The Gregory Brothers Recap How The Group Got Their Start, And Who Among Them Is The Master Of Memes

erhaps one of the biggest success stories to come out of the early days of YouTube, The Gregory Brothers are a musical quartet comprised of Evan, Michael, Andrew and Sarah, best known for their music videos that take mundane clips of news, political debates and viral videos, turning them into hilarious songs. Since the group has been deeply immersed in meme and internet culture (with hits like the “Bed Intruder Song”) from the start, we invited them to conduct an interview to recap everything from their childhood to present day, as well as getting to the bottom of which Gregory Brother was truly the master of memes among them.

Q: Hello, everyone. Well, I think we’re setting a record here for most people we’ve interviewed at once. That being said, can you guys each kick us off with a little bit about who you are and what you do with the group as far as your role?

Evan: I’m Evan, the oldest brother. My main role is managing “The Gregory Family Doghouse,” which is a piece of ‘50s kitsch that Andrew found in a Goodwill, where whoever in a family messes up by “trying some shenanigans” gets publicly shamed by having their avatar hung in the proverbial doghouse. We’ve had it up for more than 10 years, and very early on decided that positive reinforcement needed to balance the shaming. So Andrew added “Valhalla” on the other side, which you get into by “achieving” some shenanigans, as opposed to merely trying. When we’re making videos, my role is doing some music stuff and managing the visual effects. When we’re playing live, I’m usually at the piano. I’m married to Sarah, a critical female brother, who’s usually away from the studio these days herding our three small kids.

Michael: I’m the youngest bro, and I’m in charge of meme consumption so we can make sure to hear the ripest meme melodies. I’m also in charge of making the smoothies because I have the most practice perfecting the fruit ratio -- not too much banana and not too little. Just kidding, we’re all VPs of meme consumption.

Andrew: I am, as you may have guessed through the powers of deduction, the middle brother. I am usually in charge of being angry at people on the phone on the rare occasions that we have to do something like that. When we’re making videos, I’m often scouting what found footage we’re going to work from, working on the lyrics side or working on the video edit. I will note the Doghouse/Valhalla board was actually a housewarming gift! My best friend and I moved to Brooklyn together in January 2006, and his much older brother sent us a big box of housewarming stuff that he and his wife had grown out of. Fourteen years later … I have apparently not grown out of a lot of things in that care package.

Q: Okay, so before we dive into current stuff, I’d like to hear about each of your backgrounds and how you got into music in your younger years. I’m kind of envisioning a Partridge Family household [laughs].

Evan: Our parents were both teachers, but loved music and always had it in the house. All three of us took piano lessons and spent lots of time singing. There were some Partridge-esque moments when our neighbor would have us sing as a family to entertain the local Lions Club chapter, but mostly, we weren’t collaborating as peers because a six-year age differential is basically interplanetary when you’re a kid. That came later.

Michael: I’m glad our parents listened to great songwriters when we were little. The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Dolly Parton and any Motown is absolutely essential for me, and even when we took piano lessons and learned discount versions of Chopin or Mozart, you could hear that common thread -- this melody, whether it’s written 1.5 billion years ago or 50 years ago or this year -- hits the brain in just the right way … you know, that “existence is good” kinda way.

Andrew: I have often denied these Partridge family accusations only to one or two minutes later be describing these Lions Club gigs we had to someone and … trailed off mid-sentence. I guess that’s pretty Partridge Family as far as that goes. We grew up in a really small town (Radford Virginia, population probably 12K) … so everyone sort of knew each other. We were taking piano lessons from the little old lady down the street after school and voice lessons from our choir teacher’s husband. It was a very small-town existence. Honestly though, stuff like the Lions Club concerts was … not entirely voluntary (not for our parents either, Mr. Umberger really knew how to twist an arm). It wasn’t until we were in our 20s that we started really making music together. I taught myself how to play guitar in college and got serious about songwriting at the same time Michael and Evan were getting really serious about playing piano by ear and composing.

Q: As time progressed, what were some of your first forays into music as more than a hobby? Were you guys ever in other bands, and what were those like?

