Tuesday Night Movie Night will always offer a free movie recommendation, every Tuesday, to anyone who wants it. Paying members help to support our work. As an added bonus, new monthly supporters get a one-time feature in a future TNMN edition. You provide one sentence, and Blake must include it in a future edition.

Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

Monthly supporters get a one-time single sentence feature in a TNMN edition. Make a joke, complain about something, share something you're working on, a cause you care about, or just about anything else, and Blake must include it in a future edition. Today’s sentence is from Adam B., our newest monthly supporter. Thanks Adam!

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A woman goes on a romantic getaway with a seemingly perfect man.

→ Modern dating satire. What’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?

→ When the title card comes late. I know I say this a lot. There’s something magical about films that withhold their title cards until the very right moment, even if the moment comes thirty minutes into the film.

→ Bloody unserious. There’s a wonderful collection of films that are both bloody and don’t take themselves too seriously, and Fresh belongs squarely in that collection.

Mimi Cave’s Fresh is sharp-witted and bonkers and bloody and frankly very fun, not entirely unlike a previous TNMN headliner called Villains. Cave’s debut feature-length film was released in 2022 and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, and a show-stealing Jojo T. Gibbs.

Fresh is arguably, despite satirical elements, not a film with a ton of depth, or one that will get you examining the meaning of your existence, but the fact is it’s a twisty good time, and sometimes that’s all we need.

Besides several well-crafted, tongue-in-cheek performances from the cast, on display is Cave’s confident visual language (and dance numbers), which, when paired with a very snappy script from Lauryn Kahn, are undeniably delectable.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.

THE GUY WHO SINGS YOUR NAME OVER AND OVER.

There is an artist on Spotify named The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, and it should be no surprise to anyone that this is precisely what he does.

He has published seventeen volumes of Fun with Names Songs, the last of which was released in the year 2013. The full collection features one hundred songs (that’s right: 1-0-0), though this count is more of a technicality, because each one uses an identical musical track, paired with an only slightly altered vocal track, which is the same nasally, out-of-tune voice crowing a different name. Since he released his final volume in Fun With Names Songs in 2013, he’s continued trickling out singles, including 2026’s The Ruth Song. The singles follow the same formula as all the others that came before, so give The Ruth Song a listen if you’re curious.

Now, before your 2026 brains get carried away, allow me to emphasize something so obvious it’s practically sitting on your lap singing your name over and over. By mentioning that the final volume was released in 2013, I’m providing two vital pieces of context. First, I’m ball-parking how long this artistic genius has been hard at work (illustrating his dedication to the craft), and second, I’m making clear the fact that modern artificial intelligence had nothing to do with his output. In fact, I submit that his work ethic is probably a practice from which we can all learn. Because sometimes the banal things are also the things we need to do, and it doesn’t get more mind-numbing than sitting down and recording the same song over and over again, one hundred times in a row.

So why in the world would any person choose to spend their time doing something so radically unuseful? To this, I say, look around. People spend time doing incomprehensibly useless shit all the time. Sometimes they don’t even need a reason. Have you ever seen Jackass or people posting on LinkedIn or me smoking a cigarette once a year on vacation because “it feels cool?” The most trite observation, though certainly one with some truth to it, is that people are usually willing to do all sorts of things so long as there is an economic return. Of the three examples above, this certainly holds true for two (vacation chain-smoking doesn’t really provide any meaningful economic returns, at least not to your author’s knowledge [please tell me if I could have been making money doing this]).

Spotify has a metric for artists called monthly listeners, which is a daily-refresh snapshot of the number of unique users who’ve listened to any number of your tracks in the trailing 28 days. Users aren’t counted twice, so if I listen to ten of your songs within 28 days, I’m counted as one unique listener for the month, with ten streams. If I asked you how many monthly listeners The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over had, what would you guess? A thousand? A million? Somewhere in between? The real number is cosmically appropriate, given the artist we’re talking about; it’s a sort of middling number that, just like his music, feels simultaneously impressive and somehow wildly underwhelming. Perhaps it’s more than you’d expect, though:

Forty thousand monthly listeners. 

That’s not nothing, obviously, and when I really thought about it, I felt compelled to learn more about the man behind the music. I dreamed that my research would uncover The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over to be some sort of spaghetti-slurping mob boss, and that he’d hear that I was digging around and then warn me to stop sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. Perhaps he was the one orchestrating the laziest of Spotify money-grab operations, the ones designed so often to appeal to kids en masse (e.g. That’s Just My Baby Doge, The Fart Song). 

