Episode 006 | Visualizing Music

Mateus Falci joins us in the basement for a funky-fresh convo about his band, Gratis, and their two music video collaborations with Haunted Basement.

We also talk about the home movies we made as kids, deciding on film school (three of us), deciding against a film career (one of us), the most bad-ass wedding processional ever, visualizing cyborg tango music and a break-up song in outer space, and why “Let Me Roll It” by Wings contains the most effective pre-chorus in rock and roll history.

You can watch Android Eyes and Two In The Morning at hauntedbasement.video.

Listen to your new favorite band, Gratis, on Spotify, Apple Music, or Soundcloud, and follow them on Instagram.

Subscribe//Follow for future episodes.

Haunted Basement is a full-service video production company that creates professional content to promote your business or brand. Visit hauntedbasement.video or contact hello@hauntedbasement.video for more.

Episode 006 Transcript

Bubba: Welcome back to the basement. Episode 6. We've done five and now we're recording six, and that's a good thing.

Ashleigh: You know, time flies when you're having fun.

Bubba: So thank you to everybody that has been with us since the start of this journey. It's been a lot of fun. Hope you're not sick of my voice. And I hope that you can distinguish between my voice and A.J.’s because I've been getting a lot of feedback. 

A.J.: Yeah, people are like, I have no idea who is talking.

Ashleigh: And I'm sorry that I've had a cold every other episode, but I think I'm getting healthy.

Bubba: Yeah. So thank you for listening. Please continue to listen.

Ashleigh: Tell your friends, tell your coworkers, tell your family, tell your dog even though they can't really listen. Leave it on in the house for them. You know, when you go out. Yeah. Just leave it on.

A.J.: Woof woof.

Bubba: Very good. All right, so today we are having a conversation with one of my best friends, Mateus, who is a musician among a slew of other things.

A.J.: He's just a very talented man.

Bubba: Yeah, he's got talent just seeping out of his pores in every direction. A.J. and I have made two music videos for his band, Gratis, and we're going to be talking about both of those music videos. We like to think of one of those as a project that brought us back to the days where we were running around with an old camcorder that we found and made home movies.

A.J.: We didn't find it. Our grandfather gave us his old camera.

Ashleigh: I thought it was dad’s.

A.J.: I remember Potty gave us this old news person camera. The one you have to put on your shoulder.

Bubba: Yeah, I remember that one. 

A.J.: That ethos that we had back then when we were like seven or eight, when I was like, Let's make a horror movie. And Ash was like, Let's do it. She'd be walking up to the door and I'd be filming from inside of the door and Ash would be like, Is anybody home? We didn't plot out stories or anything. We just wanted to make a movie. Then and there.

Bubba: It was like an opening scene of Ashleigh walking towards this scary house, I guess. She asked if anyone was home and I was dead inside face down in a bowl of pasta. And I think that's where it stopped, right?

A.J.: I think we got distracted. We were like, okay, let's do something else.

Bubba: I think around the same time we also made a project that was basically an opening sequence. It was an alien invasion one–

A.J.: Close Encounters of the Third and a Half Kind. There was supposed to be an alien invasion happening and Bubba was the lead. I would just say to Bubba, We're going to make a movie. And it always would start with him waking up in his bed and he would walk outside and in this movie he grabs a hockey stick and goes out into our backyard and you can hear UFO sounds.

Ashleigh: So we don't see anything? I don’t think I ever saw this one.

A.J.: I think Agent X was probably our masterpiece from our elementary school - early middle school days. 

Ashleigh: Yes. That was some great acting.

Bubba: Thank you.

A.J.: In our childhood home we had a coat closet with all the coats, all our parents coats. And Bubs grabbed Dad's trusted trench coat and a detective hat. And he was Agent X, and he would be solving cases in our home.

Bubba: That was definitely heavily inspired by watching Austin Powers and 007 movies at a way too young age.

Ashleigh: Yeah, I thought we weren't allowed to, but it seems like maybe I wasn't allowed to.

Bubba: Well, I don't know if I was allowed to or not, but I definitely was young enough that I was repeating Austin Powers lines back to Mom, not knowing what they meant and it was bad. I won't tell you what I said.

