Switched on Pop - "It’s a Hail Mary every time" (ft. Marc Rebillet)

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

When it comes to improvisational loop jams, few have gone as viral as Marc Rebillet. From his 2020 lockdown-era video “How to Funk in Two Minutes,” which features him wearing nothing but a bathrobe, to unsuspecting New York street corners, and eventually the Coachella main stage, Rebillet has come to be known as “loop daddy” for his gifted ability to harness spontaneous funk. On this episode of Switched On Pop, Charlie interviews Marc about his process, inspiration, and pandemic success, witnessing his flow state firsthand as he graces us with some live improvisation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. I can't forget the first time I saw Mark Rebier. It was January 2020, and he was giving a so-called YouTube lesson on how to funk in two minutes. It's shot in his apartment kitchen. He's wearing just a bright yellow bathrobe and stylish gold watch, and his fingers are dancing across a keyboard. First playing drums, then a shaker. He adds electric piano, organ, clavonet,

bass, and finally, his improvised vocals bring it all together. He did it all with the simplest setup. He played every sound out of Apple's Logic Pro, controlled by an M-A-Odi-M-A-Midi keyboard, and crafted loops on a boss loop station. I didn't know one guy could funk so hard. That YouTube video has 18 million plays. In the spring of 2020, when I was staying at home, I watched a lot of his videos, all of them funky, some might even say romantic, and always improvised. During that period, he launched what he called his quarantine live stream tour on Twitch, building a huge global audience in the process.

Mark has built a wholly unique career off of improvising and posting his videos online since 2016. People love it. His channel has gained nearly 2.5 million subscribers, and he's collaborated with greats like Erica Baidu, Flying Lotus, T-Pain, Reggie Watts. He's also taken his music directly to the people. Before his videos went viral, Mark spent 2017 in Dallas playing long bar and restaurant gigs, built entirely on improvisation, developing the live looping show he's known for today. He moved to New York City in 2018 and brought that fully formed improvisatory approach with him. His channel really took off during the pandemic period. And when things opened back up,

He took his tour outside, setting up gigs around random spots in New York City, unannounced, and every time a giant crowd would gather. I caught up with Mark earlier this fall, just as he was about to head out on tour, and bring his show on the road. Tragically, Mark took a big fall recently on his unicycle and is recovering from an injury and had to cancel the rest of that tour. While he's healing up, I thought we could all take a moment to appreciate his wonderful improvisatory gifts. I wanted to chat with Mark because I wanted to see how his mind works when he's. He's in that improvised flow state and to witness how he does it firsthand. It's a truly delightful conversation.

Here's Mark Rubea. Mark, welcome to Switchdown. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be. Very happy to be chatting with you. I've been following your music for a long time. It brought me a lot of joy during some very dark windows of life. I want to get to know what is going inside your improvisatory mind.

But I want to get to know you a little bit. Sure. I'd let to know just where your musical pursuits started. My mom got me listening to, like, a lot of Motown gospel soul. My dad, too. My dad liked Ray Charles, James Brown a lot. The soul. The funk music and R&B definitely comes through in the playing.

Yeah, man. Yeah, that's definitely the foundation. It's my preferred genre, I would say, is soul probably in general. But, yeah, after that, this friend of mine, Charlie Cockrell, he introduced me to, like, Medeschi Martin and Wood. You know, that's... Love Modesky Martin. They're amazing.

They had a great record in the 2000s called End of the World Dance Party just in case. Yeah, man. Great album. Great album. They have a very strong body of work and underappreciated, I think. Anyway, he introduced me to them. He introduced me to, like, Joe Pass, Stan Gets. Wow, some real jazz heads.

Yeah, yeah. So there was a little bit of that, and then I had a girlfriend later on who exposed me to, like, more serious blues, you know, Lightning and Hopkins, Skip James, and that stuff really resonated with me, Howlin Wolf and Mississippi Fred McDowell and all those guys. And I listened to that, like, very heavily for a long time. Okay, so the foundation is a lot of people who are improvisers. Are you growing up playing piano as a kid? Growing up playing piano as a kid, yeah. They got me started on lessons around four or five.

It was just classical training for a decade or so. And then I stopped and then I sort of taught myself improvisational blues and stuff. So was it always improv? It wasn't always improv. I learned blues as a way to divert from classical because I didn't enjoy rehearsing and practicing. That wasn't. So I guess you can sort of see the M&Ms leading to the improvised career along the way. Improvisation has its own kind of practice.

