An idiot in motion goes farther than a genius at rest

Matt Farley is the most prolific singer-songwriter of all time. He’s made over 26,000 songs, which is an average of three songs per day, for the past 26 years. He’s also made 18 feature-length movies, written five books, started two podcasts, been profiled by the New York Times and WIRED, and performed live on the Tonight Show.

He’s arguably most famous for writing “The Poop Song.” During our time together, he performed at Burpfest and opened with “Diarrhea Bounce Back.” I started questioning my decision to fly to his hometown and spend a week with him after he played “Poop into a Wormhole.” “Experts have declared that Matt Farley is a genius.” is a phrase I can only write with quotation marks, because it’s something he said himself. “I listened to podcasts talking about famous musicians and thought, ‘Man, I wish someone said that stuff about me.’ And then I thought, ‘Wait, I can say that about me!’” he told me.

Barely anyone knows his name, especially because he produces under 80 different pseudonyms, but anyone who does gets really excited when I bring him up. Seeing him perform live, he has real true fans who sing along, request custom poop songs, buy his merch and ask for autographs. It’s like standup, improv and a concert all in one. I’m not sure if anyone else could replicate the experience^[1].

He’s spent more time immersed in the creative process than anyone else I know. I watched him compose a song about a dead cat in 50 minutes and it’s still stuck in my head. Most of Matt’s music comes out roughly that fast, because he’s removed the part of his brain responsible for self-judgement. “Me and [Tom] Scalzo started writing songs in college, and we realized the less we critiqued ourselves, the more songs we wrote, and the more songs we wrote, the more good songs we wrote.”

I’m reminded of the photography professor who, as an experiment, graded half his class on the quality of a single photo, and the other half on quantity, with 100 photos getting an A. The students graded on quantity took better photos because they experimented and learned from their mistakes instead of speculating about perfection. Matt has an English degree and no formal training beyond five years of classical piano lessons as a kid. He just learned by doing.

So much of his process is based around making any idea that pops into his head a reality. In fourth grade, he wrote a song with his friend “Froggy” called “Shut Up Your Monkey.” Forty years later, him, Froggy, Tom Scalzo and his other childhood friend Pete are in a band together playing that song at live shows. “Most people outgrow the ideas they have as a kid. I guess I just never did.” He’s undiscourageable, even by his many haters you can find by googling “Matt Farley spam.” “Even at my saddest, I’m still pretty happy.”

Spending the week with him, I felt like I was in an alternate dimension where everything was possible, and all ideas were good ideas. We went on two five-hour “epic walks” talking about everything, and it was like I was playing a long game of “yes, and.” I’ve never felt more encouraged by anyone simply being themselves. By listening to him talk about his own ideas, I caught contact-inspiration and we started singing half-baked song lyrics together. I couldn’t ever catch him saying anything negative about himself or his work, and he stopped me whenever I tried to do the same. He’s smart without being in your face about it, and he rarely tried to give me advice. There’s no part of him that has to enforce his genius on anyone. He’s just hoping if he puts out enough stuff, one day the world will recognize it.

Matt Farley is a sensitive artist who suffers for his art

Since college, he’s set up his entire life to make music. His first job was at a group home that packed 40 hours into a Thursday through Saturday workweek, earning him just enough money to afford a small studio apartment, used car, and the freedom to make music four days a week.

After graduating, he was making hundreds of songs a year and promoting them by burning 500 CDs at a time to leave on store shelves (“reverse stealing”) and at coffee shops. He also shipped them to anyone he could find after Googling “mailing address.” When iTunes came out in 2003, he suddenly had another place for his music to get discovered. He put a few of his albums on there, and for the first time had some indication that people were actually listening as the royalties started to come in.

“I thought, if some of the songs make $2, what if I just make more like that? $2 per song may not seem like a lot, but if you make 20,000 songs, that’s a pretty decent living!” 26,000 songs later, he brings in an average of $200,000 per year. The whole strategy was to make a song for absolutely anything anyone could search for, released under personas associated with different niches like “The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee,” “The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns” and “The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over.” He used to make most of his money from Amazon Music, figuring it was probably little kids yelling “Alexa play Johnny poop song!” but that’s slowed down recently. “Someone at Amazon definitely knows the Poop Song guy.”

Matt gets annoyed whenever someone claims he’s running a scheme to game the streaming systems. “I was making poop songs long before Spotify. I’m not gaming the system, the system formed around me. In fact, it was more broken before. People would spend $20 on an album they didn’t even get to listen to. They didn’t know if it was good or not. It was the record companies exploiting us.”

He makes $10-15k a year from his movies too. Which he doesn’t think is a lot considering he’s made 18 of them, but I think is great considering all the actors are his family and friends who do it for free and can only sometimes remember their lines. They’re written and directed to lean into the amateur feel, and are good enough to earn him a small, cult-like following on Reddit and critical acclaim from the Important Cinema Club podcast. “Anyone can make a Hollywood actor famous. Only I can make my uncle, who can’t remember more than four words at a time, famous.”