Ashleigh: I think you can figure it out. It's a little awkward for someone to say that to his mother.

Bubba: We also made Couch Potato.

A.J.: That one was about Bubba waking up in his bed and describing the lifestyle of the couch potato as if it was an ancient tradition then going downstairs to the basement where we had a big TV and a couch. His character was trying to reach the remote control. We called it the clicker back in the day.

Ashleigh: I still call it the clicker.

A.J.: I got made fun of for calling it a clicker in college so I stopped.

Bubba: Oh, no.

Ashleigh: Don’t give up.

A.J.: He's reaching for the clicker and he has a heart attack and he dies.

Ashleigh: I enjoy The Coffee Genie.

A.J.: That one's going to live on forever because there are these kids that we babysat on our block and that's all they wanted to talk about.

Ashleigh: Any time that I babysat, they were like, show us The Coffee Genie. They thought it was the funniest thing.

A.J.: I showed it to a few people during my freshman year at USC. My friend Alex Yen thinks it's the best thing that I've ever made.

Ashleigh: It’s funny because the genie farts in the coffee. And yet again it’s Bubba waking up.

Bubba: I'm always waking up. You know, you can bet that the first Haunted Basement movie will at least have a cameo of me waking up in a bed with an extreme close up of my eye with the crust flinging from my eyelids.

Ashleigh: And you're always in a plaid bathrobe.

Bubba: We had limited costume choices. Although back in the day, we used to raid Mom's prom dresses when we were really young.

Ashleigh: Those were bridesmaids dresses. Oh, those were puffy. Those were costumes.

A.J.: Yeah, the late seventies and early eighties were a different time.

Ashleigh: Oh, my lord. Colorful.

A.J.: Anyway, what were we talking about?

Ashleigh: We were talking about Mateus. 

A.J.: Ah right. One of the music videos that we made for Gratis really dug into that feeling of We're just going to make this, we're going to have fun making it and see what happens when we make it, you know?

Ashleigh: Yeah, there's a lot to talk about, but let's talk to Mateus. 

A.J.: Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Haunted Basement: The Podcast. I'm A.J.

Bubba: I’m Bubba.

Ashleigh: And I’m Ashleigh.

A.J.: Where siblings and we run a production company called Haunted Basement. And this is our podcast where we talk about the movies, music and pop culture that inspires and influences our video work.

Bubba: Today we have a very special guest joining us in the basement. He is a multi-talented multi-hyphenate whose creative pursuits include filmmaking, songwriting, music producing, film scoring and releasing electro funk disco rock as part of the duo Gratis. But most importantly, he is a lifelong friend who is always down for a smooch and a squeeze. Mateus Falci, thank you for joining us in the basement.

Mateus: Thank you, Serrano family. I've always wanted to be in the basement with all three of you at the same time.

A.J.: Mateus, you went to college to study film, correct?

Mateus: Yeah. So the idea was basically, I got into NYU Tisch for film. I was planning on going there, and then when I got into Harvard, I decided to go there. But then I decided maybe I don't want to do films. So I didn't take any film classes freshman year to see if other things appealed to me. So the only film-adjacent course I took freshman spring was a photography course, but then the summer after freshman year I did an abroad experience that was a documentary filmmaking course in South Korea. And at that time I'd been sort of thinking like, oh, philosophy, sociology, anthropology. And then I was like, well, if you make documentaries, you kind of do all of that in the field by meeting new people and going to new places. 

Ashleigh: What was that documentary about?

Mateus: The one we made was about like it was myself and three Korean college students from Ewha Womans University. And we made a documentary about a youth league soccer team that was made up of the children of migrant families to South Korea. There's a scene of us filming them playing on the playground after practice. And they were all coming up to me and laughing and I was laughing back with them. And one of the Korean crewmates was like, you know what they're calling you? White devil. And I was like, oh.

Ashleigh: Perfect.

A.J.: Mateus, do you remember what got you into movies? What inspired you to even apply to NYU and Harvard for film?