Evan: Have to say, Michael’s middle-school rock band, “Seven Ways,” has cast a long shadow. Whenever we regret something but cannot change it, we tell each other “swimming, baseball, hockey and pool” … a quote from the Seven Ways song “It’s Too Late.” As for myself, I moved to New York pretty soon after college trying to make it in music and played in a lot of bands nights and weekends. I accompanied a children’s choir, sang in a bar band and played drums in a tiki band at burlesque shows. That was the only time in my life I’ve seen a trashed hotel room. Not on Gregory Brothers tours. We are very respectful.

Michael: [laughs] I co-wrote that song when I was 15 (“It’s Too Late”), and it was about it being too late to fix your life. Who knows, maybe I was hoping some Bernie-Madoff-type would want to buy the publishing or that our fans would hear our record and think we were grizzled 90-year-olds. Simple collaborative stuff like Radford High School drumline was really formative to me because it taught me how to stop obsessing so much over sheet music and start improvising/having fun. It was a running joke for the drumline to play “speed-up” cadences that the cheerleaders would dance along to, but we’d always take it too far until the dancing started looking spastic and fell apart -- Evan was also in the drumline at Radford (no hate, we love you, cheerleaders). At Appalachian State University, being a part of the gospel choir was invaluable -- learning everything by ear, figuring out what vocal parts sound good together and how to arrange them, etc. (the choir/band was incredible, I always crack up when this video [seen below] gets to 1:08).

Andrew: As a former songwriting teacher, Michael, I will say, it’s weird how many teens write songs about their deep regrets and how now they’ll never be able to change them. I heard some real stinkers! But there are some classics too -- think “These Days,” which Jackson Browne wrote at age 16! Other than the very short-lived ska band I played trumpet in during high school (truly the ultimate band-kid thing to do in 1998), my first band was a two-man group in college with my friend, Joe. He played piano, I played guitar and we both sang. We toyed with adding a drummer or a bass player but didn’t like anybody. We were pretty popular on campus! It was really fun. Joe is one of the funniest guys, and one thing that was unique to that band is, even as I was trying to be a “serious” songwriter, there was a lot of humor and punchlines in our songs. Even though all three of us have worked on just “serious” projects, I think our sense of humor bleeds through, inevitably, in a lot of them … which is why “Auto-Tune the News” worked so great for us.

Q: The schmoyoho YouTube channel was first launched back in 2006. Can you tell us what the original plan was for this and what you guys wanted to focus on?

Michael: You needed an account to be able to watch some videos, e.g. an Ali G clip that was deemed too racy for 12-year-olds, so that was my account. It’d be sort of like if we were lurkers on TikTok and then posted and blew up in 2023. There were a couple videos pre-2009, but it wasn’t a regular thing. In late 2008, I had a video that got some traction -- less than 25K views, but that was enormous for me at the time -- and started working with another channel based in NYC, barelypolitical (later, The Key of Awesome), and helped them with videos now and then. When we serialized the auto-tune concept in 2009 with “Auto-Tune the News,” we got lucky and it blew up when we cross-posted on our channel and the barelypolitical channel. We never posted regularly, a month could pass between uploads, but for that year, we focused on some of the weirder stuff happening in the news, or took mundane stuff and gave it a T-Pain / Kanye sheen. The channel name was just a nonsense word I made up in middle school. I’d get bored in class and just write an entire page of made-up words that would sound really dumb to say. And something about the prefix “schmo” and the repeated “O” vowels made me giggle, you know, the way you start laughing at something after you’ve stayed up all night and have three brain cells left -- not in a “this is high comedy/art” kind of way, but a “this is really idiotic” kind of way. But now, I might like the explanation from the schmoyoho song [shown below] better: it’s just a reflection of your dreams.

Andrew: Last year, our mom was going through some old papers and amazingly found that piece of paper with all of 13-year-old Michael’s funny words on it. It was pretty amazing.

Q: Your first video “Michael Gregory Performs Tupac/Twista” was uploaded on April 30th, 2007. What’s the story behind this particular video and how did it become your first?

