Mustache Wax During Covid (w/Brian Brushwood) [Post-Modern Rogue ep1]
Covid was a strange time. Stranger still if you worked making youtube videos on an Austin ‘compound’ that answered the question no one ever asked: “What if Tony Robbins ran Branch Davidians?”
Stranger still that we put so much time, effort, and money into a video that would end up on a sister channel without a paying sponsor, but that’s another story for another time. In the now time, you might enjoy a video that has one of the greatest Modern Rogue intros of all time… for a video that wasn’t allowed on the Modern Rogue.
This is actually the second version of an original song I wrote. Both are performed spectacularly by one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever known: Anthony Shea.
You wanna know how good he is? I sent him my hairband lyrics with a smartphone video of me doing my interpretation of ‘singing’. And that poor bastard turned it into music!
We had a few struggles getting this one right because he didn’t believe me when I said I wanted him to sing through a literal bullhorn. I understand his confusion at such a strange request, but damn it paid off!
I definitely owe some inspirational credit to the Portlandia sketch BWOW Premium Cable Title Sequence Music.
When I saw that sketch, I knew what I wanted to make for the Modern Rogue. I shot the whole thing over several months, and even hired a model for a few of the sequences (Zoey Otey).1
The other dancer you see is my very own co-producer/editor: Heather Tayte.
I filmed that portion in LA, several years before I got waylaid in Austin. She’s a hell of a dancer and editor!
I watched the intros to every single premium cable TV show I could think of (Justified, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Sons of Anarchy, etc.). It sounds cheesy because it is, but the pre-built Doghouse system could barely handle it, even after I doubled the RAM to 64 GB. Of course that was before I was living the i9 life. Never send a ‘gaming PC’ to do the job of a workstation. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s still not a Xeon, but my current client wanted to give me something to work for.
I hope you enjoy this video. It won’t be the last. I know it’s been a LONG time, but that is also part of the story for another time.
In any case, I’m back, and plan to be putting out content for the foreseeable future. It won’t be consistent in tone/genre/release schedule, but it will be coming out every couple of weeks. In the immediate future, I will be releasing a video every single week for the next 4-5 weeks. Next week, it’ll be a speaker repair tutorial that I shot with the Modern Rogue production crew. As I said, I won’t be staying in any particular niche these days. I know that’s not a good idea for a content creator on youtube, but I’m too old, and make a decent enough living to not give a fuck!
I spent nearly 4 years watching and participating in chasing after the algorithm, and it’s a cyclical sickness that needs to end. For my part, I’m just going to make whatever I want to make.
Thank you for your time!
- Paid out of my own pocket, mind you. I was pretty dumb about how much of my own money I spent when I worked for Brian Brushwood. I assumed it would pay off.
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