John Early on the Music That Rewired His Brain

Dopamine Hits is an interview series in which artists we like tell us all about the songs and albums that made them think about music in an entirely different way.

There’s a 16-minute bit in John Early’s HBO special Now More Than Ever where he eulogizes the millennial generation’s wasted youth. He picks apart his cohort’s general lack of useful life skills: “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” He laments how American culture has gone from the beautifully mysterious choreography of Bob Fosse to the braindead capitalist choreography of a Shark Tank pitch. He suggests that a potential millennial time capsule should include a video of a Bon Appetit cook making cacio e pepe and an “infographic about how your allyship is performative.” It’s funny, damning, heartbreaking. As a millennial myself, I couldn’t help but sigh—and even shed a tear of recognition—in between laughs while watching it.

“I wanted you to be moved by that, and it was very moving for me to perform,” Early tells me. “It felt like laying to rest this period of popular culture that bore no fruit. On the surface, it is me calling people out, but I’m trying to talk about something we inherited. We didn’t create it. It was in motion, and we’re the vessel for this totally dead culture, language, and attitude.”

The sun is setting behind him as he sits on a bench in Manhattan overlooking the East River. It’s November, and he’s living in a fancy, extended-stay hotel while in town working on an as-yet-unannounced project, surrounded by ancient senior citizens, toddlers and their nannies, and middle-aged finance types on the Upper East Side. In a white button-up and tan baseball cap, he’s soft-spoken and contemplative—a far cry from the knowingly obnoxious and loony persona he’s cultivated online, onstage, and in shows like Search Party across the last decade.

Through that work, he’s become an offbeat spokesperson for the millennial condition. Now in his late 30s, he can’t help but look back and feel robbed. “Most prior generations had some sort of next rung on the monkey bars to swing to, like a house, children, or just dignified forms of work and aging,” he says. “But we spent the entirety of our youth—of our sexual prime—on the internet making these little fragments of content that just totally disappeared. That’s not our fault. The fucking internet was just our workplace.”

He goes on to unpack the highs and lows of internet virality, a phenomenon he’s generally familiar with thanks to his more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. He loves being funny and making people laugh by skewering typical online tropes. But the process, and the aftermath, can ring hollow. “I’d film a short clip in my room, and the experience of doing it was utterly lonely—I was by myself,” he says. “Then the experience after is hell, because if I have a video that is successful, I’m spending weeks locked on my phone, checking the stats of it, every single comment, and every single person who shared it. It’s guaranteed phone addiction. For people who are watching, it’s this experience of 43 seconds and then moving on to the next thing. None of it feels very lasting or like an actual exchange of energy.”

Now More Than Ever, which premiered in 2023 and was released as an album last fall, is an antidote to that fleeting feeling. A culmination of his career thus far and a testament to his varied talents, the special features Early telling jokes, dancing, and singing while backed by his seriously capable six-piece band, the Lemon Squares. “The music makes the show much more stanky,” Early says. “It’s a lubricant.” The crew faithfully covers R&B and pop hits by Tweet, Britney Spears, and Donna Summer throughout the show, but there’s an unlikely ballad as well: Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.”

In fact, the chords to that prescient 1970 folk classic about the ecological collapse and its fallout underscore Early’s entire bit about the death of millennial culture, adding to its mournfulness. “I was really scared of it being so directly emotional,” Early says of performing the song. “It’s very melancholy, but there’s a slight note of hope to it. Choosing that song at the last minute turned it from a totally manic variety show into something that is still an absolutely manic variety show—but with an emotional thrust and a secret depth to it. In my stoner, dumb-as-rocks way, I’m trying to show that it’s OK to care.”

Early was introduced to “After the Gold” rush through a cover by the supergroup Trio, featuring Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and it’s one of the songs that rewired his brain. Below, he delves further into his history with that touchstone and other music that made a permanent imprint on his psyche.