Michael: I was performing in a talent show doing a “nerd but he’s rapping” character. Now, that kind of shtick has been done a ton, so it’s one of those “was this funny?” things now. Besides, NO one can beat The Lonely Island’s “Shy Ronnie” and “Just 2 Guyz.” There were other videos from that talent show, like an original song that turned into the “Auto-Tune the News” jingle, but I guess I deemed it too cringeworthy and made it unlisted. Oh -- two easter eggs from that video, my friend beatboxing is the wickedly talented Michael Alvarado from Us The Duo, and the guy that says “yeah” at the very beginning is the amazing mastering engineer Dan Millice, who shouts “I’m doin’ well!” in this video [seen below] around 4:13. Why was it first, or the first that’s not unlisted? Not sure, there was no grand plan, and if I went back in time to ask myself, my past self would only scold me for not using my time machine to save the dinosaurs.

Andrew: I will note that Michael’s “nerd but he’s rapping” character was funny enough in 2007 that he made it onto American Idol. Michael went full method, and the entire time he was in line, he read Al Gore’s book. ALSO one thing that I thought was hilarious is that before he started singing for the judges, he ran over to the side of the room and took off his fanny pack. He thought that would make it more believable that it wasn’t a put-on, that this guy would be self-conscious enough to know he needed to de-fanny pack before singing for Randy, Paula and Simon, but he still wore one casually. I think that was so funny of Michael.

Q: The Gregory Brothers channel was then launched on November 6th, 2007. What made you split off with this additional channel and is it different?

Evan: Frankly, the reason we started it was to post videos of our live shows and to have something to support our Myspace page, the linchpin of any band’s career in 2007. Eventually, it grew into what, in 2010, every YouTuber called, “the second channel,” aka, all the extra bits and behind-the-scenes stuff that supplemented the main channel.

Michael: Hey, you can never forget Ice JJ Fish Dos, [seen below] some of the best two hours we’ve ever spent. And yeah, early on, The Gregory Brothers channel was just a band channel with live performances and schmoyoho was the one with comedy/music bits.

Andrew: And there are some other secret channels we can’t tell you about, because we know they’re infringing on important copyright laws, although we are always very careful to say “NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED” in the more info section.

Q: The “Debate Highlights -- in song and dance” video featuring a remixed version of the presidential debate was the first kind of this content released on your channel. Where’d you come up with the idea for that, and was this your first attempt?

Michael: Yeah, that was the second time I tried out doing a current event/something trending since it seemed like it worked really well in the YouTube ecosystem. It was the first time I comped myself into news footage, and it looks awful and there’s a green halo around me. I mean, I was aware of how awful it looked, it wasn’t a goal to get it looking pristine. The goal was to try exercising some songwriting muscles and write/sing a solid hook while teaching myself to edit found footage. Shoutout to YouTube tutorials -- and Jason Gore from “The Best Show,” who was like “you can just download anything on YouTube'' and blew my mind.

Andrew: Over the years as we got rid of that green halo, it was really interesting to watch diverging reactions -- some folks were like, “You’re ABANDONING your made-at-home roots!” And some folks were like, “Finally, but this still looks terrible, you really need to get better at doing masks in After Effects,” and then would ruthlessly mock us if they found out we weren’t even using After Effects.

Q: The various “Auto-Tune the News” videos were also something the channel focused on that led to a lot of success. Who came up with the concept and what’s the backstory behind these?

Evan: “Auto-Tune the News” was a way of serializing this idea of turning speech into song. The news is something that, despite all attempts to the contrary, just keeps happening. We could snag clips from the news and make songs as often as we liked.

Michael: I remember Evan encouraging me to do a follow-up to the debate that got watched … a lot for my 100 subs. I was like, “Yeah, but videos of me just singing at other candidates will get old … wait a minute, what if they were singing?” Then it becomes a back-and-forth that’s a new format -- not a genre of music because you can change genres to suit the situation. That’s when we started working as a band on it, and we’d be over in the apartment doing some late-night footage collages so we could upload the next day.

