The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?’

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

Have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?Probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally. Even Brett Martin, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs.When Martin stumbled on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” he naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that he made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did he realize the song was actually about him. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, he called.

Hi, I'm Brett Martin. I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and I live in New Orleans. I genuinely don't remember what made me search for my name on Spotify one day last summer. It's possible I was looking for a podcast I'd been on, or maybe it was the kind of search that we all do once in a while just to procrastinate or just out of vanity. In any event, I must never have done this particular search before because the first thing I saw was a song titled, Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes.

And it had been up there for 11 years. Now, there are many Brett Martins in this world, several much more famous than I am. There's a Major League Baseball player, an Australian squash legend, some historical figures, but obviously I pressed play. And at first, the words are generic enough. Brett Martin, you're a radio guy.

You're a writer, man. You're a reporter, dude. Granted, these are somewhat uncannily like my life, but I'm just thinking this is hysterical. This is my new theme song. Oh, Brett Martin, you're a wonderful person. You're a nice man. I really like you.

There's a line about, you tell good stories. And I think, this is fabulous. This is even more like me. But then a couple of really specific details stop me in my tracks. Brett Martin, you cry on airplanes. You watch Sweet Home Alabama, and you start to cry a lot. Brett Martin, you cry on airplanes.

You watch Sweet Home Alabama, and you start to cry a lot. Brett Martin. Now, I worked on a story 20 years ago for This American Life about crying on airplanes, and specifically about crying during the movie Sweet Home Alabama. So at this point, my girlfriend and our daughters come into the room, and I point at the screen, and I say, wait a minute, this actually may be a song about me, written by some guy I don't even know. And I'm stunned, and I am also very, very amused. and I am also very, very amused. Needless to say, this song becomes a huge hit in my house. We probably play it 27 times,

play it for every guest that comes to the house and every time we laugh uproariously. And it's not until maybe my 30th listen that I actually register how it ends. This guy sings, Brett Martin, I really like you. Will you be my friend? Will you call me on the phone? Brett Martin, here's my phone number. And he sings his actual phone number. I have to admit, it takes me a few days to call. First of all, who calls anybody anymore?

And who was this guy? But my daughters keep asking if I've called, and eventually my curiosity gets the better of me. So I finally pick up the phone, and I never could have expected what I'd find on the other end. What happens next is this week's Sunday read, a piece I wrote for the magazine that's about what it's like to work at the intersection of art and commerce What it takes to make oneself visible in the never-ending river of content

On platforms like Spotify that rule our culture And how you make a life in a commercial art form All of which are questions that nearly everybody I know Who works in any medium finds themselves asking. So here's my article, read by Eric Jason Martin. Our audio producer today is Adrian Hurst, and the original music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. I don't want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song

Brett Martin, you a nice man, yes? I guess probably not. On Spotify, Brett Martin, you a nice man, yes, has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular nice man, didn't hear the one-minute, 14-second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Paparazzi and the Fatogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be

evidence of very poor search skills. When I did stumble on Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, yes, I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin. Perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers, or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player, or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who, in 1897, became the British Empire's first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radios This American Life almost 20 years ago, did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, I really like you. Will you be my friend? Will you call me on the phone? Then it gave a phone number with a New Hampshire area code. So I called.

It's possible that I dialed with outsized expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was. I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of Dr. Livingston, I presume. After one ring, a male voice answered. I said, this is Brett Martin. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to call. The man had no idea who I was. You have to understand, he said, apologetically, I've written over 24,000 songs. I wrote 50 songs yesterday. And thus was I ushered into the strange universe of Matt Farley. Farley is 45 and lives with his wife, two sons, and a cockapoo named Pippi

in Danvers, Massachusetts, on the North Shore. For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. These include hundreds of songs name-checking celebrities, from the very famous to the much less so. He doesn't give out his phone number in all of them, but he does spread it around enough that he gets several calls or texts a week. But he does spread it around enough that he gets several calls or texts a week. Perhaps sensing my deflation, he assured me that very few came from the actual subject of a song. He told me the director Dennis Dugan of Dennis Dugan I Like Your Movies Very A Lot, part of an 83 song album about movie directors, called once,

