"I'll know what Michael McDonald looks like," the Goldenvoice employee working in the media tent at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival told me when I explained to her who I was there to meet.

But when McDonald walked in, no one seemed to recognize him. His bushy mane was trimmed tight on the sides and long on the top with a hip undercut; it's a hairstyle he could probably pull into a top knot. His beard was gone in favor of a slick goatee. He looked like somebody's a cool dad—and he was. He was at the festival for the first time with his twenty-something daughter, who really wanted to see Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar. But he wasn't there just to take her to some shows—he was also on the bill, set to make a surprise appearance with Thundercat, the virtuoso Brianfeeder bassist who's worked with experimental producer Flying Lotus and rapper Kendrick Lamar. McDonald recently appeared on Thundercat's new album, Drunk, contributing vocals on the standout track "Show You the Way" alongside Kenny Loggins, a soft rock contemporary of McDonald's who introduced him to Thundercat. It's a smooth funk groove, a surprisingly brilliant collaboration that no one really saw coming.

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"As soon as I met Steve, and when we got to listen to some of his new album and just talk music, I was thoroughly impressed. Especially upon listening to the new stuff he was cutting, it was just so harmonically beautiful and sophisticated," McDonald said. "It's the kind of music that I always found really intriguing, when it seems like someone has a really intuitive, innate sense of chords and melody and stuff. Right off the bat, I was excited to work with him. "

McDonald's music has been an influence on Thundercat for his entire life, a testament to the performer's eclectic tastes. Born Stephen Bruner, the 32-year-old multi-instrumentalist has collaborated with Erykah Badu, hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces, and with thrash group Suicidal Tendencies; he also won a Grammy his work on the track "These Walls" from Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Bruner first heard Michael McDonald's voice on Steely Dan's 1977 album Aja, on which he contributed vocals to their seminal hit "Peg." "I remember everything was cool in the song, but there was this moment where I heard his voice," Bruner told me over the phone a few days after Coachella. "And I was able to identify somebody's voice in the background and I realized it was Michael, and I remember freaking out about that."

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Thundercat got in touch with McDonald through Loggins, with whom he was already collaborating on "Show You the Way." They were working together when Loggins casually mentioned, "Michael would be into this." It wasn't until later that Bruner realized he was talking about his childhood hero Michael McDonald.

Before his collaboration with Thundercat, it's possible that most of the Coachella demographic best recognized McDonald from the scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in which Paul Rudd's beleaguered electronics store employee pleads with his boss to change the endless loop of a Michael McDonald concert DVD that's been playing on the TV displays. ("Nothing against him, but if I hear 'Yah Mo Be There' one more time," he says to his manager, played by Jane Lynch, "I'm going to Yah Mo burn this place to the ground.") It's a joke that McDonald took in stride. "I still get a lot of milage out of that one," he said in an 2014 interview, possibly acknowledging that it ultimately served to put a face—and a name—to a legendary voice ubiquitous to classic rock radio stations.

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McDonald has seen a sudden—and surprising—resurgence recently; Soundcloud is littered with McDonald samples (and McDonald wannabes), and the musician graced the stage at Florida's Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival alongside Solange last month, performing together the Doobie Brothers classic "What a Fool Believes." "I think every generation...tries to separate itself from what the generation before was doing," McDonald said, attempting to come up with an explanation for why the younger festival going-crowd has shown such an interest in his music. "But then you give that a couple generations, and then all of a sudden they rediscover what somebody was doing 30, 40 years ago."

Bruner also thinks that it's cyclical. "Good music is just good music—and Michael McDonald makes good music," he said. "I think that's why it resonates. I think it's a bit on a wheel, and it comes back around. With him it's just that simple—he's always made amazing music, and people need to be reminded every now and then."

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But McDonald isn't trying to think too much into the millennial generation's current obsession with him. "Things like this—[the collaboration with] Thundercat and these festivals that we've done—just kind of came out of nowhere," he said. "It just seems like the timing has been better than anything I could've planned, so I'm just going to kind of go with the flow." He has an album coming out in September that he's been working on for eight years. And his work with Thundercat has influenced his own music. The two have talked about other collaborations, they both told me, but nothing that they can share yet. "I don't want to give away too many secrets," Bruner said.

A few hours after we talked, the Mojave tent on the other side of the polo grounds has reached capacity. Thundercat ripped through his six-string, treating it as both bass and guitar. He's the anchor of his trio, playing the complex R&B that has become a backbone of both modern hip-hop, electronic, and funk. But it's not until he announced Michael McDonald's name that the audience went truly nuts. Together they played "Show You the Way "and "What a Fool Believes," and the majority of the audience knew every word to both of those songs. Sometimes the evolution of music doesn't seem linear, but during Thundercat's set—with all the kids in Kanye merch, loud print button-down shirts, and bodysuits going crazy for Michael McDonald—it seemed suddenly clear.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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