Behind the Sound: Singing Serpent's Progressive Project

Dennis Culp is a songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer. He is an owner and co-founder of Singing Serpent, a music production company specialising in scores and audio post for advertisements as well as feature film and television. Dennis currently lives in New Jersey outside of New York City, and works in the Singing Serpent studio located in Brooklyn. He is married with two children and a cockapoo dog named Coco.

Q> How did you stumble across this job? 

Dennis> Singing Serpent has done a lot of left field comedy over the years, but not a ton of lyrical work - so this was an exciting new challenge for us. My friend Whitney Bogosian from Arnold reached out initially to chat about comedic writing partners that I might know, which led to a conversation about this project. 

Q> What was the initial brief and what demos/ideas did that spark for you? 

Dennis> The idea was always that Ed Helms would be performing these songs, serving as sort of a 'Schoolhouse Rock' for insurance, aimed at teenagers. I know Ed is a huge fan of bluegrass music (he even told me he owns an acoustic guitar that last belonged to Doc Watson!). So my first idea was a bluegrass / jug band singing the tune 'teen driver'. Classic rhinestone country was also one of our first ideas, and that one stuck pretty easily. It's funny how tracks morphed over time. '80's REO Speedwagon turned into something like Def Leppard. 

Q> How was the preproduction process? 

Dennis> Once we nailed down the genres and general song directions, I worked with four different production teams, each specializing in legitimate recordings in each genre. Those are real country shredders, including mandolin and fiddle in the song ‘Covering You’ for instance. 

Working with the lyricist DJ Javerbaum was a fantastic experience. The guy is a Harvard grad who knows what he likes musically, but doesn’t play a single instrument. He’s won Emmy awards with some of the bits he wrote for The Daily Show. DJ and I revised and revised some more until everyone - including Ed, the agency team and the clients - felt like these songs were funny on their own. 

One thing great about DJ is that he works on an idea over and over, and then only presents that one idea for each brief. He believed in his choices, and didn’t want to give the agency any options other than what he felt was the best choice. 

As the filming approached, I flew to LA to run the music production on-set. I was surprised when the day before the shoot I got a call from Ed - we chatted for half an hour about music and riffed on some new ideas for the vocals. I've worked with a lot of celebrities during my career, but I'd have to say this was a highlight. 

Q> How was the production process? 

Owen> On the day of filming, we set up a makeshift vocal booth in the great room of an Elk’s Lodge by setting up large boom mic stands draped with moving blankets. Using our vintage Neumann U67 microphone, we recorded Ed for exactly one hour. Hell hath no fury like a line producer when you've gone over time! I had my stopwatch on my stand, doing everything I could to keep us on schedule. We ended up with about three decent takes for each song. 

After the record, we had fifteen minutes during a wardrobe change to comp the best performances from each take, and edit the vocals for Ed to lip sync with during the shoot. This was the crux of the entire production, and our engineer Ben Moore amazed everyone with his quickness and quality. There were many high fives. 

Ed is a fantastic musician and singer - but having only three takes at 8:00 AM is a tall order for any singer. I’ll admit we worked some miracles with our post production. 

Q> Was the outcome what you expected?

Dennis> Going into the project, I expected everything to be a bit of a parody - but the assignment became something different. The instrumentals of these songs turned out to be a pretty serious take on the respective genres. This was important to Ed, because he felt that the lyrics and vocal performance needed to be the joke. So the music plays it straight and that made room for Ed to sell the jokes. 

Q> What you enjoyed the most about the experience 

Dennis> I’ve never been so central to the production process on-set. Although there was a lot of pressure, it was such a great feeling to come through for my friends who put a lot of faith in Singing Serpent to pull this off. We set the table for a great production, and I’m really proud of that.