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Over the course of the last week, the Internet experienced a beautiful, bizarre, and atypical viral hit. “Too Many Cooks” can best be described as an 11-minute looped intro to a fake TV family sitcom — which sounds relatively harmless, except for the twisted, multi-genre (and decade) journey the video takes us on that eventually leaves you in puzzled awe.

There are two major parts to this whole: the “story” itself, and the music. It’s fair to say that the Internet has already done a pretty great job of fleshing out the details of the storyline and all its complexities, but we were curious about the hard-to-lose “earworm” that is the “Too Many Cooks” theme. Thankfully, composers Shawn Coleman and Michael Kohler (Squidbillies, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Archer, Harvey Birdman) were able to answer a few of our questions and help us understand the strange awesomeness of their collaborative musical brainchild. Unfortunately, they couldn’t help us get the song unstuck from our heads.

See what the two had to say below. But first, if you haven’t already experienced the insane wonder, watch the video:

Shutterstock: What was your process like here? Was it different from other things that you’ve worked on? To my knowledge, Casper Kelly wrote the song and you guys wrote the music — who was responsible for what?

Shawn Coleman: Casper came in with the lyrics and wanted a 45-second loopable theme. We had a YouTube party the first day and watched a bunch of the iconic ’80s and ’90s themes and tried to isolate what made them so good/bad, from instrumentation to song structure. I really liked the ones that have that built-in husband and wife dynamic, like Family Ties and Growing Pains. The whole song is an adorable conversation or playful fight.

I did 2 or 3 demos, but they didn’t have the right zazz. Michael’s demo was great. I took it and re-recorded it, singing both the guy and girl parts as a scratch track. The longer you live with the demo, the more you get married to the performance (“demo love”), so my voice ended up making it all the way through to the end. I got a terrific writer/singer/friend named Cheryl Rogers to do the “wife” part.

Casper and I spent a while arranging the first three minutes, massaging the annoying-to-funny loops and making the false endings as dumb as they could be. The initial idea was to have the same theme looping away through the whole thing, but some visual pieces didn’t agree. Casper asked for each style to melt into the next setup, almost so you didn’t notice it was changing. I inched along with each transition, sending it around to him and (editor) Paul Painter, got feedback, tweaked, then tried to ease it into the next transition. It took a long time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_GxXRbSFDg

Michael Kohler: On my end, the process started with Casper asking me if I would write an ’80s sitcom-style theme song for this new project. He gave me a rough edit of something he and Paul Painter had cut together, and some lyrics he wanted me to make work. For that edit, they had looped the theme song from The Facts of Life, and that ended up being our best reference point for the overall feel.

It doesn’t often work like this, but I can tell you that as soon as I read Casper’s lyric, “too many cooks,” I began to sing it the way you hear it now in the show. It just happened, and I couldn’t stop singing it to myself for weeks. The rest of the basic song popped into my head while in the shower, and I sang it into my iPhone so I wouldn’t forget it before I had a chance to lay it down at the studio. The funny thing is, I just read in one of Casper’s interviews that “Too Many Cooks” was a shower idea for him originally. I had no idea. Maybe there is something to that.

I tracked a basic version of the tune with drums, bass, synths, and my scratch vocals, and sent it over to Casper. A couple of weeks later, I called Patty Mack and Michael Magno in to try a little male and female back-and-forth variation of the vocals, and that’s when Shawn took over to make all the versions and do the final mix.

In creating something both satirical and original, you had to make sure it sounded familiar. Which other TV show theme songs were your biggest reference points?

Coleman: Falcon Crest was obviously one. It just sounds so rich and opulent and pompous. French horns are the most opulent instrument. That’s why you have to keep one hand in the bell, to keep money from shooting out.

Are there any aural “Easter eggs” that might be harder to catch during a first listen/watch?

Coleman: I wove that main melody line (1-2-3-fiiiive) through each of the themes. That was a fun Peter and the Wolf nerd-out thing to do. Also, near the “mixed-up” section, there’s a nod to Twin Peaks: I took one of Cheryl’s “Too Many Cooks” hook lines, reversed it, and had her learn how to sing it backwards, then flipped it back forwards to get that weird “Cooper’s Dream” thing.

The visual transitions are clearly echoed by shifts in the music is packaged. Was it difficult to stay true to the original tune (and joke) while also blending in new material and ideas?

Coleman: It was pretty difficult, especially because the video kept evolving. Usually, when you write music for video they’ll eventually “lock” the picture — it doesn’t change. After scoring for a while, Chris had to go shoot some Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell and I had to work on Squidbillies. We reconvened a couple of months later, and Paul had shifted everything around — which made a much more compelling video, but knocked my musical hit points all out of whack.

It was tough, because both audio and video really needed to move forward hand-in-hand for it to work. I can’t write the music until I see it and Paul can’t edit it until he hears the music. We joked that we felt like we were each standing on each other’s shoulders.

Did you both get to see some of the visuals before you started working on the music?

Coleman: Yes, in a rougher state. There were some storyboards in there of some really crazy stuff Casper was hoping to shoot, but never got around to. I was blown away by the sheer volume of creative ideas he had. When we were working on the killer taking over stuff, he’d sent me all these incredible references: “Here’s two scary drones I like, and three VHS tape blurps and hisses that are weird.” Every time I’d see him, he’d come in with 15 new ideas, and they were all good.

What’s the strangest music you’ve ever composed for work?

Coleman: This. No doubt. While I’ve done a bunch of different styles for Squidbillies, I’ve never done them all at the same time.

Kohler: This is such a loaded question. I would have to say that pretty much everything I’ve done over the years specifically for Adult Swim can be classified as the strangest music I’ve ever done. I did crazy parody songs while working on Harvey Birdman, a theme song for Casper’s last series called Stroker and Hoop, insane 5.1 surround music for 12 oz. Mouse, and hilarious original tracks for various Aqua Teen Hunger Force episodes, plus their movie, a Christmas CD, and DVD extras like “Terror Phone,” to name a few. They never cease to surprise me with their requests. Shawn is the audio guru on Squidbillies, but oddly enough, I had to do a short little piece of music for them once when he wasn’t available to do it himself. It was a track consisting of me stomping my foot, clapping my hands, and then plucking “notes” on a rubber band, while Early and Granny sang over it. That’s probably up there as one of the strangest.