but he didn't realize who it was until too late and the conversation was awkward. Freed from the blinding incandescence of my own name, I could suddenly see the extent of what I had stumbled into. It was like the scene in a thriller when the detective first gazes on the wall of a serial killer's lair. Paparazzi and the Fatags is only one of about 80 pseudonyms Farley uses to release his music. As the Hungry Food Band, he sings songs about foods. As the Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities and Towns, he sings the Atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different named girls to the prom,

and 500 that are marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies. Albums devoted to sports teams in every city that is a sports team, hundreds of songs about animals and jobs and weather and furniture, and one band that is simply called The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over. is simply called the guy who sings your name over and over. He also has many, many songs about going to the bathroom. If you have a child under 10 with access to the internet, it is very likely you know some part of this body of work. What he refers to collectively as his poop songs are mostly released under two names, the toilet bowl cleaners and the odd The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee. The Odd Man is more shameless, he explained.

The Toilet Bowl Cleaners are making statements with their albums, though the distinction between the former's butt cheeks, butt cheeks, butt cheeks, and the latter's I need a lot of toilet paper to clean the poop in my butt may be subtler than he imagines. Largely, though not entirely, on the strength of such songs, Farley has managed to achieve that most elusive of goals, a decent living creating music.

In 2008, his search engine optimization project took in $3,000. Four years later, it had grown to $24,000. The introduction of Alexa and her voice-activated sistron opened up the theretofore underserved non-typing market, in particular the kind fond of shouting things like, poop in my fingernails, at the computer. Poop in my fingernails by the toilet bowl cleaners currently has over 4.4 million streams on Spotify alone. To date, that band and the odd man who sings about poop, puke, and pee have collectively brought in approximately $469,000 from various platforms. They are by far Farley's biggest earners, but not the only ones.

Paparazzi and the Fatogs has earned $41,000, the Best Birthday Song Band Ever, $38,000, the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, $80,000. Dozens of others have taken in two, three, or four digits. The New Orleans Sports Band, the Chicago Sports Band, the Singing Film song person, the paranormal song warrior, the Moturn media holiday singers who perform 70 versions of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, substituting contemporary foods for figgy pudding. It adds up. Farley quit his day job in 2017. People like to criticize the whole streaming thing, but there's really a lot of pros to it, he said. Indeed, in 2023, his music earned him just shy of $200,000, about one half penny at a time.

Farley's earnings helped fund his multiple other creative endeavors. He records what he calls his No Jokes music. This includes a two-man band he's been in since college called Moe's Haven, which once recorded an album a day for a year. He hosts two podcasts, one about his work and the other recapping Celtics games. And he makes movies. Microbudgeted, determinately amateur, but nevertheless recognizably cinematic features, starring himself and his family and friends. They feature a spectacular array of New England accents. In most, Farley plays some version of himself, a mild-mannered, eccentric hero projecting

varying degrees of menace. Farley and his college friend Charlie Roxburgh are in the midst of a project in which they have resolved to release two full movies per year. The model, Farley said, was inspired by Hallmark movies. If this movie stinks, good news, we're making another in six months. Their most popular work remains Don't Let the River Beast Get You, 2012, a charmingly shaggy tale of a cryptid threatening a small New England town. It features Farley's father as a big game hunter named Ido Hootkins. Like many of Farley's

endeavors, his films have attracted a small but intense following. I could fill a 5,000-seat arena if I could only get everybody in one place, he says. His is the kind of obsessive project that seems to inspire the same from others. A few years ago, Lior Galil, a Chicago music writer, set out to listen to Farley's entire corpus from start to finish, chronicling the journey in a zine titled Freaky for Farley. Four pages into issue one, he had already taken on the grim tone of an Arctic explorer. I've become a little tired of the album, 25 songs in, he wrote, which makes me concerned about my ability to get through the rest of this listening quest. Issue two begins, I failed.