True, true. Yeah, you just play, right? I mean, I suppose there's also a theoretical foundation for improv, you know. I still would like to learn a lot more about improvisation. I think my jazz chops are pretty crappy. I can use a lot of work. But, you know, I have a working knowledge of, like, chords and blues scales and a very scarce selection of jazz scales, you know, so you can put those together into, like,

of general improvisational pastiche, but... Enough to be dangerous. Yeah, enough to be dangerous. Enough to sell a show, you know? Would you mind showing me how it works? Sure, yeah. You mean the whole thing? Less the equipment.

We're just like, I'd love to hear you flow for a second. Oh, yeah, sure, man. This would be a great example of just practicing, I guess. Now we're in business. Seventies roads. It's like, that's the thing. With me, it's like the chords that are not that complicated. It's like, it's like F to E, but, you know, or you can, but what I like is discovering a little pocket, you know, it's like, that's nice.

And then, and then you can turn that into like a moving, flowing. You add a rhythmic element to it and then you get, then you start to get a little song and then you can like, then you can like decorate it with, with like an interesting sort of pressing little baseline. And then so the basis of all my stuff is pretty, is quite simple. Can we develop it? Zero code? Yeah, so yeah, what was that? It's like, that's like an F-11, some sort of inverted E minor. Yeah, so, so if we did something like, let's put like a, yeah, you can just sort of decorate on W. Yeah, you know.

So then you got a little song going. I love this. It's really fun to watch you do it and try to explain what you're doing at the exact same time. And then we need a little... I'm hearing your brain split into being an improvisatory space and also trying to, like, demonstrate at the same time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Which makes me want to know, like, what does it require of you to be in that space?

Like, who do you need to be in that moment? The thing is, I've been... This is the new version of this machine, but what we're talking about is the looper here that I'm using is... I've been, feel like I've been friends with this piece of equipment for so long that it's just feels very comfortable. It's just fun. It feels like I'm going to play at the playground.

You know, I'm like stepping in and then I've got my little arsenal, little sounds, and I can just choose some stuff and then just dream up a little version of some sort of beat that makes me happy. It's incredibly somatic. You're never not moving. Yeah, true.

Why is movement essential for you as you're building things out? It's like a reflex. Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to break it down. It's sort of like physicalizing the rhythm, I suppose. It's like, it just feels like I don't think I could do it without moving my head around. There's also something that definitely has to do with finding a proper pocket. With the looping, there's no like quantizing or no snapping of kicks and snares in place to like a set tempo. So whatever you lay down first has to is like the basis. for the rest of the composition on the looper. So you have to really start with like a pretty solid starting tempo, starting rhythm rhythmic idea of some kind. If you have that, then you can continue to build off of it nicely. But yeah, the bobbing of the head and moving is like just basically a way to like play

that pocket properly. And yeah, just get something out that's that has like, a human sort of feeling to it. For a decade or so, you've worked with basically the same looping device, an extremely affordable MIDI controller, a laptop with Apple Logic. You have not brought a million-dollar studio in here. You're using sounds that my students use in my coursework. It's all available.

You have created this one-man band through the aid of the looper, The MIDI controller allows you to grab any possible sound. So you are the drummer, you are the bass player, you are the keyboard player, you're everything, you're the vocalist. Yeah, exactly. I could go to guitar center right now, pick up this same equipment, and there's no way I could do what you do. Take a little bit of practice. I beg to differ, you could. You could absolutely do it.

Anyone can replicate the setup very easily. It's not, I mean, when I sort of finessed it into what it is, you know, I've always been like a tech guy, like a, you know, always like, a computer guy and stuff. So it was not difficult for me to sort of see how this would work. But when I finally landed on the final thing, where you're just running out from the headphone jack on a MacBook into the looper. And it's a very simple signal conversion. It's just an eighth inch to dual quarter inch into the looper.

And then when I was like, that's it. Now I got all the sounds in the looper and that's it. You're able to do this in a very transportable, easy to set up. Low overhead. Yeah, low overhead kind of way. Yeah. But it doesn't inhibit the creative process. True.

