes, and YouTube likes to really promote it a few times a year. All that being said, it doesn’t drive traffic to anything else on my channel, and that’s been kind of a bummer. As for other big successes, another video I did in like an hour, “It’s Cool to Behave,” also known as “Important Public Service Announcement from HOT DAD (2017 Edition),” got included on a meme playlist and broke a million views. I had literally no expectations when I made it, so experiencing that was fun. My “inverted cover” of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” is way up there too. I came up with that idea on a whim, broke my brain making it, and had the finished product uploaded a few hours later. I was really proud of that concept, and I did a bunch of other “inverted covers” too.

Q: How do you come up with the ideas behind your music/videos? Can you give us some insight into your creative process?

A: There are a few categories for this. Most of the time, I’m doing some kind of labor that isn’t creative, and I start rambling to myself or singing a random fragment of something. Maybe the whole chorus, exactly how it ends up being in the song, or maybe a fragment I eventually tweak and change. I try to just let things come to me, and then I sing them into my phone recorder and hope that I can make sense of what I sang/said when I finally sit down at my computer. I have a lot of ideas in the shower, too. Once in a blue moon, a suggestion is made by a fan in my Discord or on Twitter, and I actually decide to act on it. Not hugely often, but sometimes it just feels right. And then the last category only applies when I’m doing something like “Wrestle” or “TV” where I’m, y’know, doing songs about specific wrestlers or TV shows or some other topic and so I’m digging through Wikipedia pages and assembling lyrics that way. I like to incorporate the same kind of idea I mentioned earlier with parodies, where I get the facts right-ish, but it’s clear that I probably have no idea who the person/show/whatever actually is because I’m putting too big of a focus on the minor details instead of the major ones. Like describing/defining a character using a subplot that occurred in one episode a single time instead of their primary attributes. I think that’s funny.

Q: You’ve released several albums over the years through Hot Dad or other bands you’re a part of. What’s that process like and how does it differ from releasing music on a platform like YouTube?

A: I don’t really feel like I know how to make an album, but I suppose that’s probably the case for a lot of musicians. I feel like when I’m making an album, I’m ultimately trying to figure out how to make an album while I’m actually making the album. The more thought I put into that process, the less I get done. So for me, it’s more about just following impulses and seeing where they lead me. Trusting that my ideas are actually good and worth making, even though I’ve heard them ten thousand times and they’re now boring to me. That’s tough, but I think it’s just part of the process. I also do much better if I have song titles written before the songs themselves are created. Girls Who Care is my other project (it’s still only me, though), and it was the first thing I did after my final band imploded. Hot Dad didn’t exist when I first started composing, and I didn’t have any clue that Hot Dad could exist, so I tried to make “serious” music. I always put that in quotes because I’ve never felt like a serious person when it comes to the topics I want to write songs about, but when I first got started, it seemed like the thing you do when you’re making music.

I wrote a lot of GWC songs from 2011 to 2013, made a demo album, started building another demo album, which eventually became “Light Sleeper,” never really played any shows at all, and then sent some of my work to my incredible producer/mixer friend, Andrew Maury (almost everything I know about music production is from him, and I’m so grateful for that), who said he wanted to produce an album after hearing the latest round of demos. There were a couple of artists he produced tracks for that exploded around that time, so I had this fallacious and silly idea in my head that if he produced my record, I’d have a good shot at exploding too. He sent me sample mixes of a couple of my songs, mixes he completed in under an hour, and while I was entirely blown away, it brought on self-doubt like I’d never experienced before. So once he had all the audio and began the process, I felt like I couldn’t release my poorly mixed demos anymore, that “post-Andrew,” I’d have to wait and only release high-quality mixes. The wait got to me, because I was really excited about “Light Sleeper,” but had nothing to show for it.

That was when it clicked for me -- if I was releasing comedy music, no one would care as much about the quality of the mixes or the recordings. It could exist with blemishes and imperfections. So that’s where my TV themes came in, and Hot Dad’s mission truly began. Oddly enough, my whole view on that has entirely shifted, and now my primary focus is bringing quality back to comedy music because I feel like so many artists are just able to get away with minimal effort because “it’s just for laughs.” I don’t like that anymore. I’m trying to blend additional legitimacy into things that are clearly jokes, and blur the lines between “serious” and “funny.” I want to try harder. I definitely didn’t set out to do that, it’s just evolved/emerged over time. Unfortunately, my dreams of fame and fortune with “Light Sleeper” never came true -- I sent the finished record to hundreds of record labels in summer 2014, and none were interested. Feeling defeated and hopeless, I sat on it for three years while I dove headfirst into Hot Dad and finally released the record to an extremely receptive and kind community in 2017. In the end, I’m glad I did things the way I did, and I’m happy with how things turned out. It was an important learning experience, for sure. Honestly, I don’t feel like there’s a difference between releasing any particular song on YouTube or releasing an album.

