One musician, 24,000 songs
Matt Farley came to Spotify with big ambitions as an artist, said Brett Martin in The New York Times Magazine. Now he makes a nice living—thanks to his ‘poop songs.’
IDON’T WANT to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, 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, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. 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 naturally 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, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s 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 as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! 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.
“You have to understand,” he said, apologetically. “I’ve written over 24,000 songs. I wrote 50 songs yesterday.”
And thus was I ushered into the strange universe of Matt Farley.
FARLEY IS 45 and lives with his wife, two sons, and a cockapoo named Pippi in Danvers, on Massachusetts’ North Shore. For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a 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.
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 detective first gazes on the wall of a serial killer’s lair. Papa Razzi and the Photogs is only one of about 80 pseudonyms Farley uses to release his music. As the Hungry Food Band, he sings songs about foods. As the Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns, he sings the atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different-named girls to the prom and 500 that are marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies; albums devoted to sports teams in every city that has 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.
He 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.
Farley has managed to achieve that most elusive of goals: a decent living creating music. In 2008, his searchengine 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 nontyping market, in particular the kind fond of shouting things like “Poop in my fingernails!” at the computer. “Poop in My Fingernails,” 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: Papa Razzi and the Photogs has earned $41,000; the Best Birthday Song Band Ever, $38,000; the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, $80,000. In 2023, his music earned him just shy of $200,000, about one halfpenny at a time.
Farley’s earnings help fund his multiple other creative endeavors. He records what he calls his “no jokes” music. This includes a two-man band he’s been in since college called Moes Haven, which once recorded 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, determinedly amateur but nevertheless recognizably cinematic features starring himself and his family and friends.
The umbrella name that Farley uses for all his outputs is Motern. He made the word up; or rather, he seized on what he felt was its strange power after misspelling the word “intern” in what he had planned to be a 10,000-page novel. To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of “The Motern Method,” a 136-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.
IWAS AWARE, of course, that on some level I’d been had, the one tiny fish vain enough to be snared in Farley’s trawl. It left me a bit paranoid. 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?
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.
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, N.H., specifically because he knew nobody there who might distract him. At no point did Farley 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 three days so that he could work on music and movies the other four.
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. As described in the closely autobiographical Motern film Local Legends, Moes Haven 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.”
ALOT 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. Any number of online courses, distributors, and publishing companies promise to navigate the labyrinth of inputs that will push a song onto millions of users’ recommended playlists.
When I asked Farley how much of 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 tracks as “A Review of Exile on Main Street” designed to be discovered by the Rolling Stones–curious. A 2013 album 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 Sugarman,” which, unlike the more famous “Sugar Man,” by Rodriguez, is about a baker whose sugar delivery is running late. Farley says 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. He showed me a worn, green spiral notebook in which he meticulously tracks his output and earnings. From Spotify, he earns roughly a third of a cent per stream;
Amazon and Apple pay slightly more on average: between a third and three-quarters of a cent. TikTok, on the other hand, pays musicians by the number of videos featuring their songs and is thus immune to Farley’s strategy.
Among other topics Farley told me 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 had become clear by then is that the idea of any one song, or even album, hitting the jackpot isn’t the point. Even after Spotify’s recent announcement that it would no longer pay royalties on songs receiving fewer than a thousand streams, Farley’s business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output. And so does his artistic model. Whatever the dubious 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. This is especially true when you consider that an artificial intelligence could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Farley’s entire oeuvre, in about a day, a fact that gives his defiantly human, even artisanal, labor a kind of lonely Sisyphean dignity. Whatever else Farley’s work is, it is not AI—even when it barely seems to be I.
WHEN I VISITED Farley, he was working on a new set of songs that combine his two most successful genres: names and poop.
“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:
Jamilah, p-p-p-poop/Jamilah poop poop poop.
In Local Legends, which is something like Farley’s All That Jazz, there is a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing: one, the serious, heartfelt artist; the other a 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, because the greasy record executive belongs to a lost world. Farley represents both the best and worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken this world’s place. Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies: that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public.
After a minute and a half of “The Jamilah Poop Song,” Farley paused. He adjusted a few dials, consulted his notebook, thought for a few seconds, and plowed on to the next song. Different tempo, different vocals, similar theme.
Tunka, Tunka, he sang. Poop, poop poop poop poop.
A version of this article was first published in The New York Times Magazine. Used with permission.