I think it makes it easier for me, you know. It's like the more stuff I add, which I am working on adding another keyboard to this setup that allow me to do some kind of more interesting stuff that's like a MIDI synced keyboards so that I can do like crazy kind of arpeggios that are clocked to the tempo. Cool, fun. Sure. So I would like to do that. But yeah, the more stuff I add, just the more. more kind of busy I am, but the less, it's not necessarily better. What did it take to develop fluency with this?

When did you start doing it and when did you feel like you were able to like just show up and just do it? I had this period of about a year before I moved back here where I was back home in Dallas, which is where I'm from. And it's when I was starting to gig, I guess. I was playing like a lot of bars and restaurants and all sorts of weird. kind of one-off things, but all very long gigs, three-plus-hour gigs of just doing this. It's very much the same show it was then, but it started more kind of panicky. It's this desperation to get people's attention.

I would just talk about all kinds of different stuff, but you kind of try and be as not inflammatory, but as ridiculous as possible. I've seen some videos of you and some family restaurants, back in this period. That's the period, yeah. Let me in, I'm trying to fuck. Just getting super sexy, getting inflammatory, yeah, for people eating a sandwich, yeah.

So, and what era are we in right now? This would be 2017. 2017, so you come to New York City at the end of the 20thens? Then 2018, yeah, I came back here and basically tried to do the same thing here and got a few bars. gigs and whatnot. And then, yeah, something happened online. It was on Facebook first, weirdly. And, yeah, within the period of one week, several of my videos that had been online for a good bit at

that point went from, you know, in the tens of thousands of views to the millions. And that's a jump I'd never seen before. Yeah, along with that just came a lot of like show requests. And luckily, I had been playing live for the last year. and basically like figuring out what the show was. But yeah, as soon as we booked a tour, I was like ready. So your Dallas restaurant and bar gigs was like your Beatles in the cavern and shedding it out or going to Hamburg, I guess. Right, yeah, playing the cavern club or yeah, going to Hamburg. Right.

Okay, so that's, you know, to get great at looping is challenging. It is. Yeah, it's true. The looping has an issue. I mean, as you pointed out, like, you screw something up. What do you do? Yeah, yeah. If your foundation is bad, you can't keep building.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You have to start with a solid one. You've got to figure out where is there space to do so. Yeah, exactly, exactly. In a line, you've written. Yeah, yeah, it's true. What track do you overdub on so that you can leave room for vocals later on? But at this point, are you thinking about that or is it, do you have a process? I would say more like subconscious.

You know, it's less, I'm less sort of like actively sort of vocals will go here. You know, it's just sort of like, I'm just sort of like, well, there's room here. I'll do that there. So you said you figured out the live show you'd been doing it for a while. So you'd do some touring pre-pandemic. Yeah. But then you go inside during the pandemic. Yeah.

And I feel like you're live streaming all the time. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. What happened in that period from like got to go on tour to all of a sudden having to like shut it down? Yeah. How'd that go for your career? Were you full-time making music at that point?

I was full-time making music at that point. I was full-time since. Dallas. Wow. Yeah, it was a challenge to myself that I, you know, it was basically a this or that ultimatum for me that was I had basically two months worth of rent that I had saved or that it was severance from a job so that I could spend. So it was like, okay, in two months, you know, if I can pay rent doing music, then I will

continue to pursue it. And if I can't, then I will be an adult and like find a real job. The perception externally was it seemed like you thrived during a time where a lot of other musicians really were trying to figure out what to do. Oh, man, COVID, yes. That was. And I don't mean to say personally, but just career-wise. Yes, obviously very difficult for everybody an awful period of time, an awful period of time. But it seemed to have unlocked something for you. What unlocked?

I was alone, which is one of the places where I thrive, I would say, just creatively as being alone. I was put into this kind of pressure cooker where I was about to leave on tour basically the day that everyone was sort of ordered to stay at home. And so we had to make a call that week of whether or not to go to Australia and play this tour. You would have been stuck in Australia for a long time. Exactly. I would be like Tom Hanks, you know. But yeah, we decided against it. And so I decided instead of that, I would basically replicate the tour dates online.