Mateus: So much like Bubba, it was my older brother. Basically. I followed his track and our evolution went basically like this: journalism, print journalism, starting with the school newspaper that then took us to an interest in broadcast journalism and TV, which then led me to an interest in documentaries and then to film.

Ashleigh: Shout out Pedro.

Mateus: He joined the school newspaper. I joined the school newspaper. He majored in TV and film. I majored in TV and film.

Bubba: We bonded over copying our older brothers through every stage of our development.

Mateus: But the Falci/Serrano difference is that now no longer do Pedro or I do film and you guys stuck with it.

Bubba: You didn't stray too far. So you were studying film production in school. You also had a secondary in music, right?

Mateus: Yeah.

Bubba: You were also the director of the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter. You were executive producer of On Harvard Time, and you were a drummer in the hottest campus band, Hot Breakfast, which opened for Janelle Monae. You were also in plays and musicals. You did so friggin much and I've never seen you tired before.

Ashleigh: And he always has a smile on his face.

Bubba: Yeah, you son of a bitch.

Mateus: You're exaggerating a little bit because a lot of those things happened in different school years, but yeah, I was a director of the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter but there were many of us together on staff running that place. And I really love that community. It was awesome. And then, yes, senior year was a year for being a drummer in the band. And yeah, that was a lot of fun. But Bubs, you knew I was tired. You were the one to wake me up in film class.

Bubba: Yeah, that was the only film class that we took together, right?

Mateus: I think so.

A.J.: Was it production or theory?

Mateus: Theory.

Ashleigh: Oh, a lot of snoozing then.

Bubba: For a lot of these courses, they have these really esoteric, weird films that of course were 3 hours long.

Ashleigh: Can’t keep those eyes open.

Bubba: Mateus, you must have had low grade whiplash because you would be in there dozing off and right when your neck was almost 90 degrees you would wake up and be like, What did I miss? Then I had the immense privilege of being cast in one of your films, and I got that crossover into the production world.

Mateus: Yeah, you were great.

Ashleigh: How many films did you make while you were at Harvard?

Mateus: Quite a bit. So, sophomore year, the first course was all on actual celluloid. I'm shooting on 16mm, but that was like a lot of group projects. And then junior year, the course that Bub was referring to was a year-long fiction filmmaking course that ended with you making your own short film, which was great. And then there were a lot of side projects. And then senior year was my thesis film. But then I also made some other documentaries throughout the winter and summer breaks.

Ashleigh: And do you get to keep them or do they technically belong to Harvard now?

Mateus: No, I get to keep them.

Ashleigh: Aren't yours USC property?

A.J.: Yeah, they are. But I mean, one out of a million USC students are actually going to get a job off their college short film. They're worthless. They're just practice. You learn how to do it. The thing that I loved about film school is…I remember one class, they stuck us in a motel room for 4 hours, and you crew up with three other people in your class and then they say, okay, make something quickly. Then you just had to learn how to work with strangers and collaborate and figure out how to make the best thing possible in a very confined space and short amount of time.

Ashleigh: And hopefully meet some cool people, which I think you all did…so worth it.

Bubba: Yeah, absolutely. It'd be wild if Harvard was like Mateus, I own your thesis film because your thesis, which was screened in a packed theater, the only part of that entire screening, like the entire screening, not just not just your film, but any of the films that I remember is your birth taking place on this giant screen for everybody to watch.

Mateus: I can’t believe you remember that.

Bubba: Your dad shot it, right?

Mateus: Yes, my mom's C-section or I guess our C-section. I'm on a group chat with my freshman year dorm mates, and they all brought that up today because one of our friends became a doctor so she's delivering babies on the regular and then one friend said, Oh, the only birth I've been witness to is the C-section from Mateus’ thesis film. A couple others jumped in and said they were equally scarred by that scene.

Ashleigh: Oh my god, that's so funny.

A.J.: Mateus, are your parents musicians? How did you get into music and how did you move from film to music?

Mateus: Great question. Okay, so first, my my mom is not a musician though she loves music. My dad plays some guitar and used to write songs in his twenties and thirties and wants to get back into writing more songs. Occasionally he'll sit me down and say, I have a poem that I want to turn into a song, and then we'll work together and make a song out of it.

