Pop-Culturalist.com

It’s been over a decade since Dan Avidan (a.k.a. Danny Sexbang) and Brian Wecht (a.k.a. Ninja Brian) first came together and conceived the idea of Ninja Sex Party (NSP), an innovative act in which a Jewish superhero with no powers and his ninja best friend write and perform songs about unsuccessfully trying to find love. Much to their own amazement, the idea caught on, and the rock band has been at the forefront of the American musical comedy genre ever since.

In their eleven-year career, NSP has topped the Billboard charts, amassed over two hundred and ninety views on YouTube, and have more exciting projects on the way.

This October, the dynamic duo released their new album, The Prophecy, and we caught up with them to learn more about it!

PC: How did you each discover your passion for music and comedy?
Dan: I’ve been singing and doing comedy skits with my friends for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I had the thought of putting them together though until I saw Flight of the Conchords and the Lonely Island do it so seamlessly.

Brian: Both music and comedy were always around me growing up. I started taking piano lessons when I was five or six and had the typical classical piano education but supplemented it with jazz and got really into it by the time I was in high school. I also started playing saxophone in fourth grade and after that wanted to learn as many instruments as possible. By the time I finished high school, I could play sax, clarinet, tuba, and trombone to various levels of proficiency. My parents were big comedy fans, especially my dad. He loved Mel Brooks, Allan Sherman, and a lot of the other Jewish comedians who were big in the ’60s and ’70s. They let me and my sister watch a lot of comedy when we were way too young for it. I remember going to see George Carlin when I was eleven, for example. But I think it turned out to be a good thing, since it really influenced my comedic sensibility, even though it was maybe questionable parenting.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your careers?
Dan: I’d say YouTube as a platform has had the biggest influence. Before that, it was almost impossible to get your music out there to a lot of people without the help of a label. Having the ability to put up your own videos and get them out there was a huge game-changer.

Brian: Weird Al Yankovic, for sure. Although there are lots of comedic musicians out there, Weird Al will always be top of the heap for me. He’s a virtuosic musician who also happens to be incredibly funny and makes it all come together. Although I loved the parodies the most growing up, now I like his original songs even more. He’s an outstanding songwriter and I think doesn’t get enough credit for that. He plays with a great band too!

PC: You’ve had a lot of success throughout the years as a band. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out?
Dan: There have been so many great moments! We played our first arena show in 2019 for our ten-year anniversary, and that was pretty unforgettable. For comparison, our first show was for thirty people in a comedy club underneath a grocery store.

Brian: Definitely our tenth-anniversary show in Chicago in 2019, which was our first arena show. We played to almost eight thousand people, and it’s still unbelievable to me that we went from doing shows for a few people in tiny NYC theaters to that.

PC: Having been a part of the industry for over ten years, what’s one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started your careers?
Dan: I wish I knew it was going to work out! It would’ve been a lot less stressful!

Brian: Honestly, I still feel like we’re not really part of the industry. We just do our own thing and haven’t really figured out a lot of stuff that a traditional band would know well. The one thing I wish I knew starting out that I know now is that almost nobody makes money from pure music sales these days. You have to come up with an alternative business model if you want to survive. We lucked into ours—it was definitely not a calculated thing—but I don’t think I ever thought about what we were doing as a business model and kind of wish I had.

PC: What’s a fun fact about your bandmate that fans would be surprised to learn?
Dan: A lot of people might not know that Brian hits the gym pretty hard. He and Doctor Sung are definitely the workout guys in our band. The rest of us are mostly lazy when it comes to exercise.

Brian: Danny leads the least rock and roll lifestyle of anybody I know, and I say that as a compliment. His ideal day is hanging out with his girlfriend at home and going to bed early.

PC: Tell us about your new album, The Prophecy. What can fans expect?
Dan: I think it’s definitely our most advanced work thus far. With the last album, Cool Patrol, and this one, we’ve really started to hit a mark and sound like the band we always wanted to be.

Brian: I think it’s pretty much a continuation of the trajectory that we’ve been on for years, but we keep trying to outdo ourselves in both writing and production. This album has songs in lots of different styles, which is something we always try to do, including a few that are new to us, like a slow jam, which in our case is about math. Our goal is always to write funny songs with great music, and hopefully, we succeeded!

PC: With several albums already under your belt, what is your creative process like? Has it changed over the years?
Dan: The main difference from when we started is that we write with a producer now named Jim Roach. He’s definitely helped bring us to a new level. Apart from that though, it’s still just the two of us writing dumb joke songs that make us laugh.

Brian: Generally speaking, we do music first, lyrics second, although there are some exceptions. We now write all our songs with our producer, Jim Roach, with whom we’ve been working for the past several years. This is the biggest change in our process, since up until then, it was always just the two of us. Jim and I will bring in—or come up with on the spot—a musical ideal, and then the three of us will brainstorm song ideas. Generally speaking, we come up with the title or general idea of the song before we start writing lyrics, and most of the time, Dan takes the first crack at those. The whole process is very collaborative, and it’s often hard to say who came up with what.

PC: In addition to your new album, you also released a graphic novel. What was that process like? What was the biggest takeaway working in that medium?
Dan: It was a pretty easy process. The awesome people at Fantoons did most of the work. All we really had to do was talk about our lives, which was kind of a nice trip down memory lane.

Brian: We wrote that with the team at Fantoons, especially David Calcano, and it was a great experience. David did lots of interviews with us and then wrote a script for the book. We gave notes on that, and then a few months later, we saw it in its graphical form. Since I’d never worked on a comic book before, that was really impressive to me. The biggest takeaway for me was just that thinking graphically is very different from how you’d write a script for a TV or stage show. There are so many other possibilities than you get in other media, and you’re really only limited by your imagination. The Fantoons folks did a wonderful job turning a pretty grounded story into something graphically fantastical.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

PC: A band or artist that fans would be surprised to learn is on your playlist?
Dan: A Tribe Called Quest. Midnight Marauders is one of my favorite albums.

Brian: Mr. Lif.

PC: First album you bought?
Dan: Def Leppard’s Hysteria.

Brian: Weird Al Yankovic.

PC: First concert you attended?
Dan: Spin Doctors. They were awesome!

Brian: The Grateful Dead at Brendan Byrne Arena, 1988.

PC: An album that changed your life and why?
Dan: Nirvana’s Nevermind. I had loved individual songs before that, but that album was the first time I truly fell in love with a band.

Brian: I forget which recording, but it was Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw. I had never heard non-tonal music before, and it really expanded my expectation of what music could do.

PC: A venue on your bucket list to perform at?
Dan: Madison Square Garden would be pretty cool!

Brian: Madison Square Garden.

PC: A must-have on the road?
Dan: An extra pillow! Those bus bunk beds can do a number on your neck if you’re not careful.

Brian: Earplugs. Tour buses are really loud, and I can’t sleep without them.

To keep up with Ninja Sex Party, follow them on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.