Lee Miles never meant to start a band, but the song clichés he heard while working as a studio musician wouldn’t let him rest. All these love songs and pop singles, and not one of them ever seemed to be telling the truth. It was enough to drive Miles and the other members of SuperNaked — Luke Thomas, Rod Castro, Rafe Bradford, and Matt Gendal — to rock. After jamming on some of the satirical songs that Miles had written, they were faced with a decision none of them wanted to make. Miles recalled the moment this way: “It was like we all looked at each other, and everybody was thinking the same thing — ‘Do we have to be a band? Do we have to have a name?’”
To understand SuperNaked, you have to get intimate with their magic formula, which involves taking a mainstream song genre like the power ballad or the reggae-lite single and turning it inside out with a dose of the truth — the SuperNaked truth. Their first YouTube hit, “Terrible Person,” catalogs the deficits of a particularly annoying ex at length and in detail. Miles calls it “a love song gone wrong, complete with a video starring actor Drake Bell.”
Since then, they’ve poured their hearts out into anthems like “I Wish,” the full title of which is “I Wish (I Never Saw You Naked),” and “If I Can’t Have You,” the chorus of which completes that thought with “I’m gonna find a stripper tonight.” A SuperNaked song gets you coming and going; one minute you’re laughing at the outrageousness of the joke lines, and the next, you’re crooning along to the part in “I Wish” where Miles keeps repeating “staring right into the sun” as though you were down front at a Bon Jovi show — only funnier.
With many gigs at the WitZend in Venice Beach and at the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club under their collective belt, SuperNaked has a lot more than a name — the group also has a brand-new EP called Sicksongs released August 22. To celebrate, SuperNaked will kick off the late-night portion of this week’s LOL festival on Wednesday. Their hilarious and hard-rocking set ought to leave all the pumped-up comedy kids laughing and waving their lighters and cell phones overhead ironically.
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SuperNaked, Wednesday, September 3, at 10 p.m. Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St. $22-$29. Call the box office at 963-0761 or see lolcomedyfestival.com.