Andrew: At the time, we had just finished our first long tour as a “serious” band, Michael and I were living together, Evan and Sarah were both living within maybe two miles of us … it just made sense that if Michael was spearheading this other project, we were just gonna jump in and help.

Q: Although those two types of videos aren’t the only things you created, they were definitely something that became a focus for the channel and would ultimately become what you guys were sort of known for. Which one of these was the most important as far as the success that determined the future of your content?

Evan: No question, what we are known for is turning human speech into catchy songs. Those old videos of the 2008 debates are the very earliest versions of us doing that. In the 2009-10 “Auto-Tune the News” videos, you can see us just trying to hone this new craft. It was an evolution. In 2010, we broadened the scope to include viral videos rather than just current events and TV news. That’s how most people found us, through “Double Rainbow Song” and “Bed Intruder Song.”

Michael: “Auto-Tune the News 2” was the breakout that helped people discover that series, so that, eventually, Katie Couric, T-Pain and one of our characters could sing a trio about very thin ice. Then, like Evan said, “Double Rainbow” kicked off the broader “songify this” chapter that made the songs sound even more like pop hooks (though it wasn’t technically called “Songify This” until later that summer).

Q: I personally remember the “Bed Intruder Song” as one of your biggest successes and milestones in music memes. The song was on the Billboard Hot 100, and received lots of other noteworthy awards and accolades. How did you come up with this idea, and once it started getting really huge, what was your initial reaction?

Evan: The thing about “Bed Intruder Song” is that the original interview with Antoine Dodson was already such a massive phenomenon, you can’t overstate how viral it was. Every thumbnail on the YouTube homepage was a different rip of it. We thought our songification would be just a drop in the bucket compared to how the internet, overall, was reacting to it, so we were completely taken aback by the scale and speed of its popularity. Fortunately, we were able to get in touch with Antoine and make a little partnership over it.

Michael: It was wild how that song and original interview crossed over into the national vocabulary. That doesn’t happen much -- even when something has views, it might stay in its corner of culture. I’ll send you a screenshot of a high chart position [seen below] that cracked us up when it was behind Usher and Usher, but ahead of Usher and Usher. Also, keep in mind, Billboard wasn’t counting streams then -- ayo Billboard, if you’re reading this, please amend the Billboard charts retroactively so that the song is no. 8 instead of 89. We’ll send you a basket of fruit if you do -- no cantaloupe or honeydew melon, we know those are the boring ones. With “Bed Intruder,” like with any trending thing from 2010-2020, fans will send us requests and we’ll review them for melody potential. We wanted to make sure this was a Dodson anthem -- using the turns of phrases and humor that roasted the intruder and to make sure we could get in touch with Antoine to take part in the memehood, since, at the time, it was hard for people who were part of memes to even benefit from them. This was before someone who yodeled in a Wal-Mart would suddenly be on daytime TV the next day.

Q: What are a few other songs/videos that really solidified your confidence in the group as far as giving everyone that “Hey, we could really make something out of this!” mentality?

Evan: As early as the 2008 debate videos, it was clear that something had connected. So all of us wanted to invest in it creatively, apart from what we had been doing as kind of a conventional band. But it wasn’t an obvious career path at that point … for instance, YouTube didn’t even have a partner program yet. It was more like a clue that we should develop it. Then, when “Auto-Tune the News” got 1 million views, which if you adjust for inflation, is approx 1.1 million 2020 views, that was a strong signal we could do something with it, and videos started becoming our main thing.

Michael: The partner program existed by late 2007, I think, but it was pretty restricted, so that wasn’t an option for us at first. For me, different “moments” happened in tiers -- first, when Ben Relles and barelypolitical hit me up to work with them, there’s the “whoa, one can get hired to do this, an editing/writing job is fun.” With “Double Rainbow/ATTN” it was “wait, a lot of people do want to listen to songs about turtle fences and rainbows.” With moments like “All The Way,” [shown below] it’s “whoa, this can cross genres better than we thought.” That’s a lot of moments … you know, just a series of “WHOAs” like you’re 3 years old and constantly surprised.