So I said, because I can't go and play, I'll play in the Australian time zones that are appropriate for Australians. At the times, I would have been playing my shows, I'll do live stream. That's madness. Well, I don't know. It just kept going from there because it was, I had already been live streaming at that point from various apartments. All along the way, you can sort of see that if I, look back that I was very lucky that when the time came to do like pivotal things for myself and my career, I had gotten a good bit of practice doing those things underneath me, you know,

so that I could take off kind of running. Your show sort of uniquely works in a streaming environment. Yes, very much so. I took to callers, you know, the callers would give me something to make a song about. I would make a song about that. You establish a relationship. with these people over the course of that horrifying pandemic where, you know, you sort of rely on each other. And so there was this expectation that I was coming back every week. I'm doing this. I'm taking every opportunity I can to get online, play for people, express myself, keep people company. And they in turn did that for me. But it just ended up, like you said, being very, very good for my notoriety, for the business, for, yeah, pretty much every part of my career.

And then when we came out of it, then, yeah, the tours were bigger and et cetera. So eventually you have a tour where you go outside, which felt like a response to a certain degree. And you've played Lollapalooza, Coachella, but standard venues. Yeah. But chose for a tour to just kind of be like an Uber Busker. Yeah. You know, setting up in spots around cities, setting up your live stream, did people know you were showing up? No, no. I would schedule the stream about an hour before I started. I basically pick a neighborhood and then drive around until a corner looked appealing. But it's always a risk because amplification is not allowed.

Right, right. You're taking a risk. There are really fun videos to sort of quickly scan through. Yeah. Because at first people are like, what the heck? Who is this? What's going on? That's annoying. And then all of a sudden, you know, people gather. There's five people, ten people. And by the end of these videos, you've got a thousand people around. You found you. Yeah, it's a little party. Where are you going? You're going over to Brooklyn? You're going to take the Brooklyn Bridge? Give it up. Why this approach, I mean, obviously, I imagine a big part of your life is ticket sales, people to come see you. You could have gone anywhere and you decided I'm just going to choose a random street corner. First, it was a challenge to see if I could manage to do a multi-cam live streaming just out on the street. Yeah. And so once all that was figured out, the real.

idea outside of just the challenge of doing that was playing for like strangers again. Because at that point, this was, I don't know, I was a couple of years ago, I'd already had several years of touring, playing rooms, hard ticket rooms where people are buying tickets to see me. They want to see me. They're excited. You know, I love that energy. But the energy that I love even more than that energy is the energy I was getting in the

very early days of showing up to a lunch. restaurant of people who are have no interest in seeing me and forcing the show on them basically and sort of trying to convert people. And so that was like the thesis. It was like, can I go to neighborhoods where really any neighborhoods unannounced where passerbyes will be much less likely to know me? And sort of that vibe again from scratch rather than playing to people who are, you know, already sort of preloaded, their excitement is preloaded. And it really worked. It really worked for a while.

And then when I stopped is when it sort of got to this point where, you know, people would kind of gather in the middle of the city and wait for me to go live. And so then within half an hour, it's basically just a concert. And that was not the idea, even though it was a lot of fun. NYPD is not happy about this. I imagine. The PD not happy about exactly. That was less the idea.

fun as it was. Okay. So now you need to start seeking out locations where no one has ever seen your YouTube. That's what, where do I go? Yeah. How do I do it? It's harder and harder to access that like true sort of. So, you know, that, yeah.

My collaborator, Nate, went on a tour with his other musical collaborator, Gideon. They're called The Gideon and Hubcap show. And they toured the Outer Hebrides of Scotland by ferry. And we actually have a show where they documented this entire thing. And at times would go to towns or islands that had 30 people on them. Wow. And you know what happens is all 30 people show up to that show because they're like, Oh, wow.

You came to us. Right. So. There's a show happening. Yeah. Wow. You're about to go on tour to all the places you've never been. Yes.

That's true. There's something there, but they're all dying. They're all there to see me. But, yes, yes. I mean, no, and don't get me wrong. I mean, I do love playing shows in rooms with my fans. It's great. It's great.

But there is just something special about that weird friction that you get sort of imposing on people. So maybe your fans should show up in a little nonchalant, like, just like, you know, I don't know about this guy. Maybe turn away from me, you know, be on a call. They really got to earn your attention. Yeah, take it so that I can feel something again. Attention Spotify. Has arrived at the new Google Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, A goodrengthy

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the conversation about improvisation. There's a whole logistical part of the tour, but then you just have to do your thing. A lot of improvisers

have some kind of like pre-show ritual to get themselves in that headspace. Does that exist for you? Not to a huge extent. I do a shot at tequila with my crew. We do a PSS pre-show shot, and we'll do an ASS, of course.

