John Mulaney can’t help but play favorites a bit discussing the different parts of his unorthodox weekly talk show Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney. “I have to say,” he told Rolling Stone via Zoom last week, “there’s no part of the show and there’s no part of the week that’s as exciting as when we first rehearse music.”
“Hardcore music nerd” may not be Mulaney’s most well-known attribute, but his level of music geekery is astonishing. (During a recent talk with Rolling Stone, he waxed lovingly for many minutes about Lenny Waronker, the influential producer and record executive who’s far from a household name.)
Alongside the show’s music booker (and former Rolling Stone editor) Kevin O’Donnell, the comedian has quietly put together some of the most innovative and diverse musical performances on late-night in recent years. For the talk show’s first iteration, last year’s Everybody’s in L.A., the host showcased iconic Los Angeles acts Los Lobos, Beck, Weezer, St. Vincent, Joyce Manor, and Warren G.
This season, Mulaney and O’Donnell got Kim Gordon and Kim Deal to perform Sonic Youth’s “Little Trouble Girl” live for the first time and reunited Canadian punk band METZ for an arbitrarily Christmas-themed episode. The performances reflect Mulaney’s eclectic tastes as well as his producer’s eye for what will play onscreen. “Every artist [on the show] is a favorite of ours,” he says. “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.”
The duo started booking musical guests last October, giving them ample time to lock in guests. “Being able to have that luxury of many months allowed us to really be selective and choosy on who we wanted to book,” O’Donnell says. (The offers always come with a personal song request from Mulaney, though not every request can be fulfilled.) O’Donnell notes that every guest adds a song only for the audience, such as John Cale’s 1974 “Barracuda” from his fourth album Fear.
Another delightful quirk unique to Everybody’s Live: Showing the other guests dancing along. (Joan Baez dancing to Cypress Hill was a “did that just happen?” moment.) “Richard Kind is always dancing,” Mulaney deadpans of his friend and show sidekick.
It hasn’t all gone 100 percent smoothly. Last month, Mulaney told the story of trying to book Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, only to be nearly duped by a duplicitous fake manager. Will the real Bone Thugs eventually make an appearance? Mulaney is coy, but says, “In the Chinatown confusion of It all, since it aired, many people have reached out saying they are the manager, and would like to get them on — like, ‘Hey, we saw it. We’d love to clear this up.’”
With four shows left, Mulaney and O’Donnell’s faces light up when discussing tonight’s Destroyer/Jessica Pratt collaboration and an upcoming appearance by Singaporean singer-producer Yeule. Though Mulaney can’t help but offer one cautionary note to musicians.
“I do want to say to musicians, I think you should be a little more nimble,” he says. “I talk to Fred Armisen about this a lot. I’m like, ‘Guys, share a fucking drum kit.’ It looks terrible to have four drum kits on a stage. It looks like Storage Wars. Come in an hour early and I’m sure the kit will work.”
Below, Mulaney and O’Donnell break down five of this season’s performances.
Mannequin Pussy, “I Got Heaven”
Mulaney: What was interesting talking to the band was them being like, “Yeah, well, people won’t have us on because they won’t even say our name.” I asked them, “Oh, have they ever said, ‘We’ll have you on?’” and they go, “Yeah, if they could introduce us as MP.”
O’Donnell: Or Mannequin P.
Mulaney: 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 a very cherubic… Kevin, it was like—
O’Donnell: There were whips and chains in some of the iconography they wanted.
Mulaney: Icons in leather masks with nipple stickers. And the tongue…
O’Donnell: It was like a suggestive tongue. There was also a woman’s backside with pantyhose on bending over.
Mulaney: 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.
O’Donnell: There were all these really cool Easter eggs on the performance. There was the drumhead with Sinéad O’Connor ripping the picture of the Pope on SNL. The background singers were actually pretty well-known musicians: Jill Ryan, Jessica Lea Mayfield, and Karly Hartzman from [the band] Wednesday.
Mulaney: Netflix legal said, “Are you OK with the drumhead?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s great.” They’re like, “Because it might be a clearance issue because it’s an image of Broadway video, NBC Universal.” So I went to the band and I was like, “Hey, I want you hear from me first. If for any reason we can’t do it, it’s purely copyright. I want you to know we’re not backdoor trying to kill this.”
O’Donnell: And there’s no censors. That’s why you can get Mannequin Pussy to come up and talk about Jesus eating her snatch. All this stuff that would get bleeped out on primetime.
Mulaney: Maggie blended with those songs so incredibly. On the visuals, we loved the videos that he did when [Cale’s 2024 album] Poptical Illusion came out. And the most fun part of the process for me is when Kevin and our set designers start working with the artist on what it’s going to look like.