Ashleigh: I want that so much.

Mateus: I can send you some of them, Ash. And then how do I get into music? So music happened over the course of my life. Obviously, my parents forced me to take piano lessons, which I did not find cool for the longest time. And then I had drum lessons for a little bit, which were really fun. And then I stopped those, but kept playing. And then I'm self-taught on guitar, so I have always been doing it. Really doing it happened while I was making the thesis film in Brazil. It was sort of a quick realization that I was on paper supposed to be the happiest I should have been because I was traveling in my home country, a place I always wanted to be independent and free and with a camera with a chance to make a film, and I wasn't enjoying myself. But what was happening was I would have these sleepless nights. I wouldn't call it insomnia, but I would stay up late with my iPhone, watching live performances of my favorite bands every single night for hours and after maybe one and two or three or four of those nights being quite sleepless, I remember I got on the computer the next morning and I messaged my dad and I was like, Hey, I just realized something: I'm going to go for music, not for film, and I'm going to move to New York next year and and try to be a musician. So it sort of came out of a falling out of love with filmmaking, ironically.

A.J.: What were those bands that you were listening to live?

Mateus: Oh, it's the ones you all know. It's my Arctic Monkeys, it's my Strokes, my Oasis, my Killers, my classics. 

Bubba: If I had not met you, I would not be a Strokes fan, and my life would be so different.

Mateus: We have since spent a lot of hours of our lives talking about The Strokes.

Bubba: Yeah, absolutely. So, Mateus, can you walk us through your history with music making professionally and how you met Will and formed Gratis.

Mateus: So I graduated, moved to New York, I was hoping that some members of the college bands that I was in would want to continue on with me, but everybody had their own career paths and everything to follow, so I had to start from scratch in New York City. So that meant a lot of Craigslist music ads, both posting and responding to, and I ended up forming a pretty large community of friends and fellow musicians in New York City through Craigslist. So for years I was in several bands, some of which I would have a little more of a leadership role. Others I just wanted to experience playing with people and would just play whatever they would play. Typically, keys was what I was playing most at that time. Then fast forward a few years. I'm interning at a music studio, learning a lot about recording and mixing, but it's getting a little busy and it was a music studio where there were also a lot of commercials, music for commercials, and that wasn't necessarily where my interest lied. So at that point, the bands I had been in had all fallen apart, but I was looking for something, another outlet that I really wanted to continue working to be in a band and make music that I liked. And as I was in that decision-making mode, Will, who I had met years prior through like mutual friends, reached out to me all of a sudden and he was like, Hey, I'm tired of making music alone and I remember we met and we got along and you do music too and I want to see if there's anything there. And I was like, Yeah, absolutely. We got together. We started first trying to decide like, Well, what is our sound? What common ground do we have? We realized we really liked dueling guitars and riffs. I'm a bit more of the rock and roll side of things, and Will brings more of that dance, electronic funk side of things. We spent probably six months to a year figuring out who we were, writing songs that didn't end up making it on the EP, but just rehearsing and meeting weekly and everything. And then we were very efficient. Will and I used to joke that we were a band powered by Google Workspace and Google Docs for everything, and we finally landed on what our sound was. Will taught me a lot on the guitar throughout that time. I became a much better guitar player thanks to his mentorship and challenging me to really learn how to play styles that I had never tried before. And then we went through almost a year-long recording process. That's sort of how that EP came about.

Bubba: People need to hear this music.

Ashleigh: It just makes you wanna dance. So Mateus, talk to us about being pitched a music video for a song that you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into. You've worked so hard. You have this amazing product, and then these two crazy kids, A.J. and Bubba, come up to you. Was it their idea? Was it your idea? How does a music video come about?

Bubba: What I remember is you and Will were coming out with the EP and A.J. and I wanted to make a music video for one of the songs, and you both shared with us the MP3s before they got mastered and we listened through and we looked at the lyrics for each song and it was always Android Eyes that we wanted to do. You had written the lyrics for this song, right?

Mateus: Will had already written all the music. We updated it a bit, but this was one of his instrumental tracks that he had written already.