And that's that. Maybe I'll stretch a little bit and jump up and down. Sort of like, I don't know, you know, it's like the end of raging bull where he's like, you know, where he's like looking at himself in the mirror and he's at the Copa backstage and he's over. overweight. He's at like the end of his career and he's doing like sad stand-up shows at the Copa, but he's backstage hyping himself up like, still like punch it, punch it, and sort of, I'm good, I'm good, you got this, you got this, you know. And so that's sort of the, that's kind of what I, what I do in a very light. There's not really no rhyme or reason to it. You know, I'll like do

light vocal warmups. Okay. But yeah, what do you need in that first moment to get things going because we've got an entirely improvised show. Yeah. Is there preparation? No. It's a Hail Mary every time. It's a Hail Mary every time. And it was interesting on this last tour I was just in Europe for four months and doing a lot

of festivals, which are generally much larger crowds and often a lot of people in those crowds that don't know you, that their friends bring them or whatever. When I go on stage, like you said, I have absolutely nothing. So it's like, you have to start. You have to just. generate a thing. And it's sometimes it's city dependence. Sometimes you get lucky and the promoter will tell you that something is going on in the city or there's like some sort of chant that the people like to say if you're in wherever it is, Hungary, Poland, and there's something that

they say that is like a thing, like a Polish thing. Okay, you can start with that and then you can sort of build a song off of that. But often I'll run into the situation where I'm like literally two minutes to show. I am standing on side stage in my underwear, ready to run out, and I just have absolutely nothing. Like, nothing.

I have no idea. So where do you start then? You just go. You just get out there. You just go. I jump around for a minute. And then anything. It's like I'll go out there and go,

ah! and then whatever, you sample that, and then there's a rhythm, and then, you know, whatever, and then you start building something, and then maybe before I fully drop the beat, maybe I'll run out into the crowd and get someone to say something into the microphone. So you just, it's like panic mode sometimes where it's like, man, I do not know where this is going. But, you know, it always works out.

You just have to kind of be. open enough to something starting, you know. And then it builds. I mean, as we saw earlier, we're going to get rhythm, layers of rhythm. Yeah. In your demo earlier, we heard we began with Latin percussion. Yeah. You added shakers.

Yeah. We added a kick. We get bass, and it can grow and grow and grow. Yeah. There's limited loops. We have five loops. Yeah, yeah, five channels, but you can overdub on all of them. Yeah.

Is there like a minimum viable product for a song that you know, it's like, this is it? Yeah. And that it's sort of by sense, I suppose. It's like an instinctual sort of, okay, this feels done enough, you know, but that is something I would say that I'm open to kind of improving or or perhaps doing differently as I continue doing this, which is building more layered, more interesting compositions because, you know, when you're on a stage and especially if it's the larger stages, you know, there's 10, 20,000 people they're screaming, they want to dance.

It's like the expectation is creating things very good. quickly. And there is a limit to the complexity when you have to create something in like under two minutes. You're not making the Skrillux dubstep because no, there's too many sounds. Exactly. A lot of dance music actually sometimes very simple rhythms, but actually incredible sophistication of layers. A lot of stuff going on. Yes, it's true. What do you do when you get stuck? There's several different things. It's situational. It's like if you, if I feel like I'm going down like a bad path with a song that it's like leading to something that I'm not particularly happy with or maybe I got started with a sound that I'm not totally thrilled with and I've already

started building on it and I just know it's not getting there. I will just stop it. I'll just say fuck this. You know, this fuck this fucking song. And then just erase it. I had a hard time with this at first, but now I've come to understand that it illustrates to people that you are making it up. If it is imperfect and if you are open to like showing people, no, I don't like this, let's start over. And I also have taken to at the end of the show, end of every show, I tell people that everything that we just did was improvised. And it's amazing you would be shocked at the sheer number of people who do not know that. Oh, wow. Well, it's interesting, because I mean, part of the joy of watching you and watching any improviser is like, I'm rooting for you.