Andrew: And I think we’re continuing to be surprised! Last year, the digital distributor of our songs got in touch with us and was like, “Uhhh … “The Muffin Song” is suddenly getting a LOT of plays.” It was a song we had done with YouTuber Tomska that had done REALLY well, like 20 million views. But it had … suddenly blown up? We did some digging, and it had become a major TikTok meme! Flash forward a year and a half, it has gone gold and is approaching 180 million views. We couldn’t have guessed that would happen two years ago.

Q: All these years later, how many different songs and videos have you all uploaded to the channel or elsewhere online? Of those, can you each give me one or two of your personal favorites you think everyone should check out?

Evan: No idea. A few hundred? We’re not the most prolific YouTubers, but we really started losing track of the overall number when we started producing stuff for other YouTubers to release on their channels. A couple of my favorites from the less-popular dregs of our catalog are, let’s see, “Blind Date Fedora Prank” comes to mind. To me, it’s just a hilarious dry take on old YouTube prank channels, and the catchphrases have stuck around in my life (“we’ll have a GOOD DATE”), but our audience hated it and many thought it was an actual prank video rather than a parody. Michael disappears into the complex character of “Morchael,” best acting since “Casablanca III: This Time It’s Zombies.” Another personal favorite is our ancient channel trailer we made for the second channel, maybe 2013? This is because I had my all-time best spit-take performance.

Michael: It was a blast to make “Song Voyage,” and lately, we picked up our collaboration with Takeo Ischi from Chicken Attack -- we’re calling it the “Takeo Cinematic Universe.” It’s been a cosmic adventure working with everyone involved, including the non-humans (chickens, pig and rat). Another favorite is our “Tosche Station” song -- the longest songification ever because it’s 15 minutes of Luke from Star Wars ruining everyone’s lives by bailing and going to the Tosche Station.

Andrew: “Auto-Tune the News #10” is a classic, and “#3” is a creative and personal high point for me because I found the Joe Biden interview about blasting shotguns, even though it had less than like, 15k views. Years later, Joe Biden’s staff told me they listen to it a lot. The interstitial with Rand Paul is really funny too though and features one of Evan’s most epic performances as Mouse Bear.

Q: What about some that you weren’t such big fans of? Did anything surprise you with how well they were received or how ultimately successful they became despite your doubts?

Evan: We loved “The Muffin Song” when it came together, but nothing prepared us for how big it would become. Once it rolled over from being a YouTube hit to a TikTok trend, it just snowballed -- probably the most important song about a baked good not located on Drury Lane.

Michael: I remember wishing Mitt Romney was a better accidental singer since election years are our most prolific. His voice was hard to squeeze good melodies out of, like a dried-up grapefruit. In non-musical ways, most people in the U.S. probably long for debates like Obama vs. Romney. It’s funny that Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee now -- he was one of the most popular accidental singers from “Auto-Tune The News” and even had the best hook in episode 1.

Andrew: This question is a trap. [laughs] But Evan is right, the “Blind Date Fedora Prank” was not appropriately appreciated.

Q: Normally, I like to ask what someone’s family thinks about their internet fame/career, but I’ve never had the majority of someone’s family also included in the interview. However, can you tell me what your parents make of your online success and the content you guys produce?

Evan: They’ve made their peace with it.

Michael: We’re lucky that our parents never hit us with guilt trips for embarrassing them with online shenanigans. At the beginning, I remember mom recounting and explaining what we did to a neighbor -- and this was after we had some hits -- and their only response was “peculiar …” That mentality (scoffing at YouTube) seems ancient now though, so they probably don’t have to pretend we’re accountants or pediatricians anymore (I’m kidding, mom and dad, I know you couldn’t tell a lie).

Andrew: They are really supportive and, fortunately, just think our videos are funny too.

Q: What about friends or fans? How public are you each about sharing your work? Do you find that most people already know who you are, or is it something you bring up?

