Featured Photo Credit: Orion Bustamante
If you’ve scrolled through TikTok recently, you may have heard a melancholic rendition of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” flooding your FYP. What you may not have realized was that the voice behind this viral sound was none other than Stephen Kramer Glickman, known by millennials as Gustavo Rocque, the band’s producer on the Nickelodeon hit Big Time Rush.
Glickman has had a passion for music since he first sat at his grandmother’s piano at the age of two. Throughout the years, he has made his mark in comedy, television, and animation, but it was only recently that he began to seriously revisit that passion with his cover album, “The Moving Company.”
Fresh off the release of his debut project, produced by Grammy Winner Greg Collins (Album Of The Year for U2), Glickman chatted with us about the album, the music videos, and what fans can expect next!
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Excerpt from the podcast:
When you posted your cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” it ended up going viral on Tik Tok. It turned into a trend, which is a whole nother level of virality. I think there are like 120K videos using the sound. Did you expect it to take off when you posted it?
You can’t plan anything like that. That is absolute insanity. When I dropped just a little piece of the track, it had like a hundred thousand views and people were using the sound to show off beautiful things in their town. So it would be like someone would show a sunset or they’d show an iceberg like someone was in Greenland showing an iceberg or the Middle East using it to show the dunes. There was just so much beautiful imagery that I was seeing and I was like, wow, this is really cool. And then frickin Addison Rae, bro, Addison Rae pulls up and does a video saying here’s toxic behavior from an ex-boyfriend, something like that. And then starts a trend and it goes super, super crazy. What I thought was just so fun about it too, I had close friends who were using the track and had no idea that it was me. That was a pretty neat thing to have that happen. My Tik Tok gained about 500,000 followers. I went from a million to 1.5 because of it, it was pretty great. It’s a really neat thing. I’m sure you could pay a lot of money and blow something up on the internet or on Tik ToK, but to not pay anything and have something go crazy. It was just, wow. Then Cee Lo reached out and then he reposted it on his page.
You released a music video for that single as well. In the video, you’re channeling the Joker. Where did the concept for that video come from and what was it like filming it?
It was after I had recorded the song and I was rewatching the movie Joker and I was like, man, that would have gone so well together with that. And, you know, just thinking about it You know what would be fun? Uh, maybe I should just grab footage from the movie, play it in reverse, so I don’t have to purchase the rights to the clip and put my song on it. And I did, and I put like 20 seconds of it on and I put it up on Facebook or something and it went crazy. People were like, oh my God, this is amazing. That movie was so amazing and it was so dirty, you know, the sets and everything. And downtown Los Angeles is nasty, and I owned a red suit already. So I was like, what if I put on a red suit, bought a green shirt – I had the vest, and just paint my face, and then we go to some alleyways in downtown Los Angeles? I was like, we could probably fake it pretty quickly. And then we were like, oh, we should get subway shots. Yeah, you can just get on the subway in LA and shoot in the subway and it will look like Gotham, like it’s nasty, you know? And so I think our whole budget for that music video was like $300. It was like absolutely nothing. And it was literally friends just being like, let’s go make something fun and stealing shots and screwing around and trying to make something for very little, you know, and, uh, yeah, it was awesome.
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Amelia Cordischi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Juice Box Press, is an accomplished digital marketing professional with over a decade of experience in media and communications. Her work has been featured in notable publications, including The Boston Globe. A communications graduate of Simmons University in Boston, Amelia served as manager of Simmons College Radio (“The Shark”), where she also launched and co-hosted her radio show, The Find.
In addition to her editorial work, Amelia is an established freelance photographer, with bylines in Blended Magazine and CelebMix, capturing artists and cultural moments across the music and media landscape. Her career began at WCVB-TV’s Chronicle, the ABC affiliate in Boston, where she gained firsthand experience in broadcast journalism and storytelling.
When she’s not taking photos from the photo pit, interviewing emerging artists, or crafting the next Juice Box Press feature, Amelia can be found thrifting and exploring the world of sustainable fashion.