Support for this podcast and the following message comes from BlackRock. Hi, I'm Oscar Palito, host of The Bid, a podcast from BlackRock, where we break down what's happening in the world of investing. This week, we're talking with Larry Fink. Chairman and CEO of BlackRock. This year, Larry's annual letter states, It's time to rethink retirement. Thoughts on challenges like retirement and other issues where the global capital markets are part of the solution. Listen to the episode on the bid and subscribe for market insights from BlackRock's thought leaders. You Hi, I'm Brett Martin. I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine and I live in New Orleans.

I certainly don't remember what made me search for my name on Spotify one day last summer. It's possible I was looking for a podcast I'd been on, or maybe it was the kind of Search that we all do once in a while just to procrastinate or just out of vanity. In any event, I must never have done this particular search before because the first thing I saw was a song titled Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes. And it Been up there for 11 years. Now there are many Brett Martens in this world, several much more famous than I am. Major League Baseball player, an Australian squash legend, some historical figures, but obviously I press play. And at first the words are generic enough. Granted, these are

uncannily like my life, but I'm just thinking this is hysterical. This is my new theme song. ♪ Oh Brett Martin, you're a wonderful person ♪ ♪ You're a nice man, I really like you ♪ There's a line about, You tell good stories. And I think, this is fabulous, this is even more like me. But then a couple of really specific details stopped me in my tracks. Brett Martin, you cry on airplanes. You watch Sweet Home Alabama and you start to cry a lot. ♪ Brett Martin, you cry on airplanes ♪ ♪ You watch Sweet Home Alabama and you start to cry a lot ♪ ♪ Brett Martin ♪ 20 years ago for This American Life about crying on airplanes and specifically about crying during the movie Sweet Home Alabama. So at this point my Girlfriend and our daughters come into the room and I point at the screen and I say, Wait a minute...

It may be a song about me, written by some guy I don't even know. And I'm stunned. And I am also very, very amused. Needless to say, this song becomes a huge hit in my house. We probably play it 27 times, play it for every guest that comes to the house and every time we laugh uproariously. And it's not until maybe my 30th listen that I actually register how it ends. This guy sings, Brett Martin, I really like you. Will you be my friend? Will you call me on the phone? Brett Martin, here's my phone number. And he sings his actual phone number. ♪ Brett Martin, here's my phone number ♪ ♪ 603-644-4255 ♪ I have to admit, it takes me a few days to call. First of all, who calls anybody anymore? And who was this guy? But my daughter is keeping--

asking if I've called and eventually my curiosity gets the better of me. So I finally pick up the phone and I never could have expected what I'd And on the other end. What happens next is this week's Sunday Read. I wrote for the magazine that's about what it's like to work at the intersection of art and commerce. What it takes to make oneself visible. In the never-ending river of content on platforms like Spotify that rule our culture, and how We make a life in a commercial art form. All of which are questions that nearly everybody I know who works In any medium finds themselves asking. So here's my article, read by... Jason Martin. Our audio producer today is Adrienne Hurst and the The original music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. I don't want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song Bret Martin,

You a nice man, comma, yes? I guess probably not. On Spotify. Brett Martin, you a nice man, yes, has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular... Nice Man, didn't hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer. Seven years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Fatags. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills. When I did stumble on Brett Martin, you a nice man, yes. I know. I truly assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin. Perhaps Brett Martin, the

Left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers. Or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player. Or even Clara Brett Martin. A Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire's first female lawyer. Only when the... Stinger began referencing details of stories that I made for public radios this American life, almost 20 years ago. Did I realize it actually was about me? The song ended, I really like you. Will you be my friend? Will you call me on the phone? Then it gave a phone number with a New Hampshire area code. So I called. It's possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting-- 11 long years since his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was.

Serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of Dr. Livingston, I presume. After one ring, a male voice answered. I said, This is Brett Martin. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to call. The man had no idea who I was. Understand, he said apologetically. I've written over 24,000 songs. I wrote fifty songs yesterday. And thus was I ushered into the strange universe of At Farley. Farley is 45 and lives with his wife, two sons, and-- Cockapoo named Pippi in Danvers, Massachusetts on the North Shore. For the past 20 years he has been releasing. Album after album of songs with the object of producing result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. These include hundreds of songs.