Alas, I had no such luck. The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over is actually just some guy and his name is Matt. He’s profiled on a website called Genius, which claims to be “the world’s biggest collection of song lyrics and musical knowledge”. Your author hasn’t confirmed the stated claim, which is a big one, but not as big as the claim Matt’s profile makes:

…The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over is a prolific artist known for using a singular name as the lyrics for all of his songs. He has released a total of seventeen studio albums within a span of two years; needless to say, both his creativity and productivity are unparalleled by any other artist in the music industry.

Creativity, unparalleled. By any other artist. In the entire music industry. It’s likely meant to be funny or ironic, given the obvious lack of creativity required to belt out the same tune over and over again and replace one word with another each time. Though, your author can see the argument that Matt is a very clever artist, and his endeavor arguably is unparalleled in the modern music industry. After all, how many artists can you name that have embraced such a monumental undertaking?

People (usually) like it when their names are featured in songs. Ask anyone named Caroline what it’s like when Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline closes down a bar. Or, ask an older fellow named Mickey what it was like hearing Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey for the first time on the radio. Sure, both of your queries will probably be met with some version of “I grew so tired of that song, eventually,” but in equal parts they’ll also share a fond memory of the time that song was played at their wedding or retirement party or something in between.

However crude Matt’s instrument, and the point here is that it is crude, he has tapped into one of humanity’s most carnal intellectual desires. That is, of course, The Desire to be noticed, seen, or (at least) mentioned. He’s tuned into The Desire perhaps more than any other musical artist in the world, in fact, and it’s not even debatable given the subject matter of his music in literally your name.

Facts. Spotify is already presenting users with personalized DJs and playlists. Artificial intelligence companies, though probably more likely their offshoots and underlings and relatives and benefactors will eventually try to pursue some more advanced version of personalized music. Further, I’ve no doubt some technology executive far removed from our version of reality and why people crave human-made art is somewhere out there in the ether, thinking about the fiscal opportunity that personalized music obviously presents. And I’m not speaking about the sort of “personalization” we’re all familiar with, like recommendation algorithms that pick up on your musical proclivities and feed you similar artists. I’m speaking of deeper personalization, on a song-by-song basis. This executive is counting the dollars in their head, imagining how many suckers will line up for a monthly subscription premium to generate songs about themselves sung by their favorite artists. And in some ways, this is the kind of personalization that The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over is proving a market for. While no argument can be made that he is positively cleaning up, he’s successfully targeting a long tail of music listeners, and anyone in the technology business will tell you that the long tail adds up, so long as you can generate enough coverage.

The thing that I’m getting at here is that Matt probably isn’t the slouch you might presume he is based on the quality of his musical entries. As I continued perusing musical acts with a similar premise, I came across another artist who calls himself The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities and Towns. And, well, I just couldn’t believe my pretty little eyes when I’d realized that this Guy was also just Matt. The same fucking Guy. In fact, Matt is everywhere, so long as you know where to look. On Spotify, you can hear his signature fingers-pinching-nose-closed, gravelly voice under the following pseudonyms (and likely more, but I was tired of looking), ordered by total number of monthly listeners:

In total, the artists I uncovered, who appear to simply be Matt with a different stupid hat on, bring in about ~748k monthly listeners. The predictable question on your author’s mind: how much money is Matt making with these songs? Spotify’s payment practices are notoriously convoluted, but generally speaking they pay artists per stream. Payouts vary, and it depends on a multitude of other factors we won’t get into today, but the estimates I’ve seen most often on the internet are $0.004 per stream, or ~$4 per 1,000 streams. Streams. Not monthly listeners. A distinction worth making because one monthly listener can stream multiple times or more within 28 days.

So, let’s do some math. If every one of Matt’s 748,000 monthly listeners, across properties, listens to only one song every 28 days, we can estimate that Matt is making $3,000 a month in passive income on already-published tracks. But to presume this ignores the very nature of his music, like the Fun With Names Songs album. Drew and I know about this album because his daughter, a while ago, asked to hear a song with her name in it. Drew searched and found Matt on Spotify. Now, Drew has a family of four, and you bet your ass his daughter asked for The Mommy Song, The Daddy Song, and a song with her brother’s name in it. She also asked for a song with her dog’s name in it. And Matt, to his credit, has published a song for each of their names. So, multiply his total monthly earnings by 3 (the average U.S. family size reported in November 2023), and suddenly Matt is making $9,000 monthly, or $108k annually — well over the $65k (the average income in the United States published in January 2026 by Forbes).