He also wrote The Motern Method, which brings in about $2,000-3,000 a year. It’s like a Walmart version of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, not necessarily because of quality but because it’s accessible for everyone. He talks about his rules to produce more creative work, how to sustain yourself while making art, and writes so simply and repetitively that anyone can remember something important from it.

But more important than the money, it seems like having multiple creative outlets whenever he’s feeling tired of making music keeps his idea muscle strong. “I’m currently in a period of creative exhaustion. I haven’t made music for nine months. But I still write and make movies. Otherwise I’d feel too unproductive.”

Even though he’s so positive all the time, I kept getting the sense that Matt’s upset that he's not more famous.

“No one else would put out so much work for so little recognition and still keep going.”

“So why do you keep going?”

He paused. “The drive comes from not being successful. If I made it in my 30s, I’d be complacent now.”

Since hitting his goal of making a living off his art, he’s moved the goalposts to include being a respected artist. And how could you not? “I saw this NPR special about Ringo Starr promoting his new album. Like come on. He was a Beatle! And even after all that he still wants more.”

He feels taken for granted. Like the world doesn’t pay him enough attention because he doesn’t fit the mold of a tortured artist. “There’s no point in being a tortured artist. I bet some marketing exec realized artists would sell more records if they pretended to be sad. My theory is Van Gogh cut off his ear on purpose to get more attention.” Even though he’ll say “all my songs are good” when asked point blank, he’ll sometimes let slip he knows some are better than others.

In his song, “Congratulations on Writing Your 19,000th Song” he writes:

“Congratulations oh oh oh oh you did it.
Does it make you upset when people make comments and say things like,
‘Big deal, it’s all quantity over quality.’
How does that make you feel?
Well I happen to have listened to all of your 19,000 songs
and sure some of them are not too good,
but I mean, even if you only have 1% of them that are really fantastic,
That's way more fantastic songs than just about anyone else in the whole wide world.
And I would say that you’re more like at like 2 or 3% oh yeah!”

In his 26-year career, he’s only taken a break from songwriting once before. For three months, because of creative exhaustion. Similar to this year, he’d written a lot of songs the year before, but this time his exhaustion is partially due to AI. I can only imagine how Matt felt when one of the dads in his homeschooling group claimed he was a musician too, and when Matt asked about his process, he said, “I just click the button on Suno.”

“You didn’t make that. Using AI to make music, that’s like driving somewhere and saying you ran there.”

People often lump him into the “AI slop” crowd, and he’s offended by the allegations when he’s put so much time into his craft. So now he’s “taking revenge on the world” by not releasing any more “No Jokes” albums, conveniently leaving in a loophole that he’s allowed to release singles. Recently, he's been putting more effort into live shows and talking to his fans on the phone to build a real connection, which he thinks will be hard for AI to replicate.

You are a bad judge of your own work

At this point you’re probably wondering: is Matt’s music even any good? And if you listened to his Spotify right now, you’d probably think it’s slop at first. But after spending five hours in the car with him, listening to him play a 12-hour playlist of his greatest hits, having him pause to explain the lore behind each song, and being shushed whenever I tried to talk over them, I still don’t love it.

But he gets about a call a day from a half-joking, half-serious young fan praising his genius for one of his songs or movies. The crowd at his show grew over time as people couldn’t help being drawn in by his comedy concert. I don’t listen to his music on my own, but it’s not like it was unpleasant during our time together. He’ll often joke that I learned to fake paying attention from his wife, who’ll respond to him excitedly explaining his work with, “Uh-huh, that’s nice, honey” or “Oh really? I didn’t know that.” I naturally said the same things, not because I didn’t care, but because I can only care so much. His enthusiasm, like his music catalog, is endless.

He tries to release everything without expectation because no matter what you try to put into your work, someone else can interpret it entirely differently. He told me a story three or four times that basically went like, “We put a lot of thought and work into this album. We thought this would finally be our big break. We hosted a listening party. No one listened or showed up.”

“Damn, so people liked your throwaways more?” I asked, referring to the poop songs.

“No, they’re good songs. That’s why people like them,” Matt replied.

He sees every song he releases as a chance for someone to discover him. Being prolific is its own promotional strategy. And if people enjoy the work he puts less effort into, that’s not a bad thing. I asked him, “Do you think you’d write better songs if you spent more time on them?”

“Nah. I think there’s something good about not filtering myself. It’s almost better when it all comes out at once. Violently.^[2] Sometimes when you overwork something, you squeeze the magic out of it.”

It’s not like he set out to become the poop song guy. It was just what people happened to listen to. Even for Moes Haven, one of his “No Jokes” collaborations with Tom Scalzo, the most popular song on Spotify by far is “Forgot to Wipe.” In his quest to gain respect, he uses the poop songs as a gateway drug to create more true fans. Whenever he plays live with his band “The Big Heist,” they’ll pull the crowd in with something like “There’s an Old Lady Pooping on the Floor” then throw in songs like “Tightrope,” a “serious” hard rock track about all your accomplishments being scrutinized despite how hard you’ve worked to get there. Something autobiographical there.

