Songs Without Jokes

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We’d be out trying to give out flyers,” Bret remembers. “This woman was walking home with her groceries and we managed to convince her to come into the creepy basement venue with her groceries at, like, 11 in the morning. Then we start playing these weird comedy songs. I can’t remember if it was her or somebody else but at some point we had an audience of one, and they left halfway through the show. That made it into the TV show.”

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Well, I talk to them and I guess, and I did it when I did it in New Zealand. Someone got up and goes, ‘I want a song about my car. It’s a love song about my car,’ and we went, alright, we can do that, but this guy had, like, a whole thing prepared. He was crazy. He had a whole song written and he was ready to go. He was like, ‘No, the chorus should be like this! It should be an F Sharp!’ He had a key. I was like, What? Who are you? Nah, there hasn’t been anything like that. There are some comedians who are pursuing serious musicianship, but it doesn’t happen often. Do you know Tim and Eric? Tim has done a few albums. Hannibal, too.

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He’s got so massive,” says Bret, beaming jovially down a Zoom window from his Wellington home. “It’s awesome. I sometimes forget how big Taika has become… It’s cool seeing the same ideas that worked in theatre carry on working on the big films.” My songwriting had started to open up a little bit,” he says. “We were writing songs all the time in Conchords, but they were always based on a gag. Then the movie stuff often required more story and character, so sometimes what might be a funny song also had to be an emotional moment. I wanted to do some songs that didn’t have to be anything for anyone else, songs that could just exist. It’s kind of bizarre, because 99 percent of songs are like that—there’s only about 10 people who write comedy songs. So mostly this was just me wanting to write songs that didn’t have to do anything apart from be a song.” Yeah, some. Growing up I loved James Brown. I was in a band and I was the drummer and I spent all my time trying to play funk breaks. That was what I was really into as a teenager. At the same time I was into Leonard Cohen, but more of his sort of slightly more comedic songs, I guess. You know, the little ones where the production is like a Cassio tone and him singing over it. Even as a teenager, I thought that was cool. It’s funny because I’ve spent a lot of time working with Cassio tones. In Flight of the Conchords, we were always making our own beats and messing with little drum machines.

Oh, yeah, they just play the most popular songs on Spotify. How does this affect your live performance? That’s my new buzz is what I’ve been doing with the live show. I do this thing, kind of like doing a collab where I write a song with a volunteer from the audience. So halfway through the show, I ask for a volunteer who wants to write a song with me. They start telling me a story about their life and then up turning the pieces into a song. Yeah, he’s been in all sorts of stuff. He’s a brilliant actor, but this was a comedy role. A sort of broad, stupid police comedy. Anyway, that was a funny example of how New Zealand was isolated and connected in different ways. I grew up before the internet, you couldn’t just look things up, and since Sledgehammer was on primetime and from America, it was the biggest show in New Zealand, we just presumed it was the biggest show everywhere. The album rollout isn’t entirely without humor, though, as a press release offers the following sample headlines for publications to use: Growing tired of writing songs for films that “have to do a lot of jobs, a lot of character work or tell the story”, Bret began filing away ideas for more serious songs. “As much as I love comedy music, I don’t really listen to it in everyday life,” he admits. “I have a fondness for the funny song within an album that might be more serious. Lots of people have them. Courtney Barnett has some really funny lines and Leonard Cohen has a lot of funny lines. I was interested in something in that zone.”People don’t hit speed bumps like they used to when they’d listen to a whole album all the way through, because people often don’t listen to whole albums anymore. So, yeah, Bret’s a ridiculously funny dude, and you might even call him one of the best comedy songwriters in the biz. He’s had smash hits, he’s won major awards, he’s the better-dressed part of his duo…he’s got a good thing going! So, what gives with this whole “songs without jokes” solo stuff, man? So, yeah, Bret’s a ridiculously funny dude, and you might even call him one of the best comedy songwriters in the biz. (In Bret’s own words, there are fewer than a dozen people in the world writing comedy songs today, but who’s counting?) He’s had smash hits, he’s won major awards, he’s the better-dressed part of his duo...he’s got a good thing going! So, what gives with this whole “songs without jokes” solo stuff, man? This is not to suggest the new songs are wildly exposing or unduly austere; rather they just land differently. “There’s still a bit of a lyrical playfulness that I find hard to resist,” he says. “But it was interesting even starting to play these songs to other people and see they were all surprised – this is not what they were expecting.” I had to record another version of Man or Muppet because they didn’t really like it … It was a cultural adjustment