Bubba: But the lyrics for Android Eyes are so heavily influenced by your background with filmmaking. Can you get into that? Tell us what you were thinking when you wrote the lyrics.

Mateus: Yeah, I wasn't thinking much, to be honest. The lyrics all sort of spilled out of me pretty quickly. There's a lot about filmmaking references sort of embedded.

A.J.: We can control what we see on screen.

Mateus: Will and I continue to be into digital minimalism. And the idea of being off social media and all these things to help me be a more creative and intentional person. So I think there was some of that too, and the like controlling what you see on screen and everything. And then I'm sure there was some love of Blade Runner in there. My parents walked down the aisle to the Blade Runner theme song.

A.J.: Oh, that is an incredible fact.

Mateus: So that all came together. A lot of it was one of those pure moments that you all can probably relate to when you're feeling creative and it doesn't feel like you're putting that much effort in and things are just kind of coming out of you and are working. But to your question, Ashleigh, I remember we sent Bubba and A.J. all five songs and being like, We love you guys. We want you to make a music video for one of these songs. Never expected it to be Android Eyes. I remember Will was like, Oh man, they chose the one that's like the most random of the songs on the EP. But I couldn't be more happy that that’s the song they ended up choosing because of the video that ultimately came out of that, I think is one of my favorite things that I've ever been a part of.

A.J.: Should we describe the plot of the music video?

Ashleigh: Yeah, please do. And make it brief.

A.J.: This is my interpretation: this video editor who is watching this robot destruction movie.

Bubba: He's watching the footage of a film that he just shot. He's a DIY independent filmmaker that just shot this robot movie on the cheap. He's looking at the footage. He is like, I need to spice this up.

A.J.: And at some point in the music video, he realizes he can control the robot and he's controlling this destruction. And he's also sort of falling in love with this creation. So at the end of the music video, we have this very dreamy sequence with a lot of bubbles floating around where the video editor goes into the movie and has this very romantic slow dance with the robot at the end.

Mateus: Honestly, who came up with the bubble slow dance?

A.J.: That was all Bubba. 

Bubba: What I love about the song is that it has this amazing climactic outro for me. I kept hearing the outro as like this really kind of heavy cyborg tango theme music. It was always in my head whenever I listened. It kind of made sense to me that after all this struggle, all that was happening, that the filmmaker would face off with the robot. And now there's this tango.

Mateus: I know Will and I were pumped. We were like, this is how it ends? This is hilarious.

Ashleigh: If it was made in 2023, it could have a very different ending.

Bubba: We should say that both Will and Mateus star in Android Eyes. Will is the filmmaker and Mateus is in the robot costume.

A.J.: Let's get into the production of it. We got the okay on our concept. And then what I did- I was living in Crown Heights at the time- I went to the grocery store across the street from me. I was like, Can I have all of the cardboard boxes that you're not using? So my bedroom was filled with cardboard boxes. Because of the DIY element of this shoot I was like, I got to make this entire cardboard city and I also got to make this robot costume out of cardboard and whatever else I was using, like plastic. I was going to the dollar store and picking up cardboard off the street. So by the end of the pre-production of this shoot, my room was stacked with boxes. I basically have a path to get to my bed. And that was about it for a month, and it was absolutely worth it.

Ashleigh: Did you bring it all on the train?

Mateus: I think you arrived in Bubba’s car.

A.J.: Yeah.

Mateus: But when you showed up like we were like, Oh, this is going to be amazing, so awesome. And then obviously the robot costume itself was incredible, but the city- there were so many city blocks.

Bubba: And you and Matues made all the city inhabitants, you guys made the time to cut out all these pictures of our friends and then random celebrities.

Mateus: The robot ate our friend Jacob.

A.J.: And then you also found the old VCR and old TVs as well.

Mateus: Oh, yeah. I think Will found them. You know how people just throw stuff on the sidewalk in Brooklyn? Yeah, I think Will and I were both for three weeks before that trash hunters just looking at every block. Oh, should we grab that tv? Grab that? So we ended up getting a bunch of little monitors and a VCR.