Name-checking celebrities from the very famous to the much less so. He doesn't give out his phone number in all of them, but he does spread it around enough that he gets several calls or texts a week. Perhaps sensing my deflation, he assured me that very few came from the actual subject of a song. He told me that director Dennis Dugan of Dennis Dugan, I Like Your Movies, Very A Lot, part of an 83 song album about movie directors called once, but he didn't really Who it was until too late and the conversation was awkward. Freed from the blinding incandescence of my own name, I could suddenly see the extent of what I had stumbled into. It was like the scene in a thriller, when the detail was broken. First gazes on the wall of a serial killer's lair. Paparazzi and the Fatags is only one of about 80. Pseudonyms Farley uses to release his music. As the Hungry Food Band, he sings

About foods. As the guy who sings songs about cities and towns, he... He sings the Atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different named girls to the prom and 500 songs. That are marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies. Albums voted as sports teams in every city that is a sports team, hundreds of songs about animals and jobs and weather and furniture. And one band that is simply called The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over. the end of the video. Also has many, many songs about going to the bathroom. If you have a child under 10 with access to the internet, it is very Likely you know some part of this body of work. What he refers to collectively as his poop songs are mostly released under two names, the Toilet Bowl Cleaners and the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee.

The odd man is more shameless, he explained. The toilet bowl cleaners are making statements with their albums, though the distinction between the former's butt cheeks, butt cheeks, butt cheeks, and the latter's 'I need a lot of toilet paper to clean the poop in my butt' may be subtler than he imagines. Largely, though not entirely, on the strength of such songs, Farley has managed to achieve that most elusive of goals, a decent living creating music. In 2008, his engine optimization project took in $3,000. Four years later, it had grown to $24,000. The introduction of Alexa. And her voice-activated sistren opened up the theretofore underserved non-typing market, in particular the kind fond of shouting things like poop in my fingernails at the computer.

By the Toilet Bowl Cleaners currently has over 4.4 million streams on Spotify alone. To date, that band and the odd man who sings about poop, puke, and pee have collectively brought in approximately $469,000 from various platforms. They are by far Farley's biggest earners, but not the only ones. Paparazzi and the Fatags has earned $41,000, the best birthday sale. Song Band Ever, $38,000, The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, $80,000. Have taken in two, three, or four digits. The New Orleans sports band, the Chicago sports band, the singing film critic, the great weather song person. The paranormal song warrior, the Motern Media holiday singers who perform 70 versions of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, substitute...

Including contemporary foods for figgy pudding. It adds up. Farley quit his day job in 2017. People like to criticize the whole streaming thing, but there's really a lot of pros to it, he said. In 2023, his music earned him just shy of $200,000, about one half penny at a time. Farley's earnings help fund his multiple other creative endeavors. What he calls his no jokes music. This includes a two-man band he's been in since college called Mo's Haven, which once an album a day for a year. He hosts two podcasts, one about his work and the other recapping Celtics games. And he makes movies, microbudgeted, determinative. Amateur, but nevertheless recognizably cinematic features starring himself and his family and friends.

A spectacular array of New England accents. In most, Farley plays some version of himself, a mild-mannered, eccentric, Hero projecting varying degrees of menace. Farley and his college friend Charlie Roxburgh are in the midst of a project in which they have resolved to release two full movies per year. The model, Farley said, was inspired by Hallmark movies. If this movie stings, Good news, we're making another in six months. Their most popular work remains Don't Let the River Beast Get You. 2012. A charmingly shaggy tale of a cryptid threatening a small New England town. His father as a big game hunter named Edo Hootkins. Like many of Farley's endeavors, his films have attracted a small, but intense, following. I could fill a 5,000-seat arena if I could. I could only get everybody in one place, he says. His is the kind of obsessive project

seems to inspire the same for others. A few years ago, Lior Galil, a Chicago music writer, set out to listen to Farley's entire corpus from start to finish. Chronicling the journey in a zine titled Freaky for Farley. Pages into issue one, he had already taken on the grim tone of an Arctic explorer. I've become a little tired Of the album, 25 Songs In, he wrote, which makes me concerned about my ability to get through the rest of this listening quest. Issue two begins, I failed. The umbrella name that Farley uses for all his outputs is Moturn. He made the word up, or rather, he seized on what he found. Was its strange power after misspelling the word intern in what he had planned to be a 10,000-page novel. To far... Creativity has always been a volume business. That in fact is the gist of the Moturn Method, a 130-

six-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021. His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished. Accordingly. If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop, he said. You just do it and do it and do it. And you sort it out later. Or as the case may be, you don't, but rather send it all out into the abyss, hoping that someday, somebody somewhere will hear it. The questions around retirement have gotten tiring. Instead of, Have you saved up enough? Shouldn't they be asking, What is it that you love to do?