Evan: Only big fans know who we are because we’re not front and center in our own videos. Most people recognize something we’ve made over the years, but they don’t necessarily know “us.” That moment of recognition is always very sweet and fun though! “Oh! You made that?! (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme, Bed Intruder Song, Muffin Song, I Don’t Wanna Be Free, Auto-Tune the News, etc.) I watched that (large number) times! It got me through (rough time in school, challenging period as U.S. Vice President, etc.), and I love you!”

Michael: It’s always very sweet, and I appreciate everyone who’s a fan, whether it’s very casual and they listened to one song, or they know every single word to “Hairy Legs.” Sometimes I get neurotic and afraid that when I was sleepy in an airport and ran into someone, they thought I was annoyed because my eyebrows and eyes drooped into a furrowed/annoyed face. So if you are one of those people reading this, please know that I was NOT annoyed and my heart was overjoyed, even though my face had perished. And with sharing work, only if it’s relevant or if people ask or bring it up. Though I love the concept of just busting into someone’s door and shouting, “I CO-WROTE THE MUFFIN SONG, sorry and/or you’re welcome, whichever applies.”

Andrew: I would say all our friends know what we do though, because, generally, you know what your friends’ jobs are.

Q: Alright let’s go back to focusing on your content. Would you mind sharing how the group comes up with ideas for new songs and how each of you plays a specific role?

Evan: As far as looking for material for songifications, the whole universe is fair game … we try to stay on top of the news, plus viral videos and what’s trending in the memeverse. We’re all political junkies, but Andrew’s the biggest history buff and probably the most in tune with the latest hot, sexy C-SPAN clip. Michael’s the most into r/PrequelMemes.

Michael: True, can’t get enough prequel memes, Raimi memes, or really any (insert something here) memes. I do a lot of Know Your Meme browsing, too, especially if there’s one that’s on the more esoteric side, where you feel like Guy Pearce in “Memento” trying to figure out the origin of a work of art or the reason someone is trying to hunt you down.

Q: How many people are involved on your production team when you shoot custom videos or record songs? How much has that changed from the past to more current work as your channel has grown and become so successful?

Evan: Like nearly any YouTuber, we started as a bedroom operation, working out of Andrew and Michael’s apartment. We’d shoot green screen literally under Michael’s bed. It was a loft bed, so it’s not that impressive. Eventually, we “outgrew it” (read: Andrew and Michael got sick of me barging into their home and rummaging around for coffee filters), and we rented a studio space in Brooklyn where we’ve been ever since. With the exception of when we shoot big projects (e.g. “Love Is Like Drugs,” “Song Voyage,” live holiday specials), our team these days is four to five people. Most consistently, we’ve working with awesome music producer, Aaron Beaumont, who’s been in the mix for four years now and does all sorts of stuff on the audio side, tuning/arranging/mixing/mastering and more. Less frequently, but consistently, we work with a pair of videographers, Steve DiCasa and Cody Buesing, that work together as Rethink Films. We met them as employees of Maker Studios back in the day and are crazy about their talent and work ethic, so we use them whenever we can.

Michael: We’ve also worked a lot with Michael Onufrak and Alexander Tso over the years. And the guys in our VidCon band, Alexander Foote, Andrew Pertes, Ben Marshall and Spencer Cohen. It’s a bunch of super talented people, and every time something bigger or more time-sensitive comes around, like the presidential debate songs, we’ll sneak into their apartments with our grappling hook and say, “We’re putting a crew together.”

Andrew: But the core is pretty small. Usually, when we’re shooting something, it’s just the three of us -- even though Aaron works really closely with us now, he’s only on the music side, so he can work remotely a lot or come in at odd hours when we’re not shooting.

Q: What about the decision to focus on YouTube as your main platform? How’d the group decide on that and what other places do you also release your content on?

Evan: YouTube has rarely been the biggest source of income for us, especially because we don’t post frequently or with regularity. But it’s always been the centerpiece of how people discover our work, and so it has always been the focus.