A.J.: It takes a lot of trust to put a cardboard robot costume on your body for a ten hour shoot. And you're like I don't know how Bubba and A.J. are going to film this, if they're going to make me look good or not. But I'm game for it. And I appreciate that. You know, it's a lot to ask for. 

Mateus: It was great. But the only thing that we all know you didn't account for was the size of my nose. If you look closely enough, you can see my nose poking out of the robot's mouth.

Ashleigh: We’d have the same issue.

Bubba: Talking to the right people here.

A.J.: Bubs, closing thoughts on Android Eyes?

Bubba: I've got so many thoughts. If you go to the website and we'll link it in the show notes for sure. But the description under the video talks about how it brought us back to our childhood, like making our VHS home movies and just kind of working with whatever we have at our disposal and having fun. And that's what shooting Android Eye was. It was just a few hours in the backyard. There are these photos, these behind the scenes photos of A.J. kind of like on his back underneath your legs. He’s getting a shot, a low angle shot. Then like I'm in your face standing over A.J. getting another angle. It was just really fun.

Mateus: Every edit that you all sent me, I was like, Oh my God, this is amazing. And you would both be like, It's not ready yet. I'd be like, It can't get any better. Yes, it can, don't worry. But you obviously had the vision for it, so you knew exactly where it was going. It was really fun to be receiving the different cuts as it got better and better. You know what Haunted Basement does really well is the start of music videos. They instantly bring me into the world of the song.

Bubba: Just a follow up about the editing process for this. I love that the editing of Android Eyes was also kind of like this meta multilayered thing where obviously in the music video Will is trying to enhance the video with edits and it's a mirror of our process, you know, disguised as a music video. 

A.J.: For sure, when I love a project, I almost don't even want to release it. I just want to keep working and be in that world.

Mateus: When you guys edit music videos, are you ever thinking about cutting rhythmically?

A.J.: That’s my thing.

Ashleigh: That’s A.J.’s specialty.

A.J.: I think my main goal in life is to visualize music. Especially if I am really feeling a song I can see a whole music video in my head or I can almost see these geometric patterns bopping around in my head in very rhythmical ways. So I'm always trying to translate that on a screen. And I love when I work with Bubba on Haunted Basement projects because he pushes more of the narrative. We’ve got to tell a story here. So we've got to balance the two. For me, especially at this time in 2019 when I was in my late twenties, I was like, Can the whole music video just be this sort of really scattered visual thing?

Ashleigh: And now I'm here to tell them to hurry up.

Bubba: All right. Should we jump into Two in the Morning?

A.J.: Let’s do it.

Mateus: Two in the Morning is a single that Gratis made in 2020 and then we waited to release it when the video was ready. 

Bubba: Yeah, but the song itself has quite a history. Do you mind sharing a little bit about that process?

Mateus: Sure. It was written in a night, a sleepless night in 2016 when I was 24. It again was one of those things that just spilled out of me. And the original demo was I remember my bandmate at the time, Woody, shout out to Woody. Great person and a dear friend. He had shown me, I think it was an 80 song by Big Country or something. Anyway, the song was just all choruses, like there were no verses. It was just like a chorus, a chorus, a chorus, and then back to the first chorus. And I thought that was super cool. So I tried to write a version of that. And ultimately, once Gratis rolled around and we were looking for follow ups to the EP that we could do, I shared it with Will and he was like, Let's finish the song, let's do it. So he was super helpful. He was the one who was like, This song is called Two in the Morning. It's sleepy, you know, it's dreamy. Let's take it in that direction. We started working on it. We got our friend Derek, who is our drummer, to play drums on it. He did an amazing job. He played this giant goatskin snare drum, which we wanted to sound warm, a pillowy snare sound. And he brought in this snare drum and it was so good. And then we had our friend Robin mix it, and it became this sort of much more emotive and sleepy and dreamy song. Will took over the choruses and I took over the verses and I think it's my dad's favorite crazy song. That's sort of its claim to fame for me at this point.

Bubba: It is a goosebump-inducing song, and I think especially for me knowing the process and just knowing you, it's like every time I listen to it, I'm just overwhelmed with pride and admiration.

