John Early, In the Flesh
Before the Cleveland stop on his current tour, we caught up with the comic, actor and performer about turning a stand-up special into a musical revue, letting cover songs color his own vulnerability, the origins of “Vicky with a V,” and his brand-new album, Now More Than Ever.
Photo courtesy of the artist“I hope you don’t mind me getting ready during this,” John Early tells me, as he picks up a blonde wig-wearing mannequin head and sits it on the Grog Shop’s green room table. Early is merely a few weeks removed from the release of his album, Now More Than Ever—the “expansion” companion to his tremendous, This Is Spinal Tap-style Max special from last year. The LP is full of songs, but don’t you dare call him a singer, even if he is dedicating a chunk of his nightly set to doing just that. What Early is doing on stage every night isn’t karaoke; he’s not singing a Dolly Parton song, grabbing some laughs and then calling it a day.
On Late Night with Seth Meyers this summer, he called his voice “unremarkable” but admitted to feeling “compelled to sing” at his live shows. There’s a very nuanced line being straddled in those compulsions, and every night is an opportunity for Early to better-hone the craft he so deeply cares for (but doesn’t consider his main thing). “It gets easier with reps, for sure,” he says. “And I’ve accepted it. This is something that I had been doing with a full band, but never with any cameras present, never with any intention of it being memorialized. That was by design, so that I never had to see myself sing.”
Of course, during rehearsals and soundchecks, Early could gauge how he was doing, especially when he and his musical director/bandmate/producer Michael A. Hesslein (known affectionately as Hess) were sharing the stage together. But opening up that space to tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people at one time can be intimidating and intimate, though ultimately freeing. “When people are there, it’s so strange,” Early says. “You have no actual perception of how you sound, which is actually very liberating.” He was freaked out before the special, by virtue of the premise being “This is John Early, and he sings,” but showgoers and longtime Earlyheads responded warmly to his whole “gay comedian makes Britney Spears and Neil Young sound cabaret” approach (though, he has since cleared up all confusion around his sexuality, declaring that “the hourglass shapes of a woman drives me absolutely wild”). “I don’t think I’m doing anything groundbreaking at all,” he adds, contradicting the joke that fuels the Now More Than Ever show—that doing both comedy and music is groundbreaking.
While Now More Than Ever is not a groundbreaking premise, it does tap into a crucial part of comedy’s long and beloved lexicon. As a culture, we’ve accepted the entanglement of it and musicality ever since the days of yore, when a mathematician named Tom Lehrer sang parody songs and Jack Benny played violin on the Vaudeville circuit. Then, Steve Martin raised some laughs while plucking his banjo with an arrow through his head and, 40 years later, the 2020s were christened by Bo Burnham’s legendary quarantine opus Inside. Now, we have entered Early’s world.
Everyone who comes to this intersection of art does so for different philosophies. When he’s singing a song like Aliyah’s “Rock the Boat” to an audience volunteer who is tied to a chair right after a run of intensely sexual material, it’s not just a segue of vulnerable embarrassment, it’s a gesture of relief that remains linear with the material that precedes it. “I feel so comforted knowing there’s a song coming up,” Early says, “because there’s a set pace and you’re completely held by the song—by the structure of a song. All you have to do is get through it. I find stand-up to be so much more existentially… I don’t like that it’s all up to me. The songs are more collaborative.”
Early is currently touring the United States, playing a “fun lap around the country” without any desire to turn the performances into a special. He’s incorporating songs into the shows that aren’t on the album, like the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream,” and continuing to perfect the “little system” he and Hess have built together. When he’s on stage, Early is a gifted performer who can so effortlessly package ideas and tangents without rigidity. It’s all elemental, a microcosm of humor populated by one man spinning his “tangled web of content.” The rest of us are merely tourists. But, the still-active lifespan of Now More Than Ever wasn’t always this easy.
Recording half of the special’s accompanying LP in a studio wasn’t just a fish-out-of-water experience for Early, it was “embarrassing” and an absurdity not unlike that Documentary Now! episode spoofing D.A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company film. “To me, to have headphones on and be in a studio is a sketch that I’ve done multiple times,” he says. “There’s nothing funnier to me than studio politics and studio behavior, so to find myself sincerely doing that was so embarrassing. It’s very punishing, because it is so fake. When I have a task on stage, I have to deliver the song to the audience. They’re right in front of me, and it makes it very immediate and the song can be free. But in the studio, you’re in a vacuum. It’s so dry and airless. It’s very hard to get any kind of emotion and the spontaneity that I feel on stage. It’s soul-sucking for me.”