Michael: Right, and I’m so glad we never leaned into something like Facebook. YouTube has had imperfections for sure, but they do have a lot of people who are advocating for the channels/creatives, whereas Facebook seemed to quickly become more cravenly “pay-for-play,” destroying entire industries. We’ll always throw our work up wherever unless a project has exclusivity, but YouTube remains the greatest when it comes to being the place people end up going. Can you watch the best Vines now? Yeah, on YouTube. Remember that thing that was funny on Twitter four months ago that you wanna show someone? You’ll have to find it on YouTube now unless you wanna scroll until you get carpal tunnel. Because of that, it feels lucky to consider YouTube home, even if we go work on other projects from time to time elsewhere.

Andrew: It was sad when Vine died though. I thought that was the first platform other than YouTube that was really suited for our stuff. Although, on Facebook, it’s amazing how pretty regularly stuff like “SPACE FORCE” gets pirated and goes viral in super conservative FB groups, which seems, just a perfect analogy for demonstrating what Facebook is.

Q: Besides your video content online, the group has also put out a bunch of albums and other work outside of your more meme-oriented videos. What’s that process for writing, recording and releasing albums like?

Evan: Every year, we do live holiday performances that are very traditional and are like the last vestige of what we were as a band 10-12 years ago. Singing in harmony … sans-autotune (gasp), piano, guitar, you know. So last year, we finally put out a record that captured that spirit, but it’s totally removed from what we do in the video world the other 11 months out of the year.

Michael: If you’re afraid of earnestness, have no fear, there are some non-serious tracks, too.

Andrew: There are also songs like “Always Summertime,” “OMG,” “Hello Again” and “Say What I Want to Say” that are serious songs that Michael or Michael and I have worked up and put on the first or second channel. Oh, and Blondie recorded one of our songs. [laughs] We write a lot of serious songs by ourselves, and usually, a co-write for us is if we get stuck, we go to the other one for a nudge or some help on a specific part of a song, a lyric or a chord change that is tripping us up. It’s always a fun diversion from what we “should” be working on.

Q: How often do you guys tour and do live shows? What are some aspects of that side of being a musician you like the most, or dislike?

Evan: We don’t really tour anymore, and I miss it because it’s just so gratifying to get that connection to fans in-person. But, of course, these days it would be nice to see any humans in-person. We do perform the songs from our videos as a band at festivals. Honestly, it feels like fiction to even write a sentence about performing. Who knows when live music will ever come back.

Michael: I’m sad in advance that we might not be able to do our NYC Christmas shows like we usually do, but health has gotta come first this year -- we’ll do a livestream and add a cheesy laugh track or maybe a track that just boos us after every song to spice things up. After the passing of Yosemitebear (Paul Vasquez), I’ve been thinking about those performances a lot -- he was one-of-a-kind and that was the most fun I’ve had on stage.

Andrew: I love playing live shows. But the sad reality is that if we stay home and make videos, they get hundreds of thousands or millions of views -- and we can’t play to big enough crowds on the road to make up for not putting out those videos. And our videos are complicated to make on the road.

Q: Who are some of your favorite colleagues currently working on similar music content you love, and who do you collaborate with outside of The Gregory Brothers team?

Evan: We do tons of collaborations, it’s the biggest way we’ve grown over the last few years. Our fans don’t even know sometimes -- we’ll just give a video to another YouTuber for them to release if it feels like that’s what’s right for them, like LaurDIY, Boogie2988, PewDiePie, Jacksepticeye, Markiplier, Tomska and tons of others. But other times, we work really closely with them and we release a music video jointly. Roomie and JonTron, for example, we did bigger productions for “Pizza Love” and “Love Is Like Drugs.”