Ashleigh: Yeah, it's a gorgeous, gorgeous song. I wrote down that I just genuinely enjoy listening to it and I think it's very cool and funky and smooth. 

Bubba: A.J., what was your reaction to Two in the Morning when you first heard it?

A.J.: Yeah, I heard it first, I'm pretty sure it was after the lockdowns of March 2020 when one of my only things that I did was walk around the streets here and listen to music. And Mateus had sent me that song and almost immediately I saw these images of an astronaut floating in outer space and the words in my head were like, breakup song set in outer space. And that's what came to my head. And I remember really pushing Mateus, I need to make a music video for this. And once again you must have thought it was a crazy idea, but you gave us your blessing. 

Mateus: I know how much I love space exploration and sci fi, so I was very pleased once again. And you nailed it right off the bat.

Bubba: A.J. sent me this quick clip that he made on After Effects or maybe even Premiere. It's the second shot that's in the music video, but an earlier version of it and you had roughed out this image of the moon and the lyrics of the first line of the song kind of rotating around it. I felt it was such a perfect image to kind of capture the vibe of that first line. And we ended up building the entire music video around that design scheme.

A.J.: Yeah, I think we wanted to make a lyric video that didn't feel like a lyric video. A lot of lyric music videos that I see, I mean, they're great, but they're also pretty basic, just like text on screen. I wanted it to be like, you're experiencing a story and you can look around on screen and also see a lyric video happening as well.

Ashleigh: Lyric videos with a story are just better.

A.J.: A little bit more involving.

Mateus: To the point where we didn't even call it a lyric video. We just called it like the official music video when we put it on our YouTube and it's like, this is a music video that has lyrics.

Ashleigh: It is very cool. And I don't know how you boys did it. I don't understand.

A.J.: I don't understand how Bubba did the Saturn shot. There's a shot where we go toward Saturn and we wrap around the rings of Saturn. It wraps around 180. And then we go into a different sort of composition. And Bubba was the mastermind behind that shot. And I was learning how to use After Effects while making this music video. But Bubba was light years ahead of me with his knowledge of it.

Bubba: The way that we went about making this was we came up with a shot list and thought about all the assets that we would need. So we needed to create all these 3D models of planets. We had to come up with the design and the look and feel of the text itself, of the lyrics. We had to kind of come up with a look and feel for space. We had to find all these light flares that we downloaded, just like all these flares from everywhere on the Internet. And we brought all those assets into After Effects. Every shot had these 3D planets in 3D space with 2D astronaut floating past it. So the Saturn shot probably took me like three months to get ready.

A.J.: It took a lot of time and I was like, Oh, this is why it takes a long time for animated films to come out. It's just so meticulous.

Bubba: We were designing it as we were executing the camera movements. And it's not a great way to go about making something that's supposed to be an effects heavy video. But eventually we got it right.

A.J.: Yes. The biggest challenge production wise on this music video was making space look three dimensional. I have a lot of a lot more respect for Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey or even a movie that I don't really like, Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón. Both of those filmmakers made the blackness of space, this very flat background look like it has dimension, and it was very difficult for this music video to be like, okay, how do we make these 2D images look like there's depth to it? And that's where all the flares and lights and shadows came into play. But yeah, I gained a lot of respect for the craft of shooting in space with this music video.

Bubba: And this guy who is learning After Effects on the fly ultimately comes up with one of my favorite shots, the final shot of this music video.

Mateus: A.J., I don't know if you know this, but I didn't realize what was actually in that shot for like a solid year and a half.

A.J.: You didn’t see the arms?

Mateus: I didn't see his arms. Yeah. And I didn't realize that his helmet was the planet. And then one day I finally saw it. I was like, Oh.

Bubba: While I was taking on the Saturn shot, A.J. had come up with a handful of different versions of that final shot and the first version of this shot was a comp with Mateus dancing with his Corgi superimposed over some starry background. We were doing this remotely. So I would send A.J. a project file and update it and he'd receive it in New York and then he'd add whatever and send it back to me. And we went through so many iterations and I just kept going, It's not right. It's not right. It's got to be better, got to be more, it's got to be whatever. And I don't know how you cracked that, A.J., but I think that image is so perfect for the comedown of this breakup song.

