Forever Trending
by Bayliss Wagner ’21
f you’re on TikTok or any other social media platform, there’s a very good chance that you’ve heard “It’s Corn,” a musical mashup that turns a little boy’s remarks on corn cobs into song and his enthusiastic chomps into percussion. The video has more than 28 million views on YouTube and has been used in well over a million TikTok videos, as well as posts from brands like United Airlines, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Chips Ahoy!.
What you may not have heard: The quartet behind “It’s Corn” — and a number of other viral hits — includes two Swarthmore graduates, Evan Gregory ’01 and Andrew Rose Gregory ’04.
Along with younger brother Michael Gregory and Evan’s wife, Sarah Fullen Gregory, they make up The Gregory Brothers, and they have been “songifying” pop culture, politics, memes, and social media ephemera for more than a decade, with enough success to be labeled “Masters of the Internet” by NPR.
They created “The Bed Intruder Song,” which became YouTube’s most-watched video of 2010; collaborated with actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt to parody the 2020 presidential debates; made a hit Stranger Things remix called “Chrissy Wake Up”; and created the theme song for Netflix comedy blockbuster Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Evan double-majored in music and computer science, learning skills he continues to use for mixing songs, creating graphics, and managing their record label.
He co-hosted a retro blues and R&B show on WSRN and sang with Sixteen Feet throughout his time at Swarthmore, activities he remembers as being formative of his current style.
“I have 100% confidence I wouldn’t be making music in the way I’m making it now if I hadn’t spent hundreds of hours in the WSRN library and thousands of hours singing with Sixteen Feet,” he says.
Andrew arrived at Swarthmore during Evan’s senior year, joining his brother in Sixteen Feet and on the men’s Ultimate Frisbee team, the Earthworms. He also hosted WSRN shows, including a folk show called “Moonshine is Thicker Than Blood” and the comedy call-in game show “Botticelli.”
For Andrew, who majored in religion, the College would also prove formative. It was where he first learned to play the guitar and “got hooked with a songwriting bug.”
He also began to recognize his talent as a comedian.
“My time at Swarthmore involved many very, very long van trips and flights with Sixteen Feet and the Swarthmore Earthworms. For me it was edifying to realize that it wasn’t just my brothers that I could crack up, and that maybe I had a talent for making others laugh,” he says.
His senior year, Andrew would foreshadow his future work by playing in a band with Joe Raciti ’05 that he says played “original music that featured a lot of humor as well.”
After college, the brothers moved to Brooklyn and began performing together in their free time, officially forming The Gregory Brothers in 2007. It was still several years before they saw a viable path to becoming professional musicians.
Even when their video “Auto-Tune the News #2” got a favorable mention from Katie Couric on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and earned the group a feature on Rachel Maddow’s prime-time MSNBC show in 2009, they didn’t quit their day jobs.
The group only decided to go full time in 2010 following the success of “Double Rainbow Song” and “Bed Intruder Song,” both of which made the Top 100 iTunes singles.
More than a decade later, the group continues to make hits and grow its fan base, currently more than 3.5 million YouTube subscribers and hundreds of thousands of followers on other platforms. They’ve also expanded and diversified with projects like the “Punch Up the Jam” podcast, which Evan and Andrew hosted together.
One thing their career makes clear is that even seemingly overnight, “viral” successes build upon years of work.
“Any success in the arts is a combination of skill, personal connections, and luck,” Andrew says. He advises fellow Swarthmore graduates with creative aspirations to “think about how you can improve your strengths in those areas while understanding that some of it is just out of your hands and not attached to the value and worth of your art.”
Decades after graduation, both Evan and Andrew still count friends they made as Swarthmore students among their closest. They also still attend Sixteen Feet reunions, both official and unofficial — Evan’s past summer vacation was with seven fellow members, he says. “My cohort — people within a couple years of me in Sixteen Feet — continue to be some of my best friends,” he says. “It’s quite beautiful, actually.”
It’s a safe bet they’ll be at the next reunion, and maybe by then there will be another Gregory Brothers hit in their discography, too.