Q: YouTube is your primary focus for sharing content, but what are some of the biggest challenges you experience on the platform? Are there other outlets you target as well?

A: YouTube has become quite bad for me the past few years, and it’s extremely difficult to reach my own subscribers. That’s definitely not a unique struggle to me, but when it’s paired with my lack of desire to cover subjects/topics that are trending or easy to share, it can result in some seemingly insurmountable challenges. I’ve made things over the years that were for the views, and while that sometimes works, I always feel kind of oily and uncomfortable after I finish that kind of thing. And if it doesn’t work, it brings on some heavy ennui/melancholy vibes. These days, I try to make things that are more timeless, or more generalized in their subject matter, so they can potentially reach new fans forever. The problem with earnest content is that the views don’t come easy, and I think a lot of my work can be challenging for the uninitiated. I’ve had a lot of people tell me they tried to share my work with friends/family and it didn’t yield a positive reaction. There’s a bit of a learning curve, and while I’m proud of that, it leads to plenty of bouts of frustration. I once read an interview with Tim Heidecker where he said his work doesn’t “spoon-feed you the jokes,” and that’s a statement that’s always felt true for me as well. There’s also the issue that vulgar things often get demonetized, and shorter content like mine is terrible for ad revenue. But given the work I do, there’s not much I can do about that, unless I want to make every video a 10-minute long song, which is a bit much. If I didn’t have an active Patreon (love y’all) and a healthy number of monthly listeners on Spotify (love y’all, too), none of this would be sustainable. With regard to targeting other platforms, if I want to survive, I need as many income streams as possible. So I just do everything. That’s why I stream on Twitch, have a Discord/Patreon, upload music to all the streaming platforms in the most optimized fashion, post video snippets to Instagram and Twitter -- the list goes on and on.

(Hot Dad Fan Art)

Q: When you’re shooting videos and putting those together, how many people work on your team to make them happen, and how has that process changed since the beginning?

A: Normally just one or two people, unless we’re doing a band shoot or something with a bigger cast. Initially, it was Alex and I shooting with a Sony MiniDV camcorder. We were homebodies, but we wanted more visual variety in our work, so I figured out how to chroma key in Sony Vegas, Alex built a PVC frame to hold up a big piece of green fabric, and we started shooting our “Home Improvement” parody in front of a green screen in our basement. After he left, it was just me doing minor editing with a lot of fair use stuff, which was nothing but an endless, frustrating struggle, and resulted in me never making any ad revenue at all the first couple of years (I still make barely anything though). Those videos are slowly being blocked and taken down, one at a time.

By late summer 2014, I had done 69 TV themes, and put that project on hiatus after what felt like enough. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I knew I wanted to keep going in music. So I started doing lyric videos for Hot Dad songs I was writing, just simple stuff. January 2015 led to a Gawker feature, which caused me to do 30 more TV themes. I followed that up with “Wrestle,” which was more demonetized fair use stuff, which led me to finally start a Patreon. And then I went back to songs not about TV shows or wrestlers and began editing basic green screen videos myself, which was always a challenge. As usual, I didn’t feel that great about my video editing efforts, and I started to feel like my work was being held hostage by the fact that no one would get to experience it until I made a video. Since I was never that excited about doing videos, and I never felt my videos lived up to the quality of the songs I was beginning to write, I started not wanting to work on songs, because that meant I had to make videos. I realized that I needed to get out of that very bad loop as quickly as possible, so I made a post on my Hot Dad Facebook page asking if there were any volunteers who might want to edit videos for me. Peter Bjorndal was the first person to respond, and I worked with him for the next four years.

We shot three amazing videos in person, “Burger King (Aims to Please),” “Crazy Tonight,” and “I Like Love,” but mostly it was him writing scripts after hearing my finished-ish song, sending me shot lists, and me shooting footage in front of my green screen and whining to him about having to do hard shots he requested (yes, all of the shots were worth it). Sometimes I had more ideas and input for something in particular, like when I’d “choreograph” a dance routine (that was all me, baby), but usually, I would just let him go wild because the results were so great. And I also could never afford to pay him what I felt he deserved after the initial volunteer phase ended, so I wanted to keep him as happy and fulfilled as he could be so he’d stick around. Hence, pretty close to maximum freedom. All good things must come to an end, and by the end, it became clear that he was far less excited about video editing than he was at the start. He retired this past December and is heading to art school (he’s still doing some occasional design work for me though), and I wish him the best. Thanks for so much incredible work, Peter! Nolan Cooney of the very funny and terrific gr18vidz is my new editor, and we’re definitely trying more of a collaborative thing where I’m giving a lot more input. I’m starting to write some sketches again, too. It’s been a lot of fun, and we’re enjoying plenty of digital laughs together. Things are gonna be a bit sillier for a bit, and then we’ll see where we go from there.

