In its original form, Vanessa Carlton’s 2002 hit “A Thousand Miles” is a cinematic pop song about romantic longing, carried by one of the hookiest piano melodies ever written. But here are two other universal truths: Music is a fluid art form built for reinterpretation, and high school generally sucks. In that spirit, a pair of Arizona teenagers performed a bizarre and virtuosic piano-and-drums version of Carlton’s classic during their student talent show—part next-level trolling, part act of polite youthful rebellion.
Make Weird Music, a YouTube channel devoted to “shining a light on the world’s most creative music,” documented the whole tale. (The source makes sense, given that the page is operated by Anthony Garone: a tech ghostwriter, musician, author, and proud father of Gabe, the 17-year-old pianist in question. Gabe’s drummer bandmate is best friend Owen Dueck, also 17.) Garone’s video actually opens with a home-studio live performance by the duo, and that alone is worth the price of admission: The piece, originally arranged by Brekky Boy‘s Taylor Davis, opens with a straightforward rendering of the piano melody—before everything goes haywire with dissonance, leading to a heavy jazz-fusion section and other forms of avant-garde chaos, with the original melodies sprinkled in throughout.
But that performance is really just an homage to the duo’s surreal talent-show spectacle, which took place at Mesa’s Dobson High School where roughly 250-300 students and parents looked on with some mixture of pop nostalgia and severe confusion. Garone sprinkled in snippets of hilarious cell-phone footage throughout the video. “You can hear the audience,” he says in the clip. “They started with all cheering, like, ‘Yeah, it’s ‘A Thousand Miles. Woo-hoo!’ And then you go [plays dissonant harmonies]. They’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh! What is happening?’”
“They are such trolls,” Garone tells GOOD. “They were joking about doing the talent show, and they were gonna get up and do something terrible: play like idiots or do a sketch that was intentionally not funny. I was like, ‘Why don’t you do something that’s challenging and interesting?’ I showed them this Mr. Show sketch ‘The Audition.’ I’m like, ‘You have an opportunity to do something meta and weird, just like [David Cross in the show]–you run a piece called ‘The Audition’ while you’re auditioning. There’s something you can do for a talent show that demonstrates your talents but also demonstrates that people won’t understand your talents.”
Garone—himself a guitar virtuoso and massive fan of progressive music—was already familiar with Brekky Boy’s version of “A Thousand Miles,” so he made the initial suggestion. They eventually agreed, impressively transcribing the whole piece in roughly a week. (Garone also connected with Brekky Boy’s Davis, who was excited to learn that someone else was performing his weird creation.)
“It was super intimidating,” Dueck tells Garone in the video, describing their process of learning and performing the track. “It was definitely interesting,” adds Gabe. “There were a lot of weird parts to it that I enjoyed transcribing.” They also talk about how they ramped up the strangeness to include their stage presence: “Right before the curtain opened, Owen comes up to me and is like, ‘Dude, we should just stare at each other—weird the audience out,’” says Gabe. (They did indeed follow through on that idea, gazing at each other for a silent 15-second overture.)
Gabe notes with a laugh that they “didn’t win” the contest. But, as Dueck clarifies: “Winning wasn’t the point. Playing something so weird that people would question our skill level—I think that was the point.”
In a way, it was a form of performance art.
“I love this quote from [The Residents’] Homer Flynn, who said, ‘Life is all about letting things pass through you, and then you put your own creative stamp on it on its way out,” Garone tells GOOD, paraphrasing an interview from the MWM channel. “This [Brekky Boy] arrangement to me is, ‘Hey, this is a cool song. I want to put my own creative stamp on it. Then to have someone cover that cover with a whole different intention? He hears the song and then says, ‘My goodness, I want to do this to my high-school peers because they’re so irritating and boring and mundane.’ I don’t mean this in insulting ways, but my son is always like, ‘All they do is sit on their phones all day. They’re not paying attention. They’re not learning anything. They slow down the learning. I would love to make them suffer through these four minutes of…’Gotcha!’”