Yeah. Like, I hope he gets somewhere. It has a bit of the nerves of improv comedy. Like, watching any kind of improv, I start to feel anxious. Yeah, I do too. Yeah, I'm just like, oh, I hope this works. I know, man. I know. It's true. But riding those rays of anxiety and, like, then you get this fulfillment of a punchline, or in your case, maybe it's a drop or just a great line.

Yeah, yeah. It adds, you know, it definitely does. And it, yeah, it can be quite rare that it works, like, really well. Like, maybe once a show, I hit, like, a really, like a really solid moment. So in 15 years when the musicologists are putting together the music theory of Mark Rebier, what are the things that you lean on to become your sound that happen in a set? Could you categorize yourself? Yeah, well, I suppose, yeah, there are definitely hallmarks.

Can you give me some sounds? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, it's like, let's start big. Yeah, let's say, let's say we're in, I don't know, what country are we in? Well, a friend of mine went to the Garbage Festival in Poland. Garbage Festival. Well, Poland. Okay, yeah, that's great. So it's like a major techno festival.

The Garbage Festival in Poland. Poland is garbage. Poland is garbage. Star اللs, counting, sergeant, Sarbit, Sar export, Sarbit, Sarbitt, Tarbts, Arbis, sacrifice, Harbit, Sarbit, Servitz, Bark. Sarbit, Harbiz, Arbit, Sarbit, Harbit, Sarban, Harbit, Harbit, Sarbit,

Zap, Harvard, Sarbit, Generally, Target, Target, Target, drop that kick on a stage. It's a very intimate party of one right now. Yeah, exactly. And so then I'll let that sit for a second, and then sometimes it's like you can do like, bring everything else out.

Charbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, you are garbage.

You are garbage. You're garbage. You're garbage. You're garbage. And so am I. You're garbage. And so am I. So yeah, something like that.

That was a great deal of fun. Thank you for sharing that with us. Yeah, man, absolutely. Um, uh, that's for the garbage festival in Poland. It's got to start. It's not going to start big. Yeah. And man, did we get big?

Yeah, it's easy to get you could. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's some sort of dancing thing like that. Sometimes the temple will be different, but it's sort of, there is a little bit of a, uh, I would say a general sort of template that I figured out for that, that part of the show, which is, I mean, it's kind of, it's the same way I build things generally, but the order of it is, is very effective. at the beginning where you build a rhythmic thing, and then for a big crowd, like hitting them very suddenly with the kicks is like...

And it's good because in dance music, we can lean back a little bit in the lyrical sophistication. Like, a dance song, all it needs to say is just like, awesome. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Some buzzword. And you're like, yeah. That's it. Money.

Right, that's it. And that does it. Right. That is the dance trope. Okay, let's go to other parts of Mark's language. Yeah. What's like another big sound that is important to you that's not the big drop that we need to start with? Yeah.

Well, definitely like funk, I would say. Funk is the other language that I like to, yeah, speak, I go, whatever. That's a very pretentious way. I just like the genre that I like to play a lot. It's how I first got to know you was the How to Funk in Two Minutes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, that's the genre. that's like, yeah,

soul and funk is closest to my heart. So if I could play that all the time, I would play that most of the time. But will you show me a little bit of funk? I mean, sure, yeah. You don't have a guitar. How are you going to do this?

Yeah, well, you know, the thing that kind of is the guitar of the keys is like a clav, you know? Yeah, of course. Yeah, something like this. So it would be, you know, I could do like a, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're bringing in some Marcus Miller on the bass, we've got Stevie Wonder on the keys, we've got, we've got, the drums are a little, a little more, uh, a little more like New York hip hop a little bit. Yes. Yeah, that's also, yeah, you know, I would play a lot more hip hop. Yeah, hip hop was also like a defining. Definitely, it's a top three. Yeah, soul, I would say soul funk hip hop. I don't know. Top five is, is, they switch places. But, but yeah, I would play a lot more hip hop if I felt comfortable contributing more like vocally to it, you know? I mean, it's just, I just don't feel like, you know, I don't feel I'm well.

versed enough lyrically or yeah like I have enough to say in terms of verses to to really like spit like that one of the highlight streams was yours with Harry Mac oh man going going going get to moving you improving every single time you're proving like in to all the rhythm we don't take you on a mission break you up like a decision breaking out the mental prison represent for my division oh keep on moving and proving like every second the negative others that was coming and we're about to reckon we doing this for the Record, expecting it to get higher. We're lifting you up. We lighten you up and bringing the fire. Off the top of his dome, he can just go. He did a 24-hour live stream.