Early doesn’t feel compelled to write his own music; covers are firmly and indefinitely his bag. Where his comedy is often anecdotal and ripe with character studies and exaggerations, Now More Than Ever became a direct line into his current performative psyche—a language where punchlines can be musical platitudes, as can points of solemn dharmas. While much of the special’s aural focus is on pop bangers, his rendition of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” finds him forgoing his usual hammed-up cultural bombast in favor of cinematic, humorous openness. While riffing for many minutes on mass shootings and omakase (“Are we like that?”) as a piano melody unravels behind him, he reaches a breakthrough.“The music and the stand-up used to be so compartmentalized and they deliberately disconnected,” he admits. “They were just like ‘party pauses’—I’ll talk and then we’ll all just dance a little bit. ‘After the Gold Rush’ was the first time I ever was, thematically and emotionally, letting the stand-up and the song bleed into each other. Now, I’m more excited about that potential when I’m picking songs. Now, and maybe this is very corny, I’m very excited about how a quiet, sweet song can bring out the emotion in something.”
Early’s choice to include “After the Gold Rush” is a particularly momentous one. For my money, it’s one of the saddest songs ever written—the “there was a band playing in my head” line wrenches my heart to dust whenever I hear it. Early’s material doesn’t alway go to places that are that somber but, after singing through Neil’s version of despair, he feels like he can now better tap into his own. “The reason why people laugh the second I start singing that song is that I’m talking about the internet, I’m talking about Twitter—these seemingly shallow, hollow things—and then I’m going into a very poetic song,” he says. “There’s an immediate laugh, but the more you stick with the song, that retroactively brings out the despair in the material—because all of my material is about my sadness about being alive right now. That has completely changed the way I approach stand-up. Now, from moment one, I’m trying to find that emotion instead of letting the emotion kind of exist there but not really tease it out and hope that three of 40,000 people can pick up on it. It feels more generous to start there.”
While it wasn’t in the filmed special, Early’s resound “Vicky with a V” set revels in the Neil Young afterglow; it’s a persona that is such an affecting part of his art. “When I’m writing Vicky, I’m very moved by that process,” he confesses. “I’m very touched by the way the audience reacts to Vicky.” Early conceptualized the Vicky persona and her “I’m looking for my denim” catchphrase when he was in his early 20s at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn and couldn’t locate his jacket. “We were leaving and I couldn’t find my denim, and they were like, ‘John, we need to hurry!’ And I just started talking in a Southern accent,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Don’t cross me when I’m looking for my denim.’ I was, like, looking for my denim. It made sense to me that there was a brassy, Southern mom saying that.”
Early started writing around that catchphrase, coming up with bits where the climax would be a story of her, you guessed it, looking for her denim before nose-diving into something else, like experimenting with women (“I always say, ‘Just ‘cause your college is online, doesn’t mean you can’t experiment’”). During his sets, Early transforms into Vicky, donning the very blonde wig he is combing for most of our conversation and using it as a “vehicle for unbridled sincerity.” “Vicky is where I get to relax,” he confirms, glancing at a denim purse that’s sitting next to him on the couch. “All the millennial irony and self-consciousness melts away and I get to be this completely direct, warm woman. It’s profound.”
Millennial irony is one of the larger, thoughtful parts of Early’s comedic style. He takes aim at the self-obsessed members of his generation and is never shy about turning the camera onto himself in the process. And while singing can so often be a vanity act—because there has to be some level of selfishness in order to get up on that stage and kick up a fuss in the first place—Early’s approach to the songs he and Hess choose is a selfless, anchoring pivot. “The reason why I like to do covers is because it’s devotional,” he says. “It’s someone else’s work that you’re bringing attention to. You’re filling it up, like a balloon, and it’s not you. I know that singing is inherently vain, but when I’m doing it, I know that there’s a risk of people interpreting it that way—and more power to them. But, to me, it’s a reprieve from the navel-gazing of the stand-up. It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s another John.’”
Early adjusts his position on the couch, and a cacophonous fart sound fills the air. “Let the reader know that was the leather of the couch,” he relays closely into the microphone. “That was the leather.” Picking his train of thought back up, Early declares that his singing performances are not motivated or about the self. “Stand-up, it is self-centered,” he continues. “It starts with the self, you start by talking about your personal life. But when I’m performing, I like to feel like I’m giving [audiences] something. I’m making an offering through talking about myself. I’m reaching people in almost a religious way, like a tent revival.”