The umbrella name that Farley uses for all his outputs is Moturn. He made the word up, or rather, he seized on what he felt was its strange power after misspelling the word intern in what he had planned to be a 10,000-page novel. To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of The Moturn Method, a 136-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021. His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly. If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop, he said. You just do it, and do it, and do it, and you sort it out

later. Or, as the case may be, you don't, but rather send it all out into the abyss, hoping that someday, somebody, somewhere, will hear it. I was aware, of course, that on some level I'd been had, the one tiny fish vain enough to be snared in Farley's trawl. It left me a bit paranoid. Charlie Roxburgh suddenly seemed like such a perfect Boston pseudonym that I spent a day investigating whether he was a real person. He's real, lives in Connecticut, and makes corporate videos for his day job. I lost another day chasing after a letterboxed commenter who goes by the handle DCS577

and was so baffled by the popularity of Farley's movies that he published his own short e-book, The Not Moturn Method. It urges readers to give up on their artistic dreams and even mimics Farley's buckshot SEO by appearing in multiple, slightly different versions. Surely he had to be a Farley alter ego. Nope, a 36-year-old movie buff in Missouri. Mostly, I was trying to figure out whether I thought Farley was a bad guy. Did his scheme represent the inevitable cynical end product of a culture in the grips of algorithmic platforms? Or might it be a delightful side effect?

Was his work spam, or a kind of outsider art? Was he just the poop song guy? Or was he closer to Steve Keen, the Brooklyn-based Gen X hipster-approved painter of over 300,000 works who has been the subject of books and museum retrospectives? As it happens, Farley has a song about Steve Keen. It's on a paparazzi album titled I Am Not Wasting My Life, which suggested he was asking some of the same questions. wasting my life, which suggested he was asking some of the same questions. When I went to Danvers to meet Farley in December, it became quickly apparent that he is the most transparent person in the world. He's got a thick head of hair, high cheekbones, and a friendly

Kyle Chandler-like face that another letterboxed reviewer correctly identified as youth pastory. When he picked me up at my hotel, he was wearing a fleece-lined brown hoodie that, judging by social media, is the only outer layer he wears throughout the New England winter, including on the 15 to 20 mile walks he takes twice a week. He struck me as the kind of guy who wears shorts the moment it gets above 48 degrees. Compulsively early, he confessed that he arrived at the lobby an hour before we were scheduled to meet. You might mistake Moturn's aesthetic for stoner humor, but Farley says he has never had a sip of alcohol, much less done drugs.

By his own description, he eats like a picky 12-year-old. When I made him take me to a restaurant in Salem called Doob's Seafood, famed for its belly clams, he ordered chicken nuggets and buried them beneath a blizzard of salt and ground pepper, removing the top of the pepper shaker to pour it on more directly. In the car, we listened to the Rolling Stones, the Replacements, Tom Waits. It's a mammoth accomplishment of self-control for me not to be playing my own music right now, he said, though his efforts at restraint were puzzling, given that I was, in all likelihood, the one person on earth at that moment whose job was to listen to it. All of Farley's life, he has wanted to make things

and have people see and hear them. After going to school at Providence College, he moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, specifically because he knew nobody there who might distract him. If you know people, they want you to go to cookouts. He says, I designed my entire life to not have to go to cookouts. Even now, he cannot abide downtime. To him, the wasted time of a party or watching a football game is measured in songs or scripts he could have written. At no point did Farley consider a more conventional route, such as film school or a low-level job in the entertainment industry. Instead, he took a job at a group home for teenagers, knocking out a 40-hour week in three days so that he could work on music and movies the other four. He would leave

Mosehaven CDs in public places across Manchester, hoping somebody would pick them up. He slipped them into the stacks at local record stores, like a reverse shoplifter. He would drive people to the airport, just so he could force his music on them on the way. Farley's persona is simultaneously grandiose. I really do think I'm the greatest songwriter of the 21st century, he told me, and knowingly self-effacing. One night, I went with him to a tiny independent theater in Lexington for a screening of the Moturn film Magic Spot, a time travel comedy. On the drive down, I asked what the endgame for the movies was. Obviously, they have a very different business model from his music. What if somebody gave him, say, a million dollars to make his next movie?