Oh, yeah, the dude is. And just... He's the best freestyle. On the planet, it's not even close. On the other hand, off the top of your dome, get a lot of... Something happens in the id. Fuck you, boss.

I'm late. I'm late. Yeah. It's a little more abstract and ridiculous, but yeah. Ridiculous. Something there, I guess. A lot of shock value from time to time. Yeah, for sure.

How does you, how do you, do you kiss your family with that mouth? Yeah, to their, to their chagrin. Yeah, yeah. I do, yeah. I mean, you know, my mom, who's like, you know, a very sweet, kind, gentle woman. She loves my success and loves the sweet, empowering, I guess the more empowering, motivating songs that I make. But she just chooses not to, you know, I tell her that you don't have to listen to this.

You know, this is not for you, you know. I feel like another language. I guess it's probably in like the language of soul, but I feel like, you know, there's oftentimes room in a set where things get a little more romantic. Yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah. Can we get the soundscape of what a little, a slightly more? Yeah, that would be, you know, then we go into sort of like slower, sweeter. Yeah, so maybe we could do like, you know, it's like, yeah, exactly.

Absolutely No No So it was a way more of that. So it was a way more of that Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, And then you can do like Gotta have the ride

We're riding I used to have this bass sound That would have been good for this Let's see Helps to be a little simpler With your phrasing on something like this You know you don't have to go too crazy Yeah there we go

Because you got to leave room for you Yeah right exactly And then you can even hit it with a little Yeah Sparkle on top Yeah Solo or something Mark I'm blushing

That was for you Wow Wow So you know Just a little something like that It could be slower It could be Sometimes I'll just do like just

piano or like I'll like Do like a You know I'll just do like a Like a Like a Like if you do It's there's a cool thing

That you can do with that Where if you just Where were we? We're right there And it's like And then you can And then you just lay so And it's sort of

You know It's like a tentative sort of And then you can sing over that And then you can sort of start to build it into something more if it, if it feels good. But yeah, you find, you know, there's so cool shit you can do with that. I didn't know that there's like, there's actually a little bit of 20th century minimalism in you as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I love a little bit of minimalism. With some jazzy chords in there. Yeah, yeah, almost evoking

like the Keith Jarrett Cohn concert. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You're both improvisers. I'm very different. Yes, wildly different. Yeah. Okay, so we've learned a little bit about like the musicology of your music. that there's a broad grammar of things that you draw from. Say you're going to have to teach a class on improvisation. That would be a lot of fun. What would be in your syllabus? If I'm thinking about it right now, the way I would do it would be to,

hopefully it would be a small class. And I could look over, monitor and instruct and then watch how the kids do it themselves in order to see. what their strengths and weaknesses are in terms of training. Like the music that you make will be expressive of your strengths, probably. You know, like the areas where you feel most confident is probably where you're going to lean into when you're improvising. If you can see where there are gaps or holes in, like, knowledge or training or whatever,

then you could maybe teach kids more effectively on like, okay, let's focus on this for you. Like, oh, you need, like, rhythmic training. Let's focus on some percussion training for you. And then, oh, you don't really have a good grasp of, like, melodic structure or, like, chord structure. So maybe let's do some chord work or let's do, you know, whatever. And then train each student individually on that. And then I think the important thing most above all would be, like, getting them in front of the stuff, like, playing. There's only so much sort of talking and theorizing you can do.

Ultimately, it's like you just have to see them try and play with it to get a sense of where they're at, right? So what I'm taking from it is if you had to write a syllabus on improvising, you would just make it up. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, hey, guys, I've got nothing. So let's improvise. Yeah.

I think that's a great place to end. Yeah, hell yeah. Thank you, Mark. That's why I'm not a teacher. Thank you so much for having me. I've learned so much in this process. You've taught me a ton. Oh, thanks, man.

That's really nice. Really delightful. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Lissa Soap, engineer by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Arrows Gottlieb, theme music by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Ark Iris. Remember with the Vox Media Podcast Network, a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe at nymag.com

slash pod. Next week, we're going to hit you with a double header. On Tuesday, we'll be chatting with Somber, and later in the week we'll be chatting with Amy Allen, one of the biggest songwriters of 2025. And until then, thanks for listening.