“Revival” is a good way of describing Early and his approach on Now More Than Ever, as he identifies as an “old school performer” in the archetypical sense of traveling from town to town with his wigs and props. He’s not only a millennial; he’s a performer, too, who’s tasked with interrogating the overlap between generational apathy, cultural obsessions and impatient celebrity. The concept of curtailing his material so it can be digestible on TikTok or Instagram Reels isn’t first, second or third nature to him—in fact, it’s no nature to him at all. “I don’t feel like a performer in the sense of like, ‘Hey guys!’ on social media,” Early says. “I do think that is a really important distinction. It was very confusing to grow up thinking you’re a song-and-dance man in this old school, universal way.”
“Then, to be a part of the guinea pig generation for these tech companies,” he continues, “where everyone has their own platform and everyone is constantly selling themselves and performing some version of themselves—one of the many and most disastrous effects of this is that everyone thinks they’re a fucking performer. Why wouldn’t they? They go on their phones every day and do a little show, and then they get feedback and it feels good. So, a lot of people are like, ‘I’m gonna do this!’ Then, you see it pretty quickly fall apart on stage.”
Like many song-and-dance men before him, Early is, perhaps, one of our greatest living body language comedians. To watch his set—and to speak with him in conversation—paying attention to his mannerisms is as rewarding as the stories he tells. Some of the first records I ever bought were comedy LPs, Redd Foxx, [Redacted] and Don Rickles; my junior year of undergrad, I kept my partner’s vinyl copy of John Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous on heavy rotation. It’s fascinating to hear 50, 60 years of comedians striking the balance between what you’re giving to an audience who is just listening versus what you might see on Netflix.
There are instances on the Now More Than Ever LP where you can tell that a big part of Early’s bit features a facial expression. He and his band, the Lemon Squares, went for a rock-doc style of tone, and their messiness—in pejorative sense, expressed by Early himself—lends itself to a vinyl record. “It felt totally like the right next step,” he says, “but I was immediately confronted with how physical my material is. I had to cut two whole bits, chunky jokes, because I was just like, ‘This is where the payoff is lit-er-a-lly just a face I’m making.’” Early had to accept that other parts of very physical jokes were going to make the final tracklist either way. “There is something about pure audio where you’re missing an entire sensory element and it, of course, makes the whole thing, I think, more vivid,” he continues. “Even when you’re left out of certain facial expressions that I’m making, I would like to think that, for the listener, there’s something about not knowing what I’m doing that makes it feel this special night that’s like, ‘Oh, I’m peeking inside this one moment in time.’”
Like those moments in time, Early’s milieu is engulfed in affirmative sentimentality. He takes novelty and packages it lovingly, resurrecting art forms that are, by my account, quite dead. “Why is John Early wasting his time doing a cabaret performance?” you might ask. “The process of recording those songs for this album and the process of touring with Hess, and doing the big shows with the Lemon Squares—it’s so moving to me,” he would respond. “I’m often confronted with the fact that it means nothing to the audience, to my followers on Instagram, whatever. Some people dig it, but some clearly don’t and let me know. I just refuse to accept the lack of liveness in recorded music.”
A lot of the songs in his setlist—like Britney Spears’s “Slave 4 U,” Donna Summer’s “My Baby Understands” and Madonna’s “American Life”—were crafted in the studio piecemeal, but Early yearns for a return to composition styles that are the antithesis of processed music where “all the life is rung out of it.” He points to Bette Midler as a North Star, especially. “When I would watch her old performances, as a person alive today, it jolted me,” he says. “It filled me with emotion. It sounds so warm and crackling. I don’t have 1/60th of Bette Midler’s skill or talent or stage presence, but I do just go back there.”
Early understands that some might view that line of thinking as pretentious, or that he’s refusing to accept the time we’re in. [John’s note: “I do refuse to accept the time we’re in.”]. But, he holds a deep sadness for unnecessary, corrosive change. “As a kid, when we would drive by these gigantic strip malls, I’d be like, ‘Oh, no! What about the old buildings?’” he recalls. “I always felt like there was this attitude of, like, ‘Well, that’s just what stores are now,’ but you’re saying that as if it’s not also completely destroying something that came before it—which is sad, and we should be sad.” He pauses for a moment, catching his breath. “Maybe it’s a lost cause, and maybe I would be more successful if I accepted the present moment a little bit more, but I probably wouldn’t be as happy.” That’s why John Early gladly labels himself a good-old-fashioned “crank.”
