I recently had the distinct pleasure of sitting down and interviewing two lovely members of the Indianapolis-based band, The Shake Ups, dubbed “the galaxy’s most animated band.” The band has become popular among attendees of pop culture conventions for their embrace of pop culture and love of Saturday morning cartoons. Please enjoy the following interview with two of the band members, Patrick “P.J.” O’Connor, and his wife, Savannah O’Connor.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Who is in the band, and what are their roles?

Patrick: We’re The Shake Ups. I’m Patrick, and I play guitar, sing, and write a lot of the songs. I also play some bass, and ukulele, and occasionally we have some sequenced or programmed parts that I play. I do a little bit of everything.

Savannah: I’m Savannah O’Connor. I play the keyboard, and occasionally make mouth noises of various kinds. More on the shouty, less on the sing-y side, but sometimes on the sing-y side. I play some percussion, write lyrics sometimes, and I do a lot of the stagecraft stuff.

Patrick: We've got Ed Cho on guitar. He’s a very talented guy. I've known him for twenty years, and yet I just constantly find out new things about him, like, oh, he can play the violin. Oh, he can play this, he can play that. So he’s sort of our secret weapon. Then, we have Luisanna Rodriguez, who also sings.

Savannah: Also an amazingly talented multi-instrumentalist who can pick up anything; she also plays some bass guitar.

Patrick: And then we have Lee Cherolis on bass, and we have Steve Hinckley on drums.

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When did you form the band?

Savannah: I think it’s funny to note that the band The Shake Ups is really just Patrick's band. It has existed [for a long time] and predates when we became a “pop culture band.”

Patrick: When I was in first grade, I got in trouble for humming cartoon music in class. I've always been into cartoons, and I've always been into music from cartoons, even back then. When I was getting into making music, it was kind of uncool to [reference that], and I feel like there's been a paradigm shift in the pop culture part of it. There was this compilation that came out in the late ’90s called Saturday Morning: Cartoon’s Greatest Hits, produced by a guy named Ralph Sall, and it was basically all the who's who of bands from the era of cartoon themes. I just played that compilation to death, and in the back of my mind, I was always thinking that I would love to do something like that. So it was kind of the seed for how the idea first came to me. I was sort of sneaking in some pop culture references in other projects [before that] back when it was kind of not cool to do it. I formed a band with Steve Hinckley in 2001 called Hipster Zero. We were both toy collectors, and he has the biggest collection of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe stuff I've ever seen.

Savannah: And his wife has all the original My Little Pony toys.

Patrick: I wrote a song for him called “He-Man Collecting Junkie,” which we started playing live. And when we played it, I would put on a He-Man mask, and he would put on a Skeletor mask. And that was the first kind of pop culture song that I did cosplaying. Steve would eventually become our drummer. I put out an ad and I met Ed Cho. And that's how it started. From there, we picked the name. In the early 2000s, there were a lot of poppy psychedelic sort of bands, you know, like the Apples In Stereo and the Elephant Six Collective stuff, The Shins…

Savannah: The Shingles was one of the potential names.

Patrick: We had the Lemon Shake Ups on the list. And we kind of likened that to our music, which was real bouncy and poppy, but the lyrics were usually kind of dark and cutting, which is perfect for the lemon. We thought the name was too long, so we just made it The Shake Ups and we just called the first album, A Twist of Lemon.

That was 2005, and the album came out in 2006. So, we did a lot of back and forth, different people came and went from the band. And then, around 2010, Steve joined, because we needed a new drummer. So then it was a core with the three of us. Then around 2012, I got the idea of doing some cartoon-inspired stuff.

Savannah: I can tell the next part. It’s a funny story. So, as I mentioned, Steve, the drummer, and his wife, Mary, are both toy collectors. Mary is part of a My Little Pony vintage toy collecting group, which had a fair that they did every year. They had done this event for ages and a day, and when Friendship Is Magic came out, all of a sudden there’s a lot of interest in My Little Pony, and people started bringing their children and showing up to these events, and they had a need to create children’s activities that they hadn’t had before. We took Patrick’s original songs and changed the lyrics. It was supposed to be a one-time event.

And that project got booked to do more cartoon music for family events. It just became an ongoing tangent. I took piano lessons when I was a kid, so then I ended up in the band. But I said, the gal who did it before, that’s not a voice I’m not touching with a ten-foot pole. I recruited my friend, Luisanna, who I was baking with one day, and realized she could sing.

Patrick: So, we started by getting these random convention bookings and then thought, “Wouldn’t it be good to play some of those old cartoon theme songs and have those in the set as well?” So it was a mixture of things.

Savannah: And all of us like cartoons. Everybody was into some kind of pop culture thing that they nerd out on. Lee and Ed make a comic book together, which is for kids, called Little Guardians. Everybody draws or is creative in some way, and you often find that people who like to draw like animation because it’s art. So we all like cartoons, and it went from being this one-off thing to everybody saying, “This is my favorite cartoon,” and Lee being like, “You guys have to watch Steven Universe. Oh, we got to do this and watch that. Let’s all have watch parties, and let’s watch Voltron Legendary Defender together.”

The Shake Ups cosplay Voltron — The Shake Ups cosplaying *Voltron Legendary Defender*
Image Source: The Shake Ups

What are your favorite pop culture franchises?