O’Donnell: Yeah, really every single performance is about creating this unique world that you can’t see anywhere else. It’s worth noting that John [Mulaney] was like, “We have to have [John Cale] on the show. He’s my hero.” And Maggie was Cale’s first choice for a collaborator. That’s always been John [Mulaney]’s North Star. He wants to try to make these collaborations happen because it lends to the specialness and uniqueness of the show. The initial request to perform always starts with, “Is there an artist that they would like to collaborate with to do something special as a one-off?”
Mulaney: 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.”
O’Donnell: [Rogers is] just a phenomenal musician, which is why it worked with someone like Cale. She does more maybe traditional singer-songwriter or pop music. But because she’s just such a great musician, she was able to come in and do something really loose and kind of avant-garde with Cale, which is just an testament to her talent.
Rogers and Cale also joined Mulaney on the couch prior to their performance. The episode theme was surgery.
Mulaney: With John, I was like, “I can’t say what his whole career so far has meant to me,” but I also didn’t want to be just asking Velvet Underground questions. It was really fun to talk to them. And coincidentally, they had both had major dental surgery. I want the feel of the conversations to not seem like late-night. And this super cool dude over 80 comes out that some of my fans might not know, but many do. And it was great.
Mulaney: I went over to his house two weeks before taping. It was maybe the greatest concert I’ve ever been to. As soon as there was an even slight foot in the door to go over there, I was going to. But I was most curious because he hadn’t performed live, except for one show at his grandkids’ school, in the past year.
O’Donnell: It’s funny because Randy kept trying to change the songs he would play up until the day of. So I was caught in the middle of having to negotiate between John and Randy. It was very punk rock for him to come in that day and say, “I’m going to do this,” and then it’d be like, “No, no, no, you have to actually do ‘Rain’ and ‘Political Science’.”
Mulaney: Our selects were 15 to 20 songs. It was really badass that he kept changing because everything he was picking, I’d go, “Oh man, that’s also incredible.” And then we were shuffling between “Rain,” “Sail Away,” and “Political Science.” Everything he was throwing out was an absolute favorite of mine.
The theme was Height Night, and we were gathering 24 men between five feet and seven feet. And people were like, “Oh, is he going to do ‘Short People’?” And I was like, “No.” I love “Short People.” I love everything on Little Criminals. But I purposefully didn’t put Earthquake, the comedian, on our earthquake episode last year.
O’Donnell: Everyone afterwards, fans are like, “I can’t believe he didn’t do ‘Short People’ on the show about Height Night,” but that just would have made it lame if he did it. It was cool that he didn’t do the most obvious song.
Cypress Hill, “Hits From the Bong”
Mulaney: Kevin and I are the same age and went to school together. We’ve had very similar lives and are always looking to scratch that itch of a Warren G moment or a Weezer moment of just, like, this is just for someone of our vintage and just so cool to get to see live. And you wouldn’t see it anywhere else. And we had something in the Everybody’s in L.A. run where we were going to have the L.A. Phil and it ended up not working out. But since then, I thought, I want to see north of a 15-piece orchestra on our stage.
O’Donnell: John and I talked about keeping the first episode open until the very last minute, because we wanted to get someone that was as big of a star as we could. And there’s something just inherently funny and weird about a hip-hop group with an orchestra that fit the vibe of the show perfectly.
Daniel Hope With New Century Chamber Orchestra, “Spring 1”
Mulaney: My son [Malcolm] and I listen to the Max Richter and Daniel Hope recomposed Vivaldi Four Seasons every morning. I’ve been listening to this track for five years; my son, [for] three. And then there’s another track… What’s on the Malcolm morning playlist? [Shuffles through playlist.] There’s another track of Daniel Hope from his album Spheres that we listen to called “I Giorni: Andante.” It’s very calming stuff.
[Classical music] is so powerful and loud and blows live audiences away; it also translates to TV. You just know an audience at home might go, “Oh, I haven’t seen anything like this in a while, and this is really powerful to sit through, and entertaining.”
I was so happy with the way the Daniel Hope set came together. I had this original idea that it would be done on the studio floor in what looked bombed-out industrial. It was like a half-formed concept. And [production designer] Andrea [Purcigliotti] and [art director] Joe [Celli] came up with this notion of the tree, and also, which I loved, that they’d be encircling it. So our designers came with the idea that the camera would be moving around them the whole time.
We had a cellist when we were doing Simon Rich’s Broadway show All In and my son was really interested in the cello, but he is so little that they were saying Yo-Yo Ma got a viola when he was two or three but you just play it [like a cello].