For this current tour, it’s just Early and Hess sharing a stage (well, and the audience member subjected to Early’s seductive gyrating during “Rock the Boat”)—no Lemon Squares in attendance. Instead, they’re performing to backing tracks Hess has built out. It’s a different beast, the two-person set-up, than what Early put together for the Now More Than Ever special, but it’s a welcomed tonal shift. “The truth is, the duo version of this show, as opposed to the full band, has more intimacy to it that I think is very special,” he says. “Even when I was doing the big band show a couple weeks ago in LA, I was like, ‘I’m scared we’re gonna lose some of the moving moments.’ But there’s something nice and quiet about the stuff with Hess.” The Britney songs, in particular, are harder to pull off without a full band (though Hess’s genius build-out for it is far more funkier), but a song like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton’s “The Pain of Loving You” gives the duo a chance to unravel all of the production and make it affectionate and small.
When Early breaks out Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” he hits the top note that, as he puts it, requires him to “release the sphincter.” Such a loosening is an endurance that has always felt normal and natural for Early, though. He’s not conditioning his body to do 30 minutes of stand-up and 30 minutes of singing. Instead, performing “I Feel Love” every night on tour has taught him how to let go of his own perfectionism. “The special was a really efficient way to learn this, which is that it’s on the permanent record,” he says. “The cameras are capturing this, they’re not capturing anything else. That was horrifying, so the only way through was to give it to God. I really learned, from that experience, that, at a certain point before I go on stage, I have to put my pencils down. I cannot look at notes anymore. The notebook has to close and I just have to trust that it’s in me and I will find it on stage.”
What I love so much about comedy, singing or not, is that it so often draws the curtains on things we willfully ignore. You can laugh at something, but you’re being exposed to the truth of it. Early might make fart noises while calling his peers “hot messes” in the wake of modern humanity’s downfall, but he’s really just trying to tell you that he’s not having a very good time with this whole “living” gig. But, at the end of every show, he feels lighter—no longer embarrassed by his own instincts. “There are a lot of people who are emotionally manipulative comics,” he says. “[They’re] very self-important; there’s a ‘message.’ I’ve always felt very allergic to that. For years, I was being reactionary towards that. I was kind of like, ‘There is no message, fuck you,’ or ‘There is, but it’s buried, so fuck you.’ Now, I feel older and I just feel able to embrace the part of me that does want to talk about serious things through comedy and music—on this tour, especially, going in knowing that I’m trying to move people and create, hopefully, a transcendent little moment for people. I don’t need to be anything more than silly, but I like to talk about darker things.” [John’s note: “Please strike ‘I like to talk about darker things’ from the record.’”]
Just a few days before our conversation, baseball legend Pete Rose passed away. That night, while scrolling through my TikTok feed, an interview clip of him came up. The interview posed a question: “How do you want people to talk about Pete Rose after you die?” Rose gave a very on-the-noise, pompous and confident answer about being remembered as a “champion,” but I heard it and, immediately, I wanted to know the inverse of that. And I knew that Early would be the perfect person to ask. “What do you hope people don’t say about you when you’re gone?” I say, as the crowd noise outside grows and spills into the green room. “I don’t want it to be just that I was ‘weird,’” he replies. “Which, I might be! That might be my destiny. I think that I’m always shocked by how people perceive what I do as ‘weird’—because, a lot of times, when things are weird or alienating, you assume that the person doing that is trying to put up a wall between you and them. I’m never trying to do that.”
When Early made Now More Than Ever last year, it was the most “himself” he’d ever been in front of other people, or at least on stage and in front of an audience. In the past, he’s been quite chameleonic and unknowably present, be it through his role in Search Party, or his work with Kate Berlant, or even his directing of Jacqueline Novak’s off-Broadway comedy Get On Your Knees. For an hour on Now More Than Ever, he’s not playing a character; he’s singing every song from the heart and letting the camera land on his face and linger there.
And he’s not running away from that focus, either—doing cabaret song-and-dance numbers while staying put, showing us his and the Lemon Squares’ maneuvers behind the scenes and letting his own eccentricities take a beat. It all plays out like a variety hour, even when it plays on wax, as if he’s doing his best impression of Dick Clark’s Live Wednesday or Soul Train but can’t help but make it so incredibly and beautifully John Early. “It felt so traditional to me,” he explains, “and then people were still like, ‘This is crazy.’ People were talking about all the crazy levels of interwoven irony and I was like, ‘Well that wasn’t my goal.’ I really wasn’t trying to do some sort of ‘Where does the character end and the real John begin?’ [bit]. Some of that is on me, so I just have to keep finding vehicles for myself that are more direct and more generous. I hope people don’t just go, ‘He was so niche!’”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.