There's music, there's comedy, and then there's Kenny Gray.
The son of a musical family from New England who began producing his own work as a teenager, Gray spent a decade trying to be taken seriously as a musician. Instead, after moving to Los Angeles in 2022, it was his humorous work, parodying artists he loves with infectious enthusiasm, that has captured the attention and imagination of the music world, as his rapidly growing following on social media clearly showcases.
On his very first tour supporting his digital work with supporting act DUTTS of The Birthday Boys fame, Gray sat down for an interview before his show at Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles to break down his process, tease future projects, and explain how taking his music less seriously has become serious business.
Matty @ TND: Okay, so how'd you get your start in musical comedy? What was the genesis of this idea?
Kenny Gray: That's a good question. I've always been making music ever since I learned how to produce in GarageBand when I was like 15. I've been making like dumb songs for friends for a really long time, always as sort of like, 'I'm making whatever music that makes my friends laugh.' I started doing it a little more seriously when I got involved in sketch comedy in Boston around like 2014, starting to write songs for sketch shows and fake musical theater stuff.
I started doing musical improv, but this specific iteration started a year and a half ago because I did The Artist’s Way and there was a section about 'Is there anything you can salvage from the past' and a lot of my stuff in the early part of my social media is old demos that I was saving for like serious songs that I was making fun of myself for being like 'This sounds too much like Bowie, this sounds too much like LCD. This sounds too much like Devo,' and I was like, ‘What if I just said like I want to just release this shit and get it out of my system? What if I just say fuck it and write the first lyrics to come to my head?’ Okay, this sounds like a Devo parody; I'm gonna label it as a Devo parody.
And all of a sudden it worked because personally, when I was labeling it as serious music, everyone's like ‘Well that sounds too much like Devo.’ But I was like, ‘Well now it's musical comedy,’ and they're like, ‘That's awesome. That sounds a lot like Devo.’ It's sort of just a context thing, and I think it's also how I feel about music as well. So that's a long way to answer your question.
One thing I love about your work is the pure pathos behind it. You aren't making fun of the artists you're parodying, but instead you embrace their style or vibes in a way that's very funny.
Oh, thank you. I guess it's interesting because, from my perspective, like, I have such a negative inner kind of critic that I like try and like rail against, and doing this has been very helpful because it is just like first idea, best idea. People will often say ‘Hey, you should make a parody of this band,’ and I think the truth is, I'm only parodying bands I love. And so it's less of like, here's what sucks about this; I'm more like here's what I love about this band. Like classic rock, for example, it's ridiculous. I love Van Halen. Van Halen's insane, but that's what I love about it, and just kind of zeroing in on like, what if that was, you know, shining a light on that in like a loving way? I guess I’d rather than in a punching-down way.
How do you pick which artists to parody?
Generally, my process is I make demos, and that's coming from not necessarily a comedic place. I'll pick up a guitar or a synthesizer, or I'll hear something and hear a band and go, ‘Well, that'd be fun to make something kind of like that.’ I was just listening to Gelli Haha on the way over here, and I was like, ‘Oh, that'd be fun to make something like that,' and I kind of just make the instrumental usually, and then from there I sit. I'm generally sitting on stuff for a while. I pick it back up, and I like to think, like, ‘Okay, the idea for that I like,’ an idea hits me lyrically, and then I put the two together.
Yeah, I guess my criteria is sort of what I'm listening to or what I think would be fun to play now that I'm doing live shows. And then sometimes it goes the other way. [For example] I was listening to Idles and I thought, like, ‘Putting red sauce on my white shirt.’ Like that was like an Idles line. I said, ‘Well, I can't sing in a British accent.’ I was doing it as me, so on that one, I didn't call it an Idles parody. I was like, it's just sort of a musical comedy song that people are like Idles.
Do you think you're moving away from a single artist parody to more general musical comedy, like on your song "Small Risks?"
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I try not to overanalyze my own stuff too much, but I think in working with other people on tracks, they've been like, 'Is this funny enough?' My general response has been... the joke is that we're going this hard about something so stupid, like it's not necessarily that I'm not a great joke writer, even in comedy. I'm not like the best stand-up joke writer. It's more like I'm gonna sing. It's the way we're doing it. I want to go in that direction of: he's doing something really dumb very seriously.
What was it like working with Adam Pally?
Oh, it was awesome. I mean, Adam, that situation was he reached out to me. He's been following me for a while. I had far less followers than I do now. He reached out to me a few months ago. I want to produce an album, [and] a big part of what he liked about my stuff is that I was also using production as the joke. Like, I'm producing things in the style of this stuff, and he was like, ‘I have a bunch of demos and like I think like you can translate the humor musically,’ and so I don't know when it's gonna come out or what it's gonna do.
But in April, he reached out to me a week beforehand, he's like, 'I've got a studio for 48 hours. I want to record 10 tracks. Can we do it?’ And we just, you know, we just recorded 10 tracks in one or two takes as fast as possible. I'm playing a lot of the instruments. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, he's great. I mean, I think he has a similar sensibility of: let's do something dumb very seriously, and let's let the looseness be part of it.
SNL: Would you rather host or be a cast member?
Honestly, cast member. Because what I do is write music pretty much weekly, really fast. That's the avenue to do that, or it's an avenue; it's not the only avenue. But something like The Lonely Island. There's something beautiful to me about the fact that they made, what, a hundred songs? Quantity paves over a lot of anxiety for me. As long as I'm still going, something's coming. But you know, I'll take musical guest too.
Last question: Pitch Kenny Gray to The Needle Drop fans.
Head bang, rave, and laugh all at once with songs that celebrate how wonderfully ridiculous the world of music is.