(Trey and Alex)

Q: We’re obviously big fans of your “Know Your Meme” song. What inspired you to create this track, and how did you come up with the concept?

A: I believe I was just talking to Don sometime after I worked with FrankJavCee on “R.I.P. Meme,” and I think he proposed the idea. I said I could grab Frank and Erik, and that was it. I just felt like an appropriate crossover thing to do, and I’m thrilled with how that track turned out.

Q: Given the nature of your content, do you keep up with meme culture? What are some of your favorites currently making the rounds?

A: I would argue I kinda intentionally exist in a bubble to help keep my ideas pure or whatever, but in terms of things I’m regularly consuming, I’m more into specific meme creators like iplaykorntomydmtplants and Tony Zaret than I am meme culture generally, or following what’s trending. I’m really into meme deconstruction and many layers of irony, and sometimes it’s easier to find that in a single creator’s output versus having to sort through thousands of posts from random people. Sometimes I actually think of something that would fit in with an existing meme context, but then I realize that meme was actually popular like a year earlier (I still post it anyway). I do really like the Gangster Popeye-style extremely stupid text on a really dramatic and campy demon/skeleton/fantasy art image thing (that was the first page where I witnessed it, and I was kinda obsessed with the style for a while back in 2014-2015). Similarly, r/The_Pack is solid. I love crankin’ my mf hog and being supportive with the boys. Same thing with da share z0ne, and TeenageStepdad is great, too.

Q: Do you ever dabble in creating memes yourself? Got any to share?

A: Yeah. Initially, I would write jokes and have Peter make them into memes. I’ll include some of those. That was the case for a couple of years. And then last year, after witnessing Tony Zaret’s brilliant work (he’s a super-skilled editor doing intentionally bad work, entirely unlike me -- I am not a visual artist and I know nothing about design), I was inspired to give making my own a shot. I’ve enjoyed learning the process, and it’s been fun and useful to develop the skill set. I have to be patient and I have to execute my ideas differently than I do with music, and that’s a good thing creatively.

(Erik's First Meme)

Q: In a video uploaded to your YouTube channel, you claimed to have performed the first Rickroll in August 2006 when you played "Never Gonna Give You Up" while prank calling a local radio station. Can you elaborate on that and tell us how you came up with the concept?

A: In fall 2005 and 2006, my iconoclastic friends and I were prank calling a local Friday night radio show called the “Post Game Show,” that was, as the name suggests, airing after most sports games had concluded. People would call in and give inane shoutouts to their football son, cheer for a team that won, provide an updated score, awkwardly sing a fight song, whatever. Sports were kind of a religion in my hometown region (not a big surprise), and my friends and I wanted nothing to do with it. So that was how we coped. There was a consolidated school district in the area that was colloquially referred to as “USA,” and people would frequently call in and cheer, “Go USA!” So the initial gag was just to call in and shout “Go Soviet Union!” which the hosts had no idea how to respond to. It was simple and effective, the natural antithesis to the other callers.

The process evolved into much weirder stuff (nothing gross, just like “mistaken calls” to video stores and customer service lines, shoutouts to people with names like “Greg Fakename,” and we’d sometimes falsely lead them to believe we were about to swear and they’d cut us off), and we started recording the broadcasts so we could relive the moments later. I was more into writing jokes than I was performing the actual prank calls, so when I finally got up the nerve to call during one of our sessions, I decided to play what I thought was the funniest song I had in my Winamp playlist, which was “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s a song I always loved, and it felt a lot more anachronistic then than ‘80s pop does now -- the current massive resurgence of the ‘80s aesthetic in music hadn’t yet arrived in 2006, and wouldn’t arrive for at least a couple more years -- and I was into that. It just seemed like a funny thing to do. The host seemed a little perplexed, but that was it. It was just another prank call for our collection.

I never really thought much of it, and my brother chopped up the calls and shared the MP3s within our circle of friends only. There was talk of eventually releasing them publicly, but it never happened because they just seemed too esoteric. Honestly, when Rickrolling exploded, I don’t recall immediately thinking defensively, “Hey, I did that first, and I need to prove it to the world!” I could be wrong about that, but I feel like I didn’t really start talking about it until a couple of years after the fad had died down. It was more like, “Wait a second, I actually did do that, didn’t I? Where are those files?!” So yeah, in 2015, I was living in that I need content for my channel and I’m bad at video editing purgatory, and decided that my Rickroll would be a potentially fun and interesting topic to make a video about. I knew I didn’t have the full proof with me at the time, and I expected people to doubt my claim, but I and all of my friends at that time know that I did it, and honestly, it would have been a ton of work to fake all of the other prank calls and hour-long broadcasts, just to claim something like this.