So your retirement plan should be more of an action plan, a hiking plan, a golf plan. Lincoln Financial has the products to help protect and grow your financial future. Make your pastimes last a lifetime at lincolnfinancial.com/actionplan. actionplan.com/actionplan Lincoln Financial Group, marketing name for Lincoln National Corporation and its insurance companies and broker dealer affiliate. Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc. 2024, Lincoln National Corporation. At New York Times Cooking, we believe that you can do it. Shouldn't have to run to the grocery store every time you want to make something delicious. I'm Melissa Clark and my recipe for... The most adaptable one bowl cornmeal pound cake is a comforting loaf cake that you can have. Fresh out of the oven in under an hour, using ingredients you probably already have on hand. And sliced, toasted, and buttered, it's practically a bread, so it gives you a pass to eat cake. Breakfast. You can find so many easy, flexible pantry recipes like this one at nytcooking.com. NYT Cooking has you covered with recipes, advice, and inspiration for any occasion.

I was aware, of course, that on some level I'd been had. The one tiny fish, vein and I... To be snared in Farley's trol. It left me a bit paranoid. Charlie Roxburgh suddenly seemed like such a perfect Boston pseudonym that I spent a Whether he was a real person. He's real, lives in Connecticut, and makes corporate videos for his day job. Lost another day chasing after a letterboxed commenter who goes by the handle DCS577 and was so baffled by the popularity of Farley's movie. That he published his own short ebook, The Not Motern Method. It urges readers to give up on their artistic dreams and even mimics Farley's buckshot SEO by appearing in multiple, slightly different versions. Surely he had To be a farley alter ego. Nope, a 36-year-old movie buff in Missouri. Mostly, I was trying to figure out

Whether I thought Farley was a bad guy. Did his scheme represent the inevitable cynical end product of a culture in the grips of algorithmic platforms? Or might it be a delightful side effect? Was his work spam? or a kind of outsider art? Was he just the poop song guy? Or was he closer to Steve Keen, the Brooklyn-based Gen X hipster-approved painter of over 300,000 works? Who has been the subject of books and museum retrospectives. As it happens, Farley has a song about Steve Keen. Paparazzi album titled I am not wasting my life, which suggested

He was asking some of the same questions. When I went to Danvers to meet Farley in December, it became quickly apparent that he is the most transparent person in the world. He's got a thick head of hair, high cheekbones, and a friendly Kyle Chandler-like face that none other letterboxed reviewer correctly identified as youth pastoree. Tell he was wearing a fleece-lined brown hoodie that, judging by social media, is the only outer layer he wears throughout the New England winter. Including on the 15 to 20 mile walks he takes twice a week. He struck me a- The kind of guy who wears shorts the moment it gets above 48 degrees. Compulsively early, he confessed that he

arrived at the lobby an hour before we were scheduled to meet. You might mistake Moturn's aesthetic for stoner humor, but Farley says he has never had a sip of alcohol, much less done drugs. By his own description, he eats like a picky twat. When I made him take me to a restaurant in Salem called Doob's Seafood, famed for its belly clams, he ordered chicken nuggets and buried them beneath the table. A blizzard of salt and ground pepper, removing the top of the pepper shaker to pour it on more directly. In the car, we listened to the Rolling Stones, the replacements, and the sounds of the sound. Tom Waits. It's a mammoth accomplishment of self-control for me not to be playing my own music right now, he said, though his efforts at restraint were puzzling, giving him a sense of self-control.