Michael: People we really admired in the music/comedy space before we started include Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords and The Lonely Island … so it was a dream come true to meet and collaborate with some of them. It was like a religious experience to sing “Double Rainbow” with Jack Black at Festival Supreme, and the debate song with Weird Al turned out better than we could have imagined. His every ad-lib, idea and performance made the video better. On the non-comedy side, it’s always amazing to work with heroes like Blondie, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the HitRecord community. Side note: when we recorded the debate song with Blondie, Debbie Harry recorded more vocals than we’d need in case certain questions were/weren’t asked. It’s part of our process -- we get about 25 percent too much, and then that night, we match what they actually asked. To our dismay, we recorded a question or two about climate change and there wasn’t a single actual question about it. This was 2016, and there was only one question sort of about it in all three presidential debates and that had a caveat about “how will we save coal?” So if you’re a historian perusing the archives of Know Your Meme in 2075, please don’t blame us or Blondie for ignoring the crisis of the century in that song, blame the soft debate questions. Also, on the YouTube front, we’re huge fans of Bad Lip Reading. It’s one of those channels that always makes me giggle like a schoolboy on nitrous oxide. We’ve talked about doing something sometime -- maybe if there’s a bad unintentional singer they get lip-read instead. I’m realizing that my answer is hitting “1Q84” proportions, but we really appreciate everyone that’s worked with us, and I could go 50,000 words thanking them -- it’s helped give schmoyoho different voices/styles than we could have done all on our lonesome.

Andrew: It has been really fun for me to work cross-country with Nice Peter from Epic Rap Battles. He has gotten us out of a bind a couple of times when we needed to shoot something in LA, and he gave us a hand (he shot all of Weird Al’s stuff in 2016 when Al’s trip to NYC got canceled last-minute). I also got to write on an episode of Epic Rap Battles last year, which was fun and different for me. It was relaxing to not have to depend on someone saying something in a speech that I was crossing my fingers they would say. [laughs] I got a line in that I was hoping would start a fight in the comments, and it was to my great joy that that very fight was indeed started.

Q: Although not all of your content is focused on memes, the group has created a lot of songs revolved around them. So how much do you all follow meme culture generally? Is one of you sort of the “meme master,” or does everyone stay current with them?

Michael: We all follow meme culture a lot -- I really admire channels like Grandayy, Cyranek, Kadz … again, there are too many good ones to list without turning this into a novel. And there are so many corners and niches within the memosphere now, memes specific to certain communities and then memes that ascend to being on everyone’s radar across all platforms like the Coffin Dance. They can become great memories/time markers, like instead of remembering 2018 and 2019, you remember the “Year of Bitconnect” and the “Year of Dr. Phil’s Ranch.” I think it was the Robert Frost poem that said: “So dawn goes down to day / and memes may go away / unless in your memory they remain / then the gold can stay.”

Andrew: I think it’s impossible to stay up with each meme. Memes have ecosystems -- Tumblr, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube (and individual YT channels) -- and it’s only a few that hit exit velocity and spread across all the ecosystems. So you just can’t know them all. But maybe I’m just exposing myself as a non-meme master.

Q: What’s the group working on currently, and what upcoming projects do you guys have in the works that we should know about?

Evan: Currently working on a project where I stay inside my house for weeks on end without human contact outside my family.

Michael: Huge coincidence, but same here. Otherwise, the 2020 debate songs and figuring out how to do the next Takeo Cinematic Universe episodes without letting people breathe on each other. I’m practicing now, “QUIET ON THE SET. NO BREATHING.”

Andrew: The debate videos are going to be a challenge because, in the past, we’ve gotten some really fun guests. Not sure how we’re going to do that this fall. We just got out of a script deal with YouTube (Evan and I wrote a comedy pilot they passed on), so now is a good time to think of what the next big thing could be. We are usually working on one or two things like that in the background, and very few of them actually happen, but it’s great when they see the light of day -- they become things like Song Voyage, which we’re really proud of.

Q: Okay we’re gonna wrap things up here now, but I have one last question. You’ve been doing this now for over a decade, so what keeps you going, and what do you hope people get out of your content in the end?

Evan: I keep doing it because I’m scared to quit, the bad man will hurt me (Michael).

Michael: clenches fists and furrows eyebrows [laughs] I don’t see how we’ll ever get tired of making videos about chicken ninjas or presidential candidates that sound like Travis Scott, or pizza-obsessed Spider-Men or memes in general. And doing it while goofing around and trying to make your brothers/sister-in-law/friends laugh is a dream come true.

Andrew: It is truly a blessing to get to sit around with your brothers and make each other laugh. That is our gauge for if our fans will like something, and it’s really fun.

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