But wait. Have you ever met an eight-year-old that has asked for something one time and one time only? Ask Drew how many times he’s heard each rendition of the aforementioned name songs. The answer is they stopped after his ears started bleeding. The obvious point is that it’s impossible to know exactly how many streams Matt is getting each month, or what his actual income is from these songs, but it’s likely meaningful enough income to put him in a different tax bracket, especially if he also has a day job.

More facts. Matt is not a famous musician. Imagine if Taylor Swift released a collection of songs where she sings your name. Surely her album would exhibit a touch more artistry and production value and lyrical creativity that The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over. I wouldn’t doubt that it would be the world’s biggest and most profitable musical experiment to ever take place. I mean, really. On top of the sheer spectacle of Taylor Swift singing your name, think of the record sales. If she could engineer a way to custom produce records with specific name tracks on them, she would break the music industry. Your author would like to point out that Taylor Swift is an easy example of the value-add that a recognizable artist might bring to the names song industry, and to be clear, she is not someone I’d expect to do something like this.

Even more facts. This one pains me. I’m fairly certain an artist like Taylor Swift wouldn’t do it, but some artist will sell their musical likeness to an artificial intelligence company and allow that company to produce personalized songs with it. Maybe it’ll be Kid Rock. Who the fuck knows? What I do know is that there is a market for it, because plenty of people like to hear the sound of their own name, and the case has already been presented in this column.

So, in a sense, Matt is an emblem in the fight against artificial intelligence. He’s producing work which objectively could be replicated by artificial intelligence. There’s no doubt about it. But isn’t there something dumber and funnier and more interesting about an average guy with a debatably abrasive singing voice, sitting in a recording studio and actually recording 100 variants of the very same song? This is what Matt’s work as The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over represents. It’s the humanity of it, which evaporates quickly when you realize instead that the artist is some dummy in front of a laptop, a Guy who punches in a few words to a chat field and then waits three minutes for a zip file of 100 songs to blindly publish to Spotify. The counterargument is already likely screaming in your ear, that a guy like Matt is polluting our airwaves with inane musical garbage at an incomprehensible volume, unseeable but always there, like a bird evacuating droppings from above the clouds. In a sense, one can argue that there is no difference between Matt and underbaked, artificial-intelligence-generated content.

Though, this isn’t how I see it. I see Matt as some strange version of the American dream. I was as pleased to discover him as I was the first time I learned about bacon-flavored ice cream. It’s sort of inspiring that someone can come up with a foolish idea, grounded in some odd little fundamental truth that people like hearing their names in songs, and turn it into a little money printing machine. Maybe he has kids, and maybe his kids are getting their education or cars or businesses seeded by their father’s stupid little ditties.

Taylor Swift, please help me. No matter if he is the symbol we need in the fight against artificial intelligence, or a precursor to the content hell we’re on the cusp of entering, though, because I have a much bigger and more important bone to pick with Matt, that I’ve yet to share. In all one hundred name songs he’s published, which includes The Titus Song, The Zander Song, and The Ryanne Song, he’s never published The Blake Song. 

Well, actually, he has published one song with my name in it. But I’m not a fan of it, because it’s called The Blake Poop Song. That’s right, I got a fucking poop song. I don’t deserve this, to be the butt of some poop joke that no one asked for.

So, your author has a request. And it’s not that I want The Guy That Sings Your Name Over and Over to sing my name without the word poop adjacent to it. I’m not interested, not after he so willingly denigrated my name. Instead, I’d like to put a higher value offer out there. I’d like to humbly request that Taylor Swift record and publish a new single entitled The Blake Song. Your author is the only one (other than Drew) who knows if Taylor Swift is a TNMN subscriber, and today I’ll take a risk by sharing with you all that she is not. So, I need your help to reach her with my request. To whoever is able to secure her commitment to recording and publishing my song, I will pay you $100, no questions asked. The only ground rule: the song must be actually recorded by Taylor Swift, and not use any artificial intelligence whatsoever.

For what it’s worth, Matt was seconds away from being the hero of this column, but unfortunately he flew too close to the sun with smut like The Blake Poop Song. I discovered the entry in his collection only moments before finishing this piece. I guess The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over is just another sellout, hustling for a quick buck and fleeting notoriety.

I suppose that’s why they say it. Never meet your heroes.

ᵃ This email was crafted by humans. Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.: I bet that really hurts. In an act of extraordinary contrast to the previous statement, we are also an Amazon Associate, so we earn on qualifying purchases. Though these qualifying purchases seem to be rare, we are required to disclose this to you — this helps keep our newsletter free.