That I was in all likelihood the one person on earth at that moment whose job was to listen to it. All of Farley's life he has wanted to make things and have people see. And hear them. After going to school at Providence College, he moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, specifically Quickly because he knew nobody there who might distract him. If you know people, they want you to go to cookouts, he says. I designed my entire life to not have to go to cookouts. Even now he cannot abide downtime, to him the wasted time of a party or what a football game is measured in songs or scripts he could have written. At no point did Consider a more conventional route, such as film school or a low-level job in the entertainment industry. Instead, he took a job at a group home for teenagers, knocking out a 40-hour week in

days so that he could work on music and movies the other four. He would leave In CDs in public places across Manchester, hoping somebody would pick them up. He slipped them into the stacks at local record stores like a reverse shoplifter. He would drive Just so he could force his music on them on the way. Farley's persona is simultaneously grandiose. I really do think I'm the greatest songwriter of the 21st century, he told me. Me, and knowingly self-effacing. One night I went with him to a tiny— Independent theater in Lexington for a screening of the Moturn film Magic Spot, a time travel comedy. On the drive down, I asked what the endgame for the movies was. Obviously, they have a very different business model from his music. Say, a million dollars to make his next movie. He thought for a second.

300,000 for me and Charlie. Spread the rest around to the people who have helped us all these years. Dollar movie and get sued, he said. That would be about twice the budget of a typical. Motorcycle motor joint. Magic Spot wasn't on the marquee when we pulled up, but there was a flyer taped to the door. We couldn't afford color copies, but we did our best, the theater owner said as he let us in. There were 11 people in the audience, including Farley's father and brother-in-law, both of whom were in the movie. There was also a film student named Taylor, who had driven up from the Cape for the second of three-- Turned screenings he'd see within a month, and two guys down from Manchester. Of whom was turning the other end of the Farley canon. A few minutes into the movie, the sound went out, and we sat for about 10 minutes while--

Farley frantically tried to fix it. He was on the verge of jury rigging a solution involving holding a microphone to his laptop when the sound system miraculously healed itself. A huge success! I'm on Cloud Nine, he said as we headed back toward Danvers. After the show, he refused to accept his share of the ticket sales. Instead pressing extra money into the owner's hands as thanks. for somebody so driven to find an audience and so immune to embarrassment. The advent of the digital age was a miracle. Farley began uploading the Moes Haven catalog to iTunes when it came out, and then to Spotify. Described in the closely autobiographical Moturn film Local Legends. Mosehaven was intended to meld the sounds of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Pink Floyd

Into a musical concoction that was going to blow the minds of millions of fans all the way around the world. As it turned out, Farley noticed that the only song... That seemed to blow minds, or at least get downloaded, was a comic throwaway called Shut Up Your Monkey. Get down, get funky, shut up your monkey. Some people would have quit right there, he says. I saw an opportunity. A lot of energy has been spent trying to pick the lock of the recommendation algorithms that can make or break a song on Spotify and other streaming services. And you know what? of the world. Natural language processing, average length of listens, influencer attention, metrics like acousticness, speechiness, and danceability. That will push a song onto millions of users' recommended playlists. Critics, meanwhile...

Now bemoan the rise of bands like Greta Van Fleet and Algorithmic Fever Dream, according Pitchfork, who seemed to be engineered to be the next song after whatever it was you actually chose to listen to. When I asked Farley how much... This, he factors into his work. The answer was almost zero. He gets the sense that longer titles seem to work better. Than short ones, and that around a minute and a half is a good minimum length, but for the most part, his is a blunt force attack on the softer target of search results. At its most intentionally parasitic… This includes such tracts as a review of Exile on Main Street designed to be discovered by

the Rolling Stones' Curious. A 2013 album credited to the passionate and objective Joker fan takes advantage of the fact that song titles cannot be copyrighted. Thus, this girl is on fire. Quick, grab a fire extinguisher. Almost instant karma and searching for Sugar Man, which unlike the more famous sugar Sugar Man by Rodriguez is about a baker whose sugar delivery is running late. As he has since sworn off these kinds of tricks. These days, he sets himself a relatively light goal of. One 50-song album a month, recorded in a spare bedroom in his house. Is the limit that CD Baby, which Farley uses to distribute and manage his music, allows. That may or may not have something to do with Farley, who used to put as many as 100 on an album.

