Have You Heard: Post Modern Jukebox

"Like any overnight success, its taken me about seven years, but it's really just in the last year we've been touring, so that's very new for us," says Bradlee, the musical architect behind viral YouTube hits such as Puddles singing Royals or the awesome All About that [Upright] Bass with Kate Davis. 

If you aren't responsible for any of the 200 million views their videos have racked up so far, head to postmodernjukebox.com and come back. It'll be worth it.

"My background is jazz, so I was an improviser - so I'd often just make up mash-ups and this is an extension of that," Bradlee says. 

"In some ways it's a revolutionary idea," he suggests. "While a lot of people are focussing on production and auto-tune and stuff like that, I'm just getting really talented musicians and letting the performance speak for itself."

PMJ has no record label - they release albums directly onto iTunes. The songs are performed and recorded live - mostly with a stationary camera. The songs are cherry-picked from the charts or old favourites, and it really just comes down to the arrangement and the musicianship... so much so that you may find yourself listening to music made popular by artists you hate. 

"It's kind of like an alternate universe, where you get to see modern pop culture through a time machine," Bradlee explains. "It's really about questioning genre and what makes a song good. 

"It's less about the melodic content as much as the content and the form of the song. For example, when we did Sweet Child O' Mine -  it works like a folk song, with a refrain that comes back after every verse, and once you get a great blues singer it changes the entire nature of the song - it's easy to imagine it as a mother singing to her child."

"A lot of musicians might consider pop music as inferior source material, but we take the opposite view," he laughs. "It's popular for a reason. We just like to quote/unquote elevate it a little."

Bradlee managed to get a year's worth of performances recorded in his New York apartment before his neighbours banded together and had him "kicked out of the building". He now resides in a detached home in Los Angeles, where his neighbours are "really far away". 

Of course, with several PMJ tours under his belt, he's gaining a new perspective on what 'far away' can mean.

"I remember the first time I went out on stage with PMJ and it wasn't my home city, we were very far away, I didn't know if anyone would know who we were, but we walked out and we'd filled the place - it was a sold-out show, and the audience has been doubling and tripling since. It's been a pretty wild ride," he says. 

"Even though what I do is on the internet, it's still surprising to me to see how global it is. I've learnt a lot about what PMJ means to people through travelling. When we got to Prague everybody showed up in bow-ties and in beautiful vintage clothes. This scene has emerged around us and we didn't tell anyone to do it, so I'm really excited.

"On any given tour I'll have at least four amazingly talented vocalists with me, all of whom have their own style, so you'll see great vocal talent. You'll also see an incredible tap-dancer, an MC - we're really trying to bring back the variety show format, which is the best way to showcase what we do."

Originally published in X-Press Magazine.