Mitch Thompson’s Blind Covers project sparks a universal language of pop’s power

Photos Courtesy of Blind Covers

The YouTube series Blind Covers started nearly ten years ago as a way for Kansas City native Mitch Thompson to deal with the frustrations of trying to break into the film industry in Los Angeles. The premise is simple: Thompson gives a band or artist the lyrics to an existing song with no other information, and the musicians have one hour to create their own song using said lyrics. The results are wildly different, with rapper Cuee taking on pop-punkers Four Year Strong, indie-rocker Chris Farren tackling the White Stripes, and The Get Up Kids’ Matt Pryor covering Regina Spektor, to only name but a few, yet they’re always entertaining.

Nearly 17,000 subscribers are now following the program on YouTube alone.

As the show has gone along, its release schedule has ebbed and flowed, attracting interest from studios and labels interested in monetizing the program. Taking inspiration from the likes of Tech N9ne, Thompson instead opted for creative control over financial security and decided at the end of 2019 that the following year would be “the year of Blind Covers.”

Plans for 2020 didn’t pan out for most folks, especially those wanting to do creative endeavors such as cramming a bunch of people into a room and hanging out for an entire day.

“I bought really nice cameras,” Thompson says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to have a plan. This is the year I really pour myself into it,’ and it just went away.”

Thompson was left sitting at home, unable to work as a propmaker and prop master, just thinking about the show. One of the things he thought about was the fact that he knew it could be more than what it was, and that it would be more, but he just hadn’t had the chance yet. It wasn’t until Christmas of 2022 that an opportunity would present itself to bring Blind Covers back, and in a way of which he’d always dreamed.

“Before this was all happening, we always shot our Los Angeles episodes with Mitchell Haeuszer, who just had a home studio where he was renting, and would let us come in, set up lights, shoot for the day, and he would take a day rate,” Thompson says.

In 2022, Thompson had a Christmas party and invited Haeuszer. Haeuszer then invited Thompson to a living room showcase he was having, with artists playing a couple of songs.

“It was just this cool little communal thing that he loves to do,” Thompson says. “Since I had been there, he had fully redecorated the living room and I started thinking, God, you can shoot in here and it would look really nice.”

A little while later, Thompson took Haeuszer out to lunch and asked the recording engineer if he could retrofit Haeuszer’s living room to be a standing set, as part of bringing back Blind Covers. As Thompson explains, one of the biggest issues with the original set of episodes was the sheer amount of time it took to set up lights and set the stage so that the artists could perform in a place that didn’t look slapdash.

Unfortunately, that production value would add an hour and a half of setup and teardown to the beginning and end of each day, resulting in 14-15-hour stints. In an effort to find a location where the Blind Covers crew could just walk in, flip switches, and get to work, Thompson asked Haeuszer if his home would be available.

“I was just like, ‘Basically, can I renovate your studio if you let us shoot in there?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, of course, sure.’ I don’t think he realized the extent to which I was going to disassemble his studio,” Thompson says.

Thompson would then literally tear said studio down to its studs and rebuild it, to the point of burning out a vacuum in the process. In the end, Haeuszer was so impressed after a month of work by Thompson that he ended up coming on as a producer to ensure that Blind Covers would continue to happen.

Because film work is a freelance business, Thompson often has long stretches without work, so he was used to kicking into what he calls “gotta find a project” mode. That means, when it hit February 2023 and no work had started for Thompson or anyone else, the creator hit a breaking point.

“I was like, ‘I need something to pour my hyper-focus into, or I will go crazy,’” he says. “I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have this.”

However, there is a silver lining: With Thompson having that much time to sit and think about Blind Covers and work on it, all that thought made it easier to come back. However, he’s willing to admit that it’s not 100% great.

“I definitely think it is fully a blessing and a curse,” Thompson continues. “It’s great when I’m able to take in lots of different art and inspiration and stuff, but if I’m just sitting alone with nothing to do and it runs in a circle, that’s where I get in trouble.”

The freedom of the project being fully in his hands took the Blind Covers creator back to what he was doing in film school at the University of Missouri.

“When I was at Mizzou, there wasn’t really a production track, so it was just me and a bunch of friends being like, ‘All right, what are we shooting? We all really want to make movies. Let’s bang out a script or a sketch or a fake commercial,’” Thompson says. “‘Let’s figure out what resources we can get together and let’s shoot it.’”

Thompson says that he doesn’t think he and his friends realized at the time that what they were doing was basically learning how to produce. He calls it “The Muppet effect.”

“The first two Muppet movies are like, let’s get this weird band of misfits together and make a show,” Thompson says. “That’s always where the Muppets work best for me—when it’s like, these are a bunch of fucking weirdos. These people are insane, and if they did any other job, it would be a nightmare, but because they found each other, and because they all have this weird drive and they all have different skills that they bring to the table.”

Photos Courtesy of Blind Covers

Essentially, this is what Thompson has been chasing his whole life: “How can I get to hang out and make stuff with my friends? And, yeah, if I can get paid for it, that would be great,” he says.

The renewed enthusiasm is readily apparent in the new episodes of Blind Covers. While seeing the end result is the whole point of the show—with an artist taking a song in a direction wholly unexpected, and then their response to hearing the original track—the show really succeeds, due to Thompson’s pure and unfettered love for music and bringing out that love in the artists who appear on the show.

A discussion with indie rocker Talker sees her deeply and enthusiastically discussing just what records you put on at the end of a party when it’s just the stragglers, and her certainty that Khruangbin and “instrumental, vibey shit” is what works is pure joy to watch. Thompson respects these folks, and you can see them opening up in really delightful ways.

“I think that that is core to it,” Thompson says. “These artists are trusting us not only with their time but literally with their creative life—what pays their bills in a lot of cases—and I want to give them the most comfortable space to operate in because, ultimately, the show lives or dies by what the artists are able to do in that hour. If I am not putting myself out there and taking creative risks, why would I expect them?”
At the end of the day, Thompson hopes to create an environment wherein everyone acknowledges the goofiness and low-stakes atmosphere, using it to create something where the creators and the viewers end up having fun as it goes along.

“Let’s just play together and see what we can do with it,” Thompson says. “It’s giving them a comforting space, and then, a lot of times, the artists themselves are amazed by what they can do in that hour.”

Blind Covers drops a new episode on the first Friday of every month on their YouTube channel and can be found on their Facebook.