Reaches his quota, he begins the tedious work of checking the levels of each song, entering and metadata, genre, writer, length, etc., creating an album title and cover art, nearly Is a selfie, and uploading the package one song at a time. Farley showed me a worn green spiral notebook in which he meticulously tracks his output and earnings. I think. Hand, pays musicians by the number of videos featuring their songs and is thus immune to Farley's strategy. Kylie Jenner recorded a video of themselves dancing to Farley's song about Chris. Millions of people saw it, but Farley earned less than one cent. Among other topics, Farley told...

He planned to tackle in future albums were colleges, household items, tools, musical instruments. I had planned to ask what categories haven't worked, but what are some of the most important categories? I had planned to ask what categories haven't worked, but what are some of the most important Become clear by then is that the idea of any one song or even album hitting the jackpot isn't the point. Even after his Spotify's recent announcement that it would no longer pay royalties on songs receiving fewer than a thousand streams, far the greater the price. His business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output, and so does his artistic model, obvious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it's as part of the enormous body of the whole, the magnum opus, that it gains power. When you consider that an artificial intelligence could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Varley's entire oeuvre, in about a day.

That gives his defiantly human, even artisanal labor a kind of lonely To Safian dignity. Whatever else Farley's work is, it is not AI. Even when it barely seems to be I. yeah. We've all got those parts of our house where the internet just won't go. Well, if you had wall-to-wall Wi-Fi from Xfinity, you could worry less about dead spots. Because with wall-to-wall Wi-Fi from Xfinity, you get… fast speeds, reliable connection in every room, and power for all your devices. Even when everyone's online. That's wall-to-wall Wi-Fi with Xfinity. Supply not available in all areas. Actual speeds vary.

Chagrin that he was no longer the number one result for the search poop song. There was another poop song guy. His name is Teddy Casey, and amazingly, he is also from a Boston suburb, Newton. That's where the similarities with Farley. Stop. Casey has precisely two songs available for streaming, a sweet kids song about animals called Monkey and the Poop song. Which has over 4 million streams across various platforms. Casey is 55. Until recently, he was working-- The bartender and hosting open mic nights near where he lives in mid-coast Maine. Was back home after a week in New Hampshire, training to become a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier. Poop song around 2009, but he didn't get around to posting it until 2020.

It didn't do anything for months, he said, and then all of a sudden, one month, it made twenty dollars. I was like, 'Wow, cool, buy a case of beer.' These days, the song brings in about twelve hundred dollars per month, enough to pay his rent, Casey told me, with what sounded like a Lebowski-ian shrug. I have other songs that I want to put up, he said. But I kind of don't want to sell out. I asked if he knew about the toilet bowl cleaners, and he said he'd heard a few. Of their songs. I'm not making this up, he said. There's this other guy, I don't know if you've heard of him, the odd man who sings about Can pee. His idea was to customize every poop song. So there's a Steven poop song, a Bob A boob poop song, a merry poop song, he's got hundreds. I told him that both bands were in fact the same person. Well, okay, he said.

As if realizing the full extent of what he was up against. I like mine better, but I'm biased, he said. Finally, you can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he's just been going for volume. In fact, I knew about the suite of songs that combined Farley's two most successful genres, names and poop, because he was working on a new set of them when I visited him. He estimated that he had already completed about three- thousand, but there were always new names. This can be kind of painful, he warned. Switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop. He donned headphones, consulted a list of names, and got to work. In the silence of the room, I could just hear the soft click of the keyboard and his vocals. Jamila, p-p-p-poop, Jamila, poop, poop, poop. In Local Heroes, which is something like Farley's All That Jazz,

Here's a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing. One, the serious, heartfelt artist. The other, greasy, Record executive demanding ever more poop songs. Of course the scene can only be a fantasy and can only have Farley playing both characters The greasy record executive belongs to a lost world, one in which drastically fewer people had a chance to produce art and the work was often corrupted by corporate gatekeepers, but in which there was also a clearly marked road to an audience and a living. Farley represents both the best and worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken this world's place. Certainly there are few cre- The next. Lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to any

Peace out yo! Extension they will simply disappear. Which is to say that while. The experience of watching Farley work was not unpainful, as promised, neither was it Unfamiliar. After a minute and a half of the Jamila poop song, Farley paused. He adjusted a few dials, consulted his notebook, thought for a few seconds, and plowed on to

Next song. Different tempo, different vocals, similar theme. Tonka tonka. He sang. Poop. Poop, poop, poop, poop. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/bank. Capital One N/A. Member FDIC.