Comedians have always wanted to be pop and rock stars — or at least, enough of them have gotten comfortable with a guitar and a drum track to make it seem so. It’s a long and eclectic tradition, including Steve Martin, Weird Al, Bo Burnham, Rachel Bloom, Donald Glover, Randy Rainbow and John Early.
Now there’s a new crop of albums from entertainers across the comic spectrum. Some of them regularly use music as part of their act, like Cat Cohen, whose repertoire is all cabaret style. And some are left-field turns, like the profane opus from the writer and actor Jordan Firstman, or the thoughtful, genuine emo tunes of Mae Martin. Then there’s Kyle Mooney, whose record is either all gags — or none. In comedy, like music, it’s all in how you hit the beat.
Jordan Firstman
The social media favorite Jordan Firstman didn’t expect to release a record, let alone a concept album based on the private confessions of strangers on the internet. But on “Secrets,” out this month, he lets it rip, in ways that are almost entirely unprintable here. Its party anthem single describes a dude quest to bond over anatomy. (The video, directed by the boundary-pusher Cody Critcheloe, has more than a quarter-million views.)
“Secrets” began as a pandemic-era riff, when Firstman, 33, publicly responded to his Instagram DMs. He accumulated tens of thousands of private missives — he requested the most “depraved” but also “Beautiful. Lyrical. And Random” stuff; endless inspiration.
A few years later, with a friend — the musician and producer Brad Oberhofer — he began song-ifying them. “I’m like, such a lyric queen,” he said, and the secrets were ready-made titles, misspellings and all, like “I’m I Lesbian,” the album’s Lilith Fair-flavored closer. Capitol Records bought his pitch before he even left its parking lot, he said in a video interview.
Each of the 16 tracks on “Secrets” is a different style, vocals included. “I’d get kind of drunk and go through them, like, ‘What could this be?’” he said. His songwriting beverage of choice — Four Loko — was the great clarifier.
Firstman has a flair for impressions, ever since he was a 7-year-old on Long Island imitating Kramer from “Seinfeld” to make his family laugh. Doing musicals in high school, he pulled off a Michael Bublé croon, and he broke out during lockdown with videos anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Now he’s an actor in Los Angeles, appearing as an on-off love interest in FX’s sitcom “English Teacher,” and in an upcoming HBO project from Rachel Sennott.
Making an album for a major label, with multiple producers, was “surreal,” he said, especially when he reeled in dream collaborators like Rufus Wainwright, Bloodhound Gang and Suki Waterhouse. And though he made playlists of “who I’m copying, basically,” he said, “I don’t consider it a parody album.” But “if I get sued by anyone, it is a parody album, 100 percent.”
Mae Martin
The stand-up and actor Mae Martin has carved an unusually sincere path as a comic, plumbing their life, sexuality and addictions with a lot of charm, and little sarcasm. Their album “I’m a TV” is also a departure — no punchlines, no bits, just dreamy indie rock that explores longings, identity and friendships on the verge of something else. With Martin on guitar, piano, bass and harmonica, the album was produced by Jason Couse and Wes Marskell of the Canadian art-rock duo the Darcys. (Couse and Martin are childhood friends.)
Martin, 37, hit the stage early, playing comedy clubs in Toronto at 13. “I was a really extroverted kid,” Martin said. “But privately, I was an emo kid, in my room with my guitar.” They tried musical comedy for a while, “but then the talking between the songs just got longer and longer, until the songs stopped.”
About five years ago, when Martin was working on their loosely autobiographical Netflix series “Feel Good,” they grew deeply intrigued by scoring. “That was the first time that I felt kind of professionally empowered to have opinions about music,” Martin said in a phone interview. “I loved it so much, I started learning how to use GarageBand and making demos.”
Moving to Los Angeles was a turning point: “I just had top surgery and I was feeling really good — like I had more confidence to be honest.” They rented a studio and recorded what they still thought of as a “passion project.” It was released on Universal (Canada) in February. The sound is heavily influenced ’90s emo and pop — “the era that I fell in love with music and felt like I was in a movie all the time,” Martin said.
They booked a few stage shows, which they found transformative and invigorating, like learning a new language, as they put it. “Trying to express something with stand-up or with TV, you have to crystallize and distill it down,” Martin said. In songwriting, “it’s nice to not have to neatly tie everything up with a bow — just express the feeling, instead of the conclusion. Because so much of life is that ephemeral, you know?”
Cat Cohen
“Boys never wanted to kiss me,” Cat Cohen sings, over jazzy piano, “so now I do comedy.” It’s the closest the New York performer, whose act centers on her smart, pop-florid musicality, has to a mission statement.
Since 2016, she’s earned fans with shows at Joe’s Pub, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and her 2022 Netflix special “The Twist …? She’s Gorgeous.” On “Overdressed,” her debut album released in November, Cohen, 33, had a full runway for material rooted in the musical theater she studied growing up in Houston, her millennial pop leanings and the bawdy traditions of Bette Midler and Sandra Bernhard.
“I just like things that are very glamorous and over-the-top,” she said in a video interview. “It feels like the most high-octane way to put on a show.”
She already had more than a dozen songs polished last year when she met a representative from Elektra Records, who suggested an album — “I’m like, I completely agree” — and that a good entry point would be a holiday offering. “I was like, ‘I’ll throw some holiday words into my songs,’” Cohen said. “I’d be saying ‘Valentine’s Day’ for no reason. Whatever it takes.”
Cohen recorded “Overdressed” in just nine days in London, with the producer and multi-instrumentalist Couros. “He totally got the, ‘I want it to sound like a sexy pop song but I’m gonna say these disgusting things,’” vibe, she said. Her concert persona is an overconfident femme whose inner foibles are revealed in every bridge. (“I had a threesome, and almost came,” she boasts on the dance track “Going Out Top.”)
Her songwriting starts with melody and lyrics; on her last special, “Come for Me,” she played guitar, but, she said, she always enlists “a properly trained musician friend” for composition help.
One track, “Time of Year,” was surreptitiously recorded in the same studio Adele uses. “I was like, ‘I’m Adellllle,’” she said of the session. “I love being in the studio,” she added. “I love that energy of just being in a room for 15 hours and kind of losing your mind and finding the thing and just going off like, pure gut instinct. I think that’s so fun.”
Kyle Mooney
“I don’t want to be a clown anymore,” Kyle M (as in Mooney), huffs dramatically in a short video announcing his debut album. On “The Real Me,” released last month, the filmmaker (“Y2K”) and former “Saturday Night Live” star swears he is deeply serious. “I promise, there is nothing comedic about the Kyle M project.”
The record, he said in a possibly too-earnest phone interview, is his way of letting “the world know that I’m here, and I want to make music.”
Mooney, 40, who left “S.N.L.” in 2022 after nine seasons, played guitar and trumpet growing up in San Diego, and doodled pictures of rock stars. “I kind of thought that was my life,” he said.
He played in a youthful pop-punk band called Prop 84 (his birth year); during a teenage “underground hip-hop phase,” he made beats. Comedy overtook his creative life in college, but he still composed musical snippets for his early digital shorts at “S.N.L.”
On “The Real Me,” he played everything — keys, guitar, electronic drums. “It was really just me, plugging in in my bedroom, and trying to tell these stories that I’ve had inside of me for a long time,” he said, in a trademark deadpan.
Eventually, he shared his lo-fi compositions with his friend Peanut Butter Wolf, the D.J. and producer, who released the album on his indie label, Stone’s Throw Records. They did not rerecord anything: “What you hear is what I gave,” Mooney said.
The 11 tracks, totaling 19 minutes, encompass many genres, at least in theory. There’s “Gwendolyn Bartley,” “which some people have said is sort of Beatles-esque,” according to Mooney. “I Gotta Dance Tonight” is a synth-y club non-banger. Mostly the album is him singing sort of tunelessly over gentle strums.
“I feel like I can speak more directly through songs than I can through a comedy sketch or a character,” he said. “A wall is taken down.”
As Kyle M, he never betrayed even a hint of a joke: The album, he insisted, is heartfelt and authentically him. Asked what musical traditions he saw himself a part of, he said, “If anything, I’d hope that I’m in lineage with some of the great musicians through history.”
“I’m saying that,” he added, “while trying to be humble.” He is already working on plans to tour.
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
The post What’s So Funny About These Albums? appeared first on New York Times.
