In 2006, Billy and I were roommates in Carrboro, and he was in the midst of his Song A Day podcast, trying to write 100 songs in 100 days. Watching him do that was incredible, and it landed in one of the happiest periods of my life. I was working at the Cat’s Cradle, living this fun lifestyle, and Billy was the kind of roommate who brought a sense of adventure to everything. His daily songwriting also shifted my whole understanding of creativity. Up to then, I had this idea that inspiration just strikes when it wants to, but seeing him work made me realize creativity is something you can cultivate and make regular.
At the time I was musical, but I did not really think of myself as a musician. I loved making little loops, but building a whole song felt daunting. I could make a loop that worked, but anything beyond that was hard. Still, Billy and I had collaborated some, and I’d made a hip hop beat based off a rock track I’d been working on. The synth part was inspired by the local band Kerbloki, specifically their song “Please Don’t Die on the Ice.” I loved their octave jumping and I mimicked that feel. For the bass part, I pulled from the thumping bass of the Knight Rider theme.
I played the beat for Billy and he liked it. That same day, he was complaining about having to go to Chapel Hill for something, and we started joking about how even Chapel Hill was too far, because everything we need is in Carrboro and everything we love is in Carrboro. Billy was in that Song A Day mindset where anything could be the seed for the day’s song, and he basically declared, with an exclamation point, that this was today’s song.
We dove in immediately and started writing couplets. I wrote some, he wrote some, and we did that part separately at first, then merged the best couplets together. Somewhere in there I came up with the chorus, and I layered my vocals for the “It’s Carrboro” chorus. We finalized the lyrics and recorded it.
One of the most amazing parts is that it immediately got played on the radio. Billy already had an appearance later that day on WCOM to talk about his music and his songwriting business, Custom Serenade, where people could order custom songs for birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, or any occasion. He brought “It’s Carrboro” to play during the show, and when it aired, phones lit up. People started requesting it right away, and we both felt it instantly: this thing was a hit.
Because it caught on so fast, Billy and I made a CD, literally burned it ourselves, and walked it down to the UNC Chapel Hill student station, WXYC. No one was there, so we just walked right in and put the CD right in the middle of the console. I can’t remember if we left a note, but later a friend of mine from the Cradle said the CD ended up on high rotation and was displayed prominently with basically a “play this” message. It really became a hit of the summer. I would hear it on the station all the time.
Some of my favorite moments were just hearing it out in the world. I’d be sitting at the Weaver Street Market and a car would drive by blasting our song out the windows. It was the first time I’d ever heard music of mine on the radio, and it felt magical, invigorating, and exciting. Another time Meredith and I were walking around the streets of South Point, and I heard a guy in front of us telling his friend about “It’s Carrboro.” I only caught part of it, but he was talking about the excited chorus and how high-energy it was. Hearing someone secondhand, just out in the world, being excited about something I helped create was surreal.
We were also clearly playing off the zeitgeist of that moment. There was that popular Lonely Island song about cupcakes, and we patterned our lyrical structure off another Lonely Island audio-only track called “The Heist.” The formula was kind of rapping about Caucasian-centered or bourgeois, middle-class topics, and their track had this trade-off where each couplet came from a different rapper. That became our structure too, with Billy and me alternating couplets.
Since it was a radio hit, there was demand for a video. I put up a website and bought the itscarborough.com domain. We did an open call for people to be in the video and also for donations, and we made some money, which still makes me laugh because technically that makes Billy and me professional rappers. With that money, I went to Costco with my mom and bought picnic supplies, basically stuff to make a lot of hamburgers, because we were gearing up for a big crowd scene.
We shot the video over two days. One day was just me and Billy, plus Jason Meeks doing the principal photography, and Josh Bratcher. Josh was seeing someone named Kathleen at the time, and Randy from Josh’s band, Problem of Alarming Dimensions, was there too. We started near the end of Main Street by Mike Roig’s house and walked all the way across Carrboro, shooting footage and interacting with people in a totally unscripted way. We met Carrboro staples and regulars along the way, and one of the best moments was an impromptu dance party that broke out in the alley beside the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Main Street. That greasy alleyway dance party is still one of my favorite experiences from the entire shoot.
As we filmed, we got a lot of reactions from people passing by, like cars driving past and waving. At one point we later realized one of the waving people in the video was a local drug dealer, which was a funny and weird detail to notice afterward.
The big crowd shot was at Wilson Park in Carrboro. People came in all kinds of costumes and the crowd scenes were fantastic. Unfortunately, one scene got accidentally taped over. We were so excited that we watched it, but we did not advance the tape before filming the next scene, so it erased what might have been the best shot. It was an aerial-style shot from the top of a ladder, and we lost it, so we only have ground-level shots. Even so, what we kept still looked great.
When the video was released and I finally put it up on itscarborough.com, it intersected with this guy Zach, who is tied to a different painful memory for me. Back in high school I asked a girl named Kari out, and she said yes at first, but then Zach called and told me Kari did not want to go out with me, which was devastating. Years later, Zach owned a comedy club in the area and ended up being featured in our video. Then he downloaded the video from my site and uploaded it to YouTube under his own channel without permission. It turned into a real controversy because it was our intellectual property. I told him to take it down, he refused, and I got YouTube involved so they forced it down. He was upset about it, which to me just underscored what a bad person he is.
Still, overall the video was a huge success. It was early YouTube-era, and it has over 60,000 views now, which is tremendous for a small town like Carrboro. It remains one of the most famous things Billy and I have ever done.