Schtick in a Box: The Secrets to Lonely Island's Success

Taccone, Schaffer, and Samberg spend countless hours scrawling early song concepts on legal pads while trying to maintain a vibe of grade-school grab-assery.
Photo: Mark Seliger

How does the Lonely Island trio keep cranking out instant viral hits like?Motherlover? and ?I?m on a Boat?? They just follow these make-it-look-easy steps. (It also helps to be funny as hell.)

• Step 1: Fire Up the Funny
  Early song concepts (and their catchy choruses) are drafted in makeshift writers? rooms in both New York and LA. Countless hours are spent scrawling on legal pads while trying to maintain a vibe of grade-school grab-assery. ?You?re really just trying to make the others laugh,? Andy Samberg says. ?It doesn?t even have to be anything big, as long as it generates that spark.? The absurdity of real hip hop often throws the team a bone; for instance, ?Like a Boss? is a by-the-numbers riff on Slim Thug?s strangely self-serious track of the same name.
• Step 2: Add Music to the Madness
  To nail the characteristic thump of their tunes, the guys source hundreds of backing tracks from their label, Universal Republic Records, as well as Jorma Taccone?s brother Asa and established hip hop producers. The goal is to pair the brainstormed ideas with a fitting soundtrack. ?The sound quality affects it, too,? Jorma says. ?If you think you might enjoy listening to the song more than once, it obviously has the potential to be more successful.?
• Step 3: Get on Track
  After hours of bumping tunes on repeat, the guys whittle down the selections until they have a track sporting a comically overwrought hip hop and R&B style. This is the key point where the team?s near-encyclopedic memory of rap tropes comes in handy. ?Sometimes you?ll just find yourself sitting there after hours of listening and realize, ohhh. Right. It?s that kind of boat song,? Samberg says.
• Step 4: Tap A-List Talent
  Guest artists raise a track?s profile, and add, you know, actual musical talent. For ?Boombox,? the Lonely Island trio approached Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas while they were hammering out songs for their first album, Incredibad. T-Pain?s instantly recognizable autotuned warble on the Grammy-nominated ?I?m on a Boat? stemmed from a chance meeting in an SNL hallway. A random encounter with Akon at the Grammys led to his soaring chorus on ?I Just Had Sex,? the first single off their new album.
• Step 5: Dispatch a Rough Cut
  Once the talent has signed on, Samberg records his impression of them and ships it to the artist as a guide for lyrics and melody. Which has its disadvantages: ?My Adam Levine impression for ?Iran So Far? was not only terrible, but probably insulting,? Samberg says. The Maroon 5 crooner agreed to sing the straight-faced hook on the heartfelt track anyway.
• Step 6: Do It Yourself
  ?Whether we?re shooting something ourselves for $600 or it?s a six-figure video involving helicopters, we?re making all the same choices,? says Akiva Schaffer, the Island?s go-to director. To pull off shorts like ?Lazy Sunday,? they?ll man the cameras and tackle editing themselves. For their recent batch of shorts, the guys have been crunching the five-day process down to two.
• Step 7: Serve Two Masters
  SNL creator Lorne Michaels and NBC have a higher bar than ?xJoeBlow69x? on YouTube. Shorts like ?Boombox? may have entire verses sliced out for broadcast after audience testing. Excised footage and music typically show up again in the longer (and wildly popular) online and iTunes versions. ?For television, you need to get your jokes in fast, and the SNL audience is expecting it to be the funniest thing they?ve ever seen,? Schaffer says. ?With the Internet, the stakes are a lot lower.? And as a result, fans end up with a variety of Lonely Island laughs to enjoy and share?and a full-length album to blast while droppin? those Hamiltons.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/sdvMdG04w1E/

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