A couple of bigger YouTubers featured my explanation video in a revisiting old memes piece back in January and approached my story with considerable incredulity, and it bugged me. I’ve never made the claim that I started or invented Rickrolling (this was small-town local radio in rural Michigan, after all), just that I prank called a radio station using the song months before it became a thing according to KYM/Wikipedia, and I had recorded proof of it. Their counter proof was merely “that they remembered it being earlier than I said” (they also suggested I was claiming “I invented it,” when what I actually explained is just that I did it first), which isn’t really proof at all since memory can be so fallible. If you’ve got proof, fine. If not, it’s just noise (I said I don’t like YouTube drama, but look where I am now, LOL!).

Since then, I obtained the original recorded audio files from the broadcast, with the original “Date Modified” dates on them (08-31-2006 and other dates in 2005/2006), and sent them over to Don. I have multiple full broadcasts from the era that we prank called, and also have digital copies of local newspapers that corroborate the scores announced throughout the broadcast. And both dotflist, Alex and my brother Trey were present that night, so they’d vouch for me too. It seems like pretty solid proof to me. I’ll probably end up making a response video, we’ll see!

Q: As a musician, I’m sure you have some strong opinions about music. What three albums would you suggest to readers that you think everyone should listen to?

A: If we’re talking about albums that are cool and important to me that I don’t think a ton of people have explored, it’d be:
* 12 Rods – Lost Time
* Quruli – The World is Mine
* Cornelius – Point

If we’re talking albums that I think are especially important generally, that also had a big influence on me, it’d be:
* Radiohead – OK Computer
* Interpol – Turn On the Bright Lights
* Steely Dan – Aja/Gaucho
* The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin

Q: So what does the future hold for Hot Dad? What’re you currently working on?

A: Generally, I never know specifically what the future holds for Hot Dad. I just keep making things and try to be earnest/honest. I do my best to keep the ideas flowing, funny, and satisfying and follow my whims while trying to occasionally and effectively reach a larger audience. I’m grateful that I get to live my life this way, even if it is hard and frustrating sometimes. I’m also gonna be a part of a pretty amazing upcoming video game that I can’t legally discuss yet, so that’s kind of a big deal that I’m excited about. I’ve got another full-length I’m very slowly chipping away at. There’s always something going on, I guess! Hopefully more collaborations. In terms of specific stuff coming soon, I actually caved into the rising demand for more Girls Who Care and decided to mix/master two tracks that were cut from my “Light Sleeper” record. They’re out on May 8th on all streaming platforms. The relevant links can be found here.

There’s a Hot Dad VR game coming out soon too called “The Hunger: Games Ensemble.” It’s based on a sketch I did a few years ago where I buy a VR headset that comes with what I assume are games based on The Hunger Games movies, but they’re actually all about starving to death to win. A fan (well, now my close friend), Allen, reached out to me and said he was gonna make the games, and he actually did! I couldn’t believe it the first time I tried it out. It’s amazing and so stupid and great. We’re planning to do more VR stuff in the future together, too. VR and video games generally, to me, enable essentially what could be considered interactive sketches. That’s really exciting, and something I think is begging to be explored by people like me. There’s a big difference between including something silly/bizarre in a video and taking an element like that and allowing the audience to actually manipulate/interact with it. Building an interactive world and engine to do nothing but stupid things, gosh, I love it. Just gotta make sure these things are fun! Last announcement: Hypnospace Outlaw, the amazing game I played a character called “The Chowder Man” in (I contributed a bunch of music as the character, too), is coming soon to Nintendo Switch. If you haven’t heard of it, I’d highly recommend you check it out. It’s a mid-90s internet simulator detective game, basically. Very poignant and fun and immersive.

Q: In conclusion here, what would you say is the ultimate goal of Hot Dad and the music you create? Why do it?

A: I have this theory that I’ve been exploring for a while now. Basically, plenty of serious musicians have comedic lyrics. It’s not a hugely unique thing. Satirical, darkly funny, whatever. These creators are approaching “the comedy line” from the position of serious. I’m trying to do the opposite -- I’m approaching “the serious line” from the starting position of comedy. To me, that feels different, and maybe I’m wrong about that, but I still wanna explore the hell outta it and see where it takes me. I mean, maybe it can’t even work. At some point, does comedic music that’s getting super serious just become serious music? I don’t know, but that whole gray area is kinda why I create, and why I describe my work as “emotional comedy music.” Thanks for letting me ramble on and on about this stuff! I hope it’s been interesting, and I really appreciate the opportunity.

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Find more Hot Dad by visiting his website, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Bandcamp, Spotify and official store.