“He's the worst person I've ever been in the studio with,” Benny Blanco tells me. This means he must try out every single possible version of something, whether it’s a lyric or a joke, before he’s satisfied. “It made me miserable by the end of it.”Īt work, the neurosis has a name: The No Stone Unturned Method. “It quickly lost its joy when the entire first three weeks I'm thinking Fuck, what am I going to do this year?” he remembers.
His big talent show appearance became an annual tradition-and a source of stress. “The feeling I got that day was immeasurable,” he says. During summer camp as a child, the talent show ended one year with the kids chanting “We want Burd!” So he got up on stage and improvised. “If the commercial break is even broached or discussed, that counts as a commercial break and I have to wait for the whole break to come back and then I can go to bed,” he explains.) He knew early on that he was good at making people laugh and he was willing to do anything to get that reaction, including pissing his pants in front of his friends. (Today it manifests as not falling asleep during Sports Center commercials. “It's caused me to be the way I am, the neurotic overthinking man that I've become.”Īs a child, overthinking meant OCD and spending 20 minutes every day doing elaborate rituals for a supreme being named “Spirit Chief” in order to ward off any family deaths. “I feel like me being born with this issue is the thing in my life that has defined my personality,” he says. “My thought was like, My penis is functional.”īurd is certainly not the only man on earth driven by phallic anxiety-I would venture to guess that’s the rule, not the exception-but he is more open about it than most. “When I lost my virginity, my thought wasn't, I've lost my virginity!” he says. “So top of mind, my whole life, was my penis.” It profoundly affected him on both a physical level, from urinating blood to needing secondary surgeries, and a psychological one. How did it feel to, well, expose himself like that? “It felt great,” Burd tells me. As a result, there’s so much scarring down there,” he warns, before adding that “my dick is made of balls.” A few episodes later, we learn that this condition is called hypospadias, which occurs when the opening to the urethra is located on the underside of the penis. “I just have, like, a very bizarre situation down-okay, when I was born, I came out of the womb with a tangled urethra so immediately they had to go in and do all types of surgery to it. (Spoiler: It’s razor burn.) Before he drops trou for the doctor, he lets out a lengthy preamble. In the opening minutes of Dave ’s first season, Dave is at the urologist’s office. “How can I maximize my happiness? How can I maximize the potential of this cut? How can I maximize this afternoon? How can I maximize my talent?” “Every moment I'm like, how can I optimize this?” he tells me. Much has been made of middle class millennials’ obsession with productivity and ambition, and Burd might as well be the poster child for this affliction. “When you go on every first date and you're thinking, Is this my wife? That's a tough way to be.” “I'm at the age where if I can't envision a real future then it's a total waste of time,” he says. I've never even written a lyric past sundown.” He has a girlfriend now, his first in seven years, but when he was single, he would make sure to schedule a date per week. When he makes music, he’s not enjoying himself at late-night studio sessions.
When we speak in May, he’s in the process of editing season two of Dave, grinding out minimum 10 hour days, seven days a week.īurd is an extremely affable person, which can obscure the fact that this rigor extends to all aspects of his life. He’s fanatical, approaching moments high and low with the same degree of meticulousness. Hidden in that stream of CGI shit is the key to Burd’s success. “I had to send pictures of shit and Google ‘diarrhea’ and be like, ‘Well, I think it needs to be a little bit thicker, it looks too much Coca-Cola right now.’ There was a whole thread and such serious, long paragraphs describing it.” “At first, I was really unhappy with the look and feel of the shit,” he explains. Enter post-production, which involved CGI and endless rounds of notes. First, there was a machine specially built to simulate Dave getting diarrhea-who says American innovation is dying?-but it broke as soon as he strapped it to his back. He proceeds to eagerly let me in on some television magic. “I'd never seen actual shit on TV, you know what I mean?” The 33-year-old is wearing a pale pink tie-dye sweatshirt and periodically sipping from a bottle of Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice. “I'm glad you said that,” Burd says, grinning from his Venice, Los Angeles home.
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