He thought for a second. 300,000 for me and Charlie? Spread the rest around to the people who have helped us all these years? Make a $10,000 movie and get sued, he said. That would be about twice the budget of a typical Moturn joint. Magic Spot wasn't on the marquee when we pulled up, but there was a flyer taped to the door. We couldn't afford color copies, but we did our best, the theater owner said as he let us in. There were 11 people in the audience, including Farley's father and brother-in-law,

both of whom were in the movie there was also a film student named taylor who had driven up from the cape for the second of three moturn screenings he'd see within a month and two guys down from manchester one of whom was turning the other on to the farley cannon a few minutes into the movie the sound went out and we sat for about 10 minutes while Farley frantically tried to fix it. He was on the verge of jury-rigging a solution involving holding a microphone to his laptop when the sound system miraculously healed itself. A huge success. I'm on cloud nine, he said as we headed back toward Danvers. After the show, he refused to accept his share of the ticket sales,

instead pressing extra money into the owner's hands as thanks. For somebody so driven to find an audience and so immune to embarrassment, the advent of the digital age was a miracle. Farley began uploading the Moe's Haven catalog to iTunes when it came out, and then to Spotify. loading the Mose Haven catalog to iTunes when it came out, and then to Spotify. As described in the closely autobiographical Moturn film, Local Legends, Mose Haven was intended to meld the sounds of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Pink Floyd into a musical concoction that was going to blow the minds of millions of fans all the way around the world. As it turned out, Farley noticed that the only song

that seemed to blow minds, or at least get downloaded, was a comic throwaway called Shut Up Your Monkey. Get down, get funky, shut up your monkey. Some people would have quit right there, he says. I saw an opportunity. playlist inclusion, natural language processing, average length of listens, influencer attention, metrics like acousticness, speechiness, and danceability that will push a song onto millions of users' recommended playlists. Critics, meanwhile, bemoaned the rise of bands like Greta Van Fleet and Algorithmic Feverdream, according to Pitchfork, who seemed to be engineered to be the next song after whatever it was you actually chose to listen to.

When I asked Farley how much of this he factors into his work, the answer was almost zero. He gets the sense that longer titles seem to work better than short ones, and that around a minute and a half is a good minimum length. But for the most part, his is a blunt force attack on the softer target of search results. At its most intentionally parasitic, this includes such tracks as A Review of Exile on Main Street, designed to be discovered by the Rolling Stones' Curious.

A 2013 album credited to the passionate and objective Joker fan takes advantage of the fact that song titles cannot be copyrighted. Thus, This Girl is on Fire, Quick, Grab a Fire Extinguisher, Almost, Instant Karma, and Searching for Sugar Man, which, unlike the more famous Sugar Man by Rodriguez, is about a baker whose sugar delivery is running late. Farley says he has since sworn off these kinds of tricks. These days, he sets himself a relatively light goal of one 50-song album a month,

recorded in a spare bedroom in his house. 50 tracks is the limit that CD Baby, which Farley uses to distribute and manage his music, allows, a regulation that may or may not have something to do with Farley, who used to put as many as 100 on an album. Once he reaches his quota, he begins the tedious work of checking the levels of each song, entering titles and metadata, genre, writer, length, etc., creating an album title and cover art, nearly always a selfie, and uploading the package one song at a time. Farley showed me a worn green spiral notebook in which he meticulously tracks his output and earnings. From Spotify, he earns roughly a third of a cent per stream.

