The inaugural season of John Mulaney's no-holds-barred Netflix series Everybody's Live has played host to some genuinely awesome musical guests. Destroyer and Jessica Pratt! Mannequin Pussy! My two favorite bass-playing Kims! An orchestra-backed Cypress Hill! There are three more episodes left this season, and Mulaney has revealed who will be bringing the tunes: Alanis Morrissette, Sleater-Kinney (with their pal Fred Armisen), and yeule.
The show's music booker is Kevin O’Donnell, though noted music nerd Mulaney's personal tastes do influence a lot of the choices. The pair recently talked with Rolling Stone -- where O'Donnell also used to work as an editor -- about the extensive process of booking musical guests. There's a lot of good tidbits in the conversation, particularly regarding Mannequin Pussy, whose band name alone has kept them from getting on primetime TV. Of their rip-roaring rendition of "I Got Heaven," Mulaney said:
You have no idea how scaled down in terms of shock and awe that performance was versus some of what we discussed and designed. The stained glass behind them had an S&M feel but what we didn’t go with had even more... It was our decision to tone it down a little, just because the song is so badass that keeping the tableau of the stained glass at first glance a little more traditional looking... It’s still provocative, but your eye wouldn’t immediately go to these things on it. And it was almost like, let the song take you to the most fun hardcore place rather than the lights going up and you’re going, “Oh, it’s already crazy.” It was us respectfully being like, I think the power of the song is what drives this.
According to the feature, Mulaney submits a personal song request for each artist booked for the show, though not everyone adheres to his picks. He offered this guiding principle for the booking: "Every artist [on the show] is a favorite of ours. But we were [also] super conscious of just what would be really kinetic on television. It’s as much about knowing that we’re collaborating with people who are going to have strong and great visual ideas and are going to just blow the roof off the studio." There's also this:
I thought we might have a bit more wind in our sails in booking artists if we present them with, "Hey, we’re not just coming to you with kind of a standard late-night offer." We want to do something more like [late 1980s musical TV show] Night Music, that David Sanborn hosted and Hal Willner produced. He put together Sonny Rollins and Leonard Cohen and it was just like, “No one’s doing that. We got to do something like that.
Mulaney also recently gave his analysis of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame nominees, a tradition he's been doing with RS. Of this year’s snubs he says not inducting recent Everybody’s Live guests Phish is a “crime” and “I have no opinion on the Black Crowes.” Read that here, and see the announcement for the future Everybody's Live musical guests below.