A.J.: Dreamy, dreamy little outro to this song. Mateus, what are you working on currently in terms of music?

Mateus: Well, you know, Gratis unfortunately is on an indefinite hiatus since the pandemic started. But in the meantime, I’ve kept myself busy with a couple of cool things. I've started doing little scoring gigs, which has been fun. First was through my friend Zack Guzmán who hosts the show Coinage, which is like a cryptocurrency news show. He was gracious in inviting me to write the theme song for season one and also score the trailer and first episode. So without much scoring experience, I put everything I had into it and they ended up liking it and using it. So that was exciting. And now obviously I have another scoring opportunity through you A.J., which I'm very grateful for. So that's been fun. 

A.J.: He nailed it. I hope you all are able to hear it some day. 

Mateus: Thank you. And then I've been sitting on five original songs in Portuguese in the style of MPB, which is a genre of Brazilian music that mixes bossa nova, samba, rock and roll, etc. I think I probably wrote the first one of these songs in 2016 or 2017 and have just been taking so long to get my act together to finally record it and put it out. But as of last week, I finally hired my friend to produce, got deadlines, got the band together. So we're looking at rehearsals through April and May and then recording in June.

A.J.: Very exciting. I’ve heard some bits and pieces and they're tasty. I like that your vocals are featured very heavily. I can't wait to have them in my AirPods. So should we do some quick hits before Mateus has to get out of here?

Ashleigh: Let’s do it.

A.J.: Favorite Killers song?

Mateus: Oh, you son of a gun.

A.J.: Quick! Quick!

Mateus: I can’t! Okay, let's go with Read My Mind.

A.J.: That’s mine, too.

Ashleigh: Who or what inspires you?

Mateus: Wow, I'm so bad at quick hits. 

Ashleigh: You're not great at it.

Mateus: I'm slow hits. I am inspired by all the musicians that I love. I really gravitate these days to Brazilian musicians from the 1970s, sort of the big ones Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Jorge Ben, amongst others. They're still out there in their eighties playing music and their catalog is diverse and they're incredible musicians. They just inspire me.

Ashleigh: Are you reading anything currently?

Mateus: Yes, I'm reading Think Again by Adam Grant.

Ashleigh: I love that one.

Mateus: Have you read it?

Ashleigh: Yes.

Mateus: I read the first half of it six months ago. And yesterday I was like, I need to finish this book. So I picked it up again last night.

Bubba: Do you still stand by your claim that that Wings song that you shared with me has the best pre-chorus in rock and roll?

Mateus: A hundred percent. Let Me Roll It by Wings. Most efficient and effective pre-chorus in the history of rock and roll. I can't tell you how I feel. My love is like a wheel. Two lines. But nothing has ever led into a chorus better than those two lines.

A.J.: How do you feel about Coming Up by Paul McCartney?

Mateus: I think I heard it once. It's not my fave.

A.J.: I love it. I think it's Linda McCartney's in there, too. There's just something about her voice. Linda McCartney was in Wings. She was Paul McCartney's wife. They made some really great music together. But there's something about her vocals in that song that is both bad and good at the same time. And that is what I always look for in music. Someone who sounds bad and good at the same time I'm just like, I can't figure this out. Favorite Brazilian dish?

Mateus: It's got to be the classic, just a good rice and beans with farofa. You know what farofa is? 

A.J.: Nope.

Mateus: It looks like sand, but it's not. It's like cassava flour with spices. Oh, baby, it’s very good.

Bubba: Well, Mateus, thank you for joining us in the basement to talk about music, music videos, Paul McCartney, all this stuff. You will be back. You're not going to be released for long. We got to talk about the Killers and the Strokes.

Mateus: I want to move into the basement. I don't want to go to work right now. I want to stay in the basement with you.

A.J.: We're looking forward to new music coming from Mateus. And we're going to link the music that you can listen to in the show notes. So listen up, folks, and thank you for listening to this episode.

Mateus: Thanks for having me.