Whatever the reception, it’s obvious he just likes doing the work. I spent the whole week distracting him, yet he was still working on editing a movie and fulfilling a custom song request. It looked like his happy place. Lots of people want to make movies or music, but what they really want is to be perceived as a famous musician or filmmaker. Matt’s been able to keep going for so long because by default, he thinks everything he makes is good, and his satisfaction comes from the motions.

He said it best in The Motern Method: “You are a bad judge of your work. So just keep working. Some of your stuff will be appreciated. Some of it won’t. There’s nothing you can do about it. Just get back to work on the next project.”

Inspiration is everywhere

On one of his “epic walks,” some punk kids drove by and threw a milkshake at him. He was pretty shaken up for the rest of the walk, but it later inspired the song “Once, I Got a Milkshake Thrown at Me by Some Rebellious Teens.”

Writer’s block doesn’t exist for him. He’s learned to see the world in a way where he can write about everything. He made “Xmas Lights (They Didn’t Have To Do That)” by driving around his neighbourhood and appreciating how every Christmas, people put effort into decorating their houses for no reason other than spreading joy. He wrote a love song called “Dartmouth Girl” after a girl from Dartmouth College came to his dorm room to do a survey. One of the people he mailed his album to without asking sent back a comic called Rattletrap, inspiring Matt to make a song based off it with the same name. His youngest son came into the kitchen one day and just said, “Caniko Tucci.” That’s one of his music personas now.

He’ll often look at something, either a song he wrote or piece of art, and think, “How can I ruin this?” He heard the song “No Scrubs” by TLC and write “(Scrub Or) No Scrubs (That Is The Question)” about a doctor who really doesn’t want to wear scrubs while operating. In the middle, there’s some lyrics about how the nurse won’t take a bath with the doctor unless he wears scrubs. It just came to him, so he wrote it down. Then, inspired by his own song, he wrote, “Let Me Tell You ‘Bout A Bath I Took” to further explore the doctor’s relationship with the nurse^[3]. It’s easy to understand how he got there when I lay it out, but who thinks like that?

Some of these are probably loosely inspired by his own life, but at some points it’s pure ridiculousness. He’s been a big consumer of movies, music and standup comedy his entire life, and it feels like all his art is a combo of the three. Even if it’s a song, it’ll have some humour and a plotline. He writes his own music for the movies often and it’s always a comedy-drama, or comedy-horror, but there’s always comedy.

Whether or not you like his work, it’s hard to claim he has no taste. When I told my friends about my plans to visit him, at least half of them knew and appreciated some of his songs. My friend Arielle has listened to and rated 50/94 of his songs about Canadian towns. He puts out a certain type of badness that is actually good. It’s a flavour of good that’s hard to understand at first glance, but impossible not to respect after a while. The closest I got to understanding it was when he described how they made the movies:

“They’re often only three days of shooting max because we can only get so much time from people for free. We get creative and write the dialogue in an overcomplicated way, so it’s funny even if people mess it up. We try to make them good, but they just happen to turn out bad. Which is better than when people try to make them bad on purpose, those movies suck. We go in with no expectations, so when we get anything, we’re impressed.”

For a while I wondered why he never moved to a bigger city like NYC or LA where he might find more like-minded people. “I like being around normal people. I like being around homeschool moms that give me different ideas than what all the ‘real artists’ are thinking about. I like that I can put my uncle in a movie and he’ll deliver a completely unique performance.” After a pause, he added, “It does help that Hollywood never came knocking on my door.”

He’s a big appreciator. When we walked by a bridge, he started saying, “People made that! And then other people will complain that the bridge is too big, or not wide enough, or ugly. But they don’t appreciate all the effort that went into it. If I ever made a bridge, I wouldn’t get anything else done because I’d just be showing it off to people.” He even appreciates the haters. “I’m grateful that anyone takes the time out of their day to say absolutely anything about my work. My own wife booed me at the talent show. Who cares?”

Recall the final scene of Ratatouille: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. [...] But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.” He finds as much value in other people’s work as he does his own because he understands how hard it is to make anything. I’d sometimes half-heartedly suggest he could make a song about something we walked by or something he said, and he’d start singing what I said with a melody and told me “See, now you’re thinking like a songwriter.” His appreciation of ideas is contagious, and it felt like he was nurturing my ambitions more than I could alone.

I know he’ll never give up, even though he’s not writing songs right now, because it's more satisfying to make what critics consider junk than to make nothing at all. And also because he told me, when I asked him if he ever wanted to quit or got discouraged:

“All the time. I used to say, if it doesn’t work out soon… I’ll give it another five years.”

“And if that doesn’t work, I’ll give it five more years.”

Notes

1. [1]

   Other than Bo Burnham, a much more popular comedy songwriter who also grew up on Massachusetts's North Shore.

2. [2]

   I can only assume that was the process for writing “The Diarrhea Song (Water Poop!)”

3. [3]

   There’s worldbuilding like this layered throughout Matt’s albums, all with less than 1000 streams, where there’s The Very Nice Interesting Singer Man named Roy who falls in love with Cathy who’s the ex of The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns who’s ironically too scared to leave his own hometown and they both have entire albums about their own patheticness and interactions with Cathy and the sadness and anger they feel after she leaves.