Postmodern Jukebox performed June 22 at Tanglewood and one of the founding members, Robyn Adele, was kind enough to chat about the current tour and her work as a performer. A local, she was born and raised inAlbany, New York.
Adele works as a singer, actress and pinup model, which basically means she poses in cheery, vintage-style shots. She has amassed more than 500,000 social media followers and more than 200 million views on YouTube.
One of the original members of PMJ, Adele performs around the world as a stand-alone artist, and appears on multiple Postmodern Jukebox world tours a year. Her YouTube channel has 490,000 subscribers.
The current tour, “Welcome to the Twenties 2.0,” ends Saturday, Aug. 31.
Rochelle O’Gorman: Your background is not what I expected. How did you end up where you are
Robyn Adele: I moved to New York City after I graduated from college. I went to SUNY Binghamton. I have a degree in political science and Arabic and I got a job at a nonprofit organization helping refugees with legal and social services, which is exactly what I went to school for and wanted to do. In my mind I was on the right path and doing what I thought I wanted.
The beauty of New York City is that it’s full of all different kinds of people, and I happened to go see a show and saw this pianist performing. He was taking pop songs and mashing them up together and making them sound like 1920s ragtime music. Behold, it was Scott Bradlee (the founding member of Postmodern Jukebox). It was before Scott Bradlee was Scott Bradlee. That was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
I’ve always loved music. I sang in choirs in high school and played in the [school] band. That was just a fantasy, to be a musician. I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. Then I saw something like this and was just blown away. I got to know him and discovered he had this YouTube channel where he was posting little covers of himself playing piano in his basement and taking requests from people and doing fun creative covers with his friends. One day we had gone to see karaoke together and he said, “Oh, you can sing!”
He later asked if I wanted to sing in a video for his YouTube channel and, you know, I was so honored and of course said, “Yes!” So we did the song that was No. 1 on the billboard charts at the time, back in 2013, which was “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore. We turned it into an old-timey ragtime song. I took this rap song and gave it a melody so it sounded like a real song. Scott called up two of his other friends to come over to the house and set up a camera and microphones in his living room. He filmed all the way through in one take, added some little tweets and just put it on YouTube. It, literally, the video went viral overnight.
RO: What do you consider “viral?”
RA: I woke up and there were about 300,000 views, which was unlike anything he had seen. I thought maybe we would get a thousand views. We didn’t even try to make that happen. I think a lot of people had never seen anything like that so they were sharing and posting about it. We realized, “Okay, this is something people like.”
We took a song that was really current and really popular and changed it around, which Scott had been doing for years, and we just found this formula of having the right, simple backdrop and we covered all different kinds of genres. We did bluegrass and doo-wop and swing. People really liked it, so we just kept pumping out these videos on a regular basis and Scott’s YouTube channel just exploded. Six years later it has almost 4 million subscribers.
Obviously the band has grown to include other singers. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time and met the right person and happened to be in the first video that happened to go viral.
RO: Did you secretly always want to go into show business?
RA: I don’t think I even knew what show business meant. When I was in high school, I would go see Broadway musicals and think, “Oh my God, how amazing would that be to be on that stage and sing?” But I knew it was a difficult path to pursue and I didn’t think it was practical or realistic, so I stuck to my other interests.
I didn’t even know the first thing about musical theater or being a professional singer. I definitely didn’t know anything about YouTube or that you could create a career. I didn’t know you didn’t need a record label or to go stand in line to audition. You didn’t need to go on “American Idol” or go on TV. You could literally just put a video on the internet.
We happened to get very lucky and tap into a very specific niche that no one else was targeting. After a few years, I left my other job to pursue music full-time. After a few years, I started my own YouTube channel and doing my own tours, my own shows.
RO: So you perform both with Postmodern Jukebox and on your own?
RA: Pretty much every performer that works with PMJ has their own music, their own channels, their own projects.
RO: So you’re one of the founding members?
RA: Technically, but its always been Scott’s baby, his channel, his arrangement, his ideas. But there’s always been an element of collaboration, especially between the singers, because they suggest songs and will contribute to the arrangements. But at the end of the day, this is Scott’s dream and his project and he’s been kind enough to invite his friends, and his friends’ friends, to be a part of it. I just happened to be the first singer when PMJ started to take off.
RO: Do you have any formal training?
RA: Not really. I learned most of my singing technique just from singing in choir in high school and I took voice lessons for a bit in middle school and high school.
RO: That is pretty amazing.
RA: A lot of singers are just born with it, but there are things you can do to polish your talent. I think being a part of PMJ has helped me become a stronger singer for sure. When you are singing every day on stage, it certainly helps you develop stage presence and performing skills I definitely never had to begin with.
RO: How many shows do you do in a year?
RA: I could not tell you how many shows there are in a year. I know that PMJ usually does four to five tours a year. I am on a lot of them, but not all of them. A lot of tours happen simultaneously. There will be one cast in the U.S. and another in Europe at the same time.
Usually I am on two to three tours a year, which is a lot. And each tour is usually one and a half to two months long.
RO: And how many shows are in each tour?
RA: Usually 30 to 40.
RO: Can you tell me about this “Welcome to the Twenties 2.0″ tour?
RA: Because the 2020s are coming soon we’re trying to get everybody psyched to relive the Twenties, which was a time of opulence and extravagance and trying new things, and that’s what PMJ is all about. We want people to have fun and feel like they are at a party when they are at our shows. We encourage people to dress up, dress up as flappers, and get up and dance.