Amazon and Apple pay slightly more on average, between a third and three quarters of a cent. TikTok, on the other hand, pays musicians by the number of videos featuring their songs and is thus immune to Farley's strategy. When Chris and Kylie Jenner recorded a video of themselves dancing to Farley's song about Chris, millions of people saw it, but Farley earned less than one cent. Among other topics Farley told me he planned to tackle in future albums were colleges,

household items, tools, musical instruments. I had planned to ask what categories haven't worked, but what had become clear by then is that the idea of any one song or even album hitting the jackpot isn't the point. Even after Spotify's recent announcement that it would no longer pay royalties on songs receiving fewer than a thousand streams, Farley's business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output. And so does his artistic model. Whatever the dubious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it's as part of the enormous body of the whole, the magnum opus, that it gains power. This is especially true when you consider that an artificial intelligence could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Farley's entire oeuvre, in about a day.

A fact that gives his defiantly human, even artisanal labor, a kind of lonely Sisyphean dignity. Whatever else Farley's work is, it is not AI, even when it barely seems to be I. A year or two ago, Farley discovered with some chagrin that he was no longer the number one result for the search Poop Song, there was another Poop Song guy. His name is Teddy Casey, and amazingly, he is also from a Boston suburb, Newton. That's where the similarities with Farley stop. Casey has precisely two songs available for streaming, a sweet kid's song about animals called Monkey, and The Poop Song, which has over 4 million streams across various platforms. Casey is 55. Until recently, he was working as a bartender and hosting open mic nights near where he lives in Midcoast, Maine. When I reached him, he was back

home after a week in New Hampshire, training to become a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier. He wrote his poop song around 2009, but he didn't get around to posting it until 2020. It didn't do anything for months, he said, and then all of a sudden, one month, it made $20. I was like, wow, cool, buy a case of beer. These days, the song brings in about $1,200 per month, enough to pay his rent, Casey told me,

with what sounded like a Lebowskian shrug. I have other songs that I want to put up, he said, but I kind of don't want to sell out. I asked if he knew about the toilet bowl cleaners, and he said he'd heard a few of their songs. I'm not making this up, he said. There's this other guy, I don't know if you've heard of him, the odd man who sings about poop, puke, and pee.

His idea was to customize every poop song, so there's a Stephen poop song, a Bob poop song, a Mary poop song. He's got hundreds. I told him that both bands were in fact the same person. Well, okay, he said, as if realizing the full extent of what he was up against. I like mine better, but I'm biased, he said finally. You can tell he knows how to write songs,

but I think he's just been going for volume. In fact, I knew about the suite of songs that combine Farley's two most successful genres, names and poop, because he was working on a new set of them when I visited him. He estimated that he had already completed about 3,000, but there were always new names. This can be kind of painful, he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop. He donned headphones, consulted a list of names, and got to work. In the silence of the room, I could just hear the soft click of the keyboard and his vocals. Jamila, poop, poop, poop, poop, Jamila, poop, poop, poop.

Jamila, poop, poop, poop, poop. Jamila, poop, poop, poop. In Local Heroes, which is something like Farley's All That Jazz, there is a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing. One, the serious, heartfelt artist. The other, a greasy record executive demanding ever more poop songs. Of course, the scene can only be a fantasy, and can only have Farley playing both characters, because the greasy record executive belongs to a lost world,

one in which drastically fewer people had a chance to produce art, and the work was often corrupted by corporate gatekeepers, but in which there was also a clearly marked road to an audience and a living. Farley represents both the best and worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken this world's place. Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies, that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public. And that if they don't bow to the demands of these new realities,

their work, and by extension they, will simply disappear. Which is to say that while the experience of watching Farley work was not unpainful, as promised, neither was it totally unfamiliar. After a minute and a half of the Jamila poop song, Farley paused. He adjusted a few dials, consulted his notebook, thought for a few seconds, and plowed on to the next song. Different tempo, different vocals, similar theme. Tunkah, Tunkah, he sang. Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop.