John Early on the Music That Rewired His Brain

Dopamine Hits is an interview series in which artists we like tell us all about the songs and albums that made them think about music in an entirely different way.

There’s a 16-minute bit in John Early’s HBO special Now More Than Ever where he eulogizes the millennial generation’s wasted youth. He picks apart his cohort’s general lack of useful life skills: “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” He laments how American culture has gone from the beautifully mysterious choreography of Bob Fosse to the braindead capitalist choreography of a Shark Tank pitch. He suggests that a potential millennial time capsule should include a video of a Bon Appetit cook making cacio e pepe and an “infographic about how your allyship is performative.” It’s funny, damning, heartbreaking. As a millennial myself, I couldn’t help but sigh—and even shed a tear of recognition—in between laughs while watching it.

“I wanted you to be moved by that, and it was very moving for me to perform,” Early tells me. “It felt like laying to rest this period of popular culture that bore no fruit. On the surface, it is me calling people out, but I’m trying to talk about something we inherited. We didn’t create it. It was in motion, and we’re the vessel for this totally dead culture, language, and attitude.”

The sun is setting behind him as he sits on a bench in Manhattan overlooking the East River. It’s November, and he’s living in a fancy, extended-stay hotel while in town working on an as-yet-unannounced project, surrounded by ancient senior citizens, toddlers and their nannies, and middle-aged finance types on the Upper East Side. In a white button-up and tan baseball cap, he’s soft-spoken and contemplative—a far cry from the knowingly obnoxious and loony persona he’s cultivated online, onstage, and in shows like Search Party across the last decade.

Through that work, he’s become an offbeat spokesperson for the millennial condition. Now in his late 30s, he can’t help but look back and feel robbed. “Most prior generations had some sort of next rung on the monkey bars to swing to, like a house, children, or just dignified forms of work and aging,” he says. “But we spent the entirety of our youth—of our sexual prime—on the internet making these little fragments of content that just totally disappeared. That’s not our fault. The fucking internet was just our workplace.”

He goes on to unpack the highs and lows of internet virality, a phenomenon he’s generally familiar with thanks to his more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. He loves being funny and making people laugh by skewering typical online tropes. But the process, and the aftermath, can ring hollow. “I’d film a short clip in my room, and the experience of doing it was utterly lonely—I was by myself,” he says. “Then the experience after is hell, because if I have a video that is successful, I’m spending weeks locked on my phone, checking the stats of it, every single comment, and every single person who shared it. It’s guaranteed phone addiction. For people who are watching, it’s this experience of 43 seconds and then moving on to the next thing. None of it feels very lasting or like an actual exchange of energy.”

Now More Than Ever, which premiered in 2023 and was released as an album last fall, is an antidote to that fleeting feeling. A culmination of his career thus far and a testament to his varied talents, the special features Early telling jokes, dancing, and singing while backed by his seriously capable six-piece band, the Lemon Squares. “The music makes the show much more stanky,” Early says. “It’s a lubricant.” The crew faithfully covers R&B and pop hits by Tweet, Britney Spears, and Donna Summer throughout the show, but there’s an unlikely ballad as well: Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.”

In fact, the chords to that prescient 1970 folk classic about the ecological collapse and its fallout underscore Early’s entire bit about the death of millennial culture, adding to its mournfulness. “I was really scared of it being so directly emotional,” Early says of performing the song. “It’s very melancholy, but there’s a slight note of hope to it. Choosing that song at the last minute turned it from a totally manic variety show into something that is still an absolutely manic variety show—but with an emotional thrust and a secret depth to it. In my stoner, dumb-as-rocks way, I’m trying to show that it’s OK to care.”

Early was introduced to “After the Gold” rush through a cover by the supergroup Trio, featuring Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and it’s one of the songs that rewired his brain. Below, he delves further into his history with that touchstone and other music that made a permanent imprint on his psyche.

Trio: “After the Gold Rush” (Neil Young cover) (1999)

John Early: I never sang songs like this—I always did pop, disco, R&B. And most of the music I like is sung by women. The original plan was to do “Take a Bow” by Madonna, which is a beautiful slow jam, but I only connected to the vibe of it. And then, as I was getting closer to putting the special together, I was listening to Trio’s second album, where they covered “After the Gold Rush.” I was also going through a breakup, and it was a very sad time in my life. I had no prior relationship to Neil Young, but I had a huge relationship to Trio: My family listened to their two albums in the van, because I grew up in Nashville, and country was in the air. Since I knew it from that cover, I thought I was choosing an extremely obscure song to cover for the special. But then every straight guy I talked to about it was like, “Yeah, it’s one of Neil Young’s most famous songs.” [laughs] I had no idea what his place in the culture was at all. But through that song, I’ve really come to love Neil Young. And I just love that those women in Trio love him, too.

The Abba songs on the Muriel’s Wedding soundtrack (1994)

Everything that I’ve been obsessed with has always had a strain of sadness or darkness to it. Muriel’s Wedding has its bright colors and its Abba music, but there’s devastating things happening in it, too; I think that is like the weird, compartmentalized experience a lot of closeted gay kids have.

I was probably 11 years old when I first saw the movie, and I was very drawn to Toni Collette. She plays Muriel, who is the black sheep of her family. Her friends hate her and ditch her, so she starts stealing her family’s money to reinvent herself. When she finally meets a true friend and is having this first authentic relationship of her life, she’s also going into this crazy scam marriage. It’s a lot, and the movie’s emotions are so big.

Abba’s music is initially presented almost ironically, because it’s the obsession of this catatonic, overweight girl alone in her bedroom. But by the end, you realize the music is not just this campy choice—it contains all the pathos that’s also in the movie. And Muriel says to her friend, “I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to Abba songs, but since I’ve met you, I haven’t listened to one Abba song. That’s because my life is as good as an Abba song.” The whole movie just feels like a pop song to me.

Roberta Flack: “Do What You Gotta Do” (1970)

I listen to so much dance music—I don’t mean, like, EDM, just music that you can dance to—and my relationship to music is about moving my body. That is what I’m drawn to. So I always forget that the primary function of music is to speak to your emotional life. I’m not really a lyrics person. Lyrics are usually like Mad Libs to me, I’m just singing vowel sounds. The lyrics problem goes back to childhood, when I was literally like, “Turn it up, Mom,” and was just rocking out to Tweet and Missy Elliott’s “Oops (Oh My)”—it didn’t dawn on me that the song was about masturbation, I was just so shocked by the production.

But this Roberta Flack song reminded me that music is really good when it’s poetic and sad. It totally stopped me in my tracks. I could not believe how gorgeous it is and how much it feels like you’re in the room with the band. It’s so intimate.

Missy Elliott: Supa Dupa Fly (1997)

Supa Dupa Fly was that era of Timbaland and Missy where the beats feel very wet and live, with mouth sounds and real bass guitars—so little of it feels electronic. I watched the video for “The Rain” in real time as a child, and it blew my mind. People have been making videos with crazy visuals that are futuristic and sci-fi and spacey for years, but they’re meaningless because they’re usually paired with pretty shitty music, or music that we’ve absolutely heard before. Missy is the supreme example of what that kind of futurism should be visually and sonically.

Donna Summer: Bad Girls (1979)

This is one of the most-played albums of my life. There was a period of four or five years—that I’m just now transitioning out of—where, if I had a long enough drive, I would listen to it all the way through.

In the Now More Than Ever special, you sing “I Feel Love,” and the album also includes your cover of one of the lesser-known tracks from Bad Girls, “My Baby Understands.” Why did you choose to sing that one?

I was watching a documentary about her, and she really wanted to sing in a more rock style, but the first thing that took off for her was the breathy, “love to love you baby” thing. She felt very trapped in that, but on “My Baby Understands” you hear her real voice. That’s the way she wanted to sing. That song is sweet but it’s also sad, because it seems like she’s talking about someone who’s not there a lot. She’s justifying it to herself a little bit. Donna Summer contains multitudes.

Kristen Vigard: “God Give Me Strength” (written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello; as lip synced by Illeana Douglas in Grace of My Heart) (1996)

This is the most affecting song that came out of my introduction to Burt Bacharach, who wrote it with Elvis Costello. I was listening to a playlist of Burt Bacharach songs when he died a couple of years ago, and this song came on. I was like, Whoa, what is this? And who’s the singer? Then I found it on YouTube, and I saw Illeana Douglas lip syncing, and I was like, What the hell? That’s that fucking movie that was always on VH1 when I was a kid. It’s called Grace of My Heart, and it’s this strange melodrama. It’s almost deeply funny—sometimes consciously. It’s loosely inspired by the life of Carole King, and a lot of the movie feels like a parody of a biopic. But Burt Bacharach worked on a lot of the music, and I love Illeana Douglas.

There’s something about the way that she’s lip syncing and the way that it’s filmed that is like so many things I love, like Showgirls, where there’s a whole lot of feeling and maybe some secondhand embarrassment too. It feels like she didn’t have that many takes. But at the end of the day, I just wanted to choose something that was Burt Bacharach-adjacent. It’s an exquisite song.

Kelis: Wanderland (2001)

Kelis had a very buzzy, exciting first album, Kaleidoscope, and then this was her second one with the Neptunes. She should have been coasting, but because of some awful thing that happened with her record label, Wanderland never got released in America. And as a young Kelis fan, I was always furious about it, because this was the age of physical media, and I couldn’t get the fucking CD. So the album always had this mystique to me. They were finally able to release it on streaming in the U.S. in 2019, and it was this beautiful gift from the past. I had never heard the whole thing, and it’s full of these perfect, funky, little pop songs. It’s very sparse, not trying to be some masterpiece, by any means. But it’s really special, with the Neptunes being extremely experimental. This album needs more love. 

Aaliyah: “One in a Million” (1996)

I was 8 or 9 when this came out; I had a sister who was six years older than me, so a lot of culture was funneling through her. It’s such an unconventional song—it’s kind of drone-y, in the best way. There’s no giant shifts between the choruses and the verses. There’s something very meditative and trancey about it. It’s the ultimate example of how psychedelic, funky R&B can be very emotional and poetic; there’s something haunting about it, and yet it’s a very straightforward love song lyrically. There’s still no one cooler than Aaliyah. There’s such poise and confidence to what she’s doing, and she doesn’t push at all. I’m so in awe of the stillness and the ease. I was young enough for that era of music to really get its hooks in me, and I still don’t think it’s been surpassed.

You also made a great music video that’s dance-y and funny and sweet for your cover of another Aaliyah classic, “Rock the Boat.”

That is my favorite thing I’ve ever done; everything that I’m always trying to do happened in that video. It’s full of feeling. It starts like a take off on Janet Jackson’s “Pleasure Principle” or Cassie’s “Me & U” videos, where the pop star goes into the studio alone and rehearses the dance. But then if you stick with it—and a lot of people don’t, because it’s six minutes, and people are used to watching four-second content—it starts to swirl around with the dance and my sweet parents being included in it and the broad silliness of all the sexual stuff. There’s also the beauty of the music by the band and the backing vocalists, and all the care we put into that. By the end, it’s genuinely kind of transcendent. It rides a line of funniness and feeling that I’m always trying to get at and that is hard to achieve.

Below you’ll find convenient playlists with John Early’s picks for the music that rewired his brain, for paying subscribers only. Your support makes it possible for us to keep going, thanks!