Savannah: I’m a maladaptively huge Tolkien fan, like I have all the books Christopher Tolkien has written about the writing of all the books, and I’m really excited about any media connected with it. I’m a huge Star Trek fan. That’s how I met Patrick. I was a fan of his Star Trek band, Five Year Mission, and that’s how I met him.

Patrick: Star Wars was my first fandom when I was a kid, and I have a soft spot for it. From there, I moved on to these Americanized anime. Even when I was a little kid, I could tell they weren’t the same as all these other cartoons, so it took me a little time because they always used to hide that they were foreign cartoons. When I got to see Star Blazers, Voltron, and Robotech, I finally realized it was anime that I liked, and so now I run a convention about it called Volt Con. Our fifth year is going to be next October.

Savannah: I totally relate to that thing, how pop culture can be a gateway to something else… Star Trek was a gateway to mid-century science fiction and science fiction literature that I ended up loving, which I wouldn’t have been exposed to if I hadn’t gone down the rabbit hole of Star Trek scripts.

Patrick: For me, it was the Americanized early anime that were put together by people who were taking these original Japanese shows and butchering them. It was nice to go back and see the original thing to say, “This is what I loved about this thing that I saw when I was a kid.”

What are some of the favorite songs you guys have written for some of your favorite franchises?

Patrick: Oh my gosh.

Savannah: I haven’t written that many songs.

Patrick: Well, one of my favorite projects has been Legendary Defender because it was based on Voltron. I loved My Little Pony, and I loved Steven Universe, but Voltron I grew up with, so I had no shortage of inspiration.

Savannah: He wrote that whole album in two months or something ridiculous.

Patrick: We have this joke where we always say we’re going to do an EP about a project

Savannah: And then Patrick writes ten songs

Patrick: And by the time people learn five songs, we have fifteen songs.

Savannah: So, the joke is by the time you’re done learning the songs for the EP, there’s a whole album.

Patrick: Song-wise, “All Aboard the Friendship” from My Little Pony was a fun one to do…All these layered vocals. I remember it was such a pain to record, but it worked out. Paid off. I liked that one a lot.

Savannah: Too complicated to play live.

Patrick: Yeah, so many parts. For Steven Universe, I like “Clods!,” which has a live horn section, which I always liked doing. And “Kindergarten Kid,” it was a very psychedelic song, so I went very Flaming Lips with it and added all kinds of crazy sound effects to it. There’s a screaming tea kettle in the bridge section of the song. And for our Voltron album, Legendary Defenders, it was “Hey Shiro.” The last original album we put out that was pop culture-centric was Meddling Kids, and I do like the main title track from that one a lot. That’s my favorite album because it’s a variety of different stuff.

Savannah: That is my favorite album.

I enjoyed that one a lot.

Patrick: Thanks! There’s just a lot of variety to it, and we’ll be playing a half a dozen songs off of it for a while and then decide to retire some songs and switch something out, and we end up picking three other songs off that album. “I forgot about this song! I really like playing this!” “Perfect Date” about Skeletor, and “Robot Arm” is a fun one.

Savannah: I’m really sad that we never did the music video we talked about for that.

Patrick: There are always too many ideas.

Savannah: Crazy ideas

Patrick: And we never get to all of them. A friend of ours was really adamant about doing a video for “Robot Arm,” which is one of my favorite songs. And it’s really not based on any property. It’s just about what you would do if you had a robot arm, and if you would use it for good or evil. But it was a fun one to write and record. The video never happened because we never got to it.

Savannah: Only so many hours in a day.

Do you have to get licenses to write and record some of these songs?

Patrick: If you’re writing about it, there’s kind of a gray area where you can call it fan or parody. We’ve dealt with the people who own Voltron or My Little Pony, and they’ve told us they think we’re good brand representatives, so they don’t mind.

Savannah: In those cases, we’ve been absorbed into doing something for them.

Patrick: We did a convention where we backed up the composer to the My Little Pony stuff.

Savannah: Voice actors were performing, so we just became their backup band.

Patrick: Now, as far as playing cartoon themes, we do license those to release them to stream or buy a download, because that’s not our original music. We do toe the line sometimes.

Savannah: We follow the rules, and we’re not being malicious and not making money.

I wouldn’t try doing any Disney songs, though.

Patrick: Yeah. We did do a version of the Gravity Falls theme and Star vs. the Forces of Evil theme, and we actually did an original song about Star. Nobody’s ever said anything about it, so I think we’re ok.

Savannah: Though, I hear there’s a band called the Little Mermen. They dress up as some of the central Disney characters and play rock versions of the songs from the movie, and I think they’re sanctioned now. They weren’t and then became sanctioned.

The Shake Ups cosplay The Beatles — The Shake Ups as The Fab Four!
Image Source: The Shake Ups

Any upcoming albums or projects you would like to talk about?

Patrick: The most recent thing we’ve done is a dramatized music podcast called Ignore City.

Savannah: We like cartoons and comics and all of these things, and like doing things that are derivative of other properties. So we wanted to do our own, and Ed wrote a post-apocalyptic rock musical for us in which Patrick is a disembodied robot head, and I’m a scruffy bike messenger from a domed city in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, find in a dump singing to himself, and we go on an adventure.

Patrick: It’s like Terminator and Futurama put together. But with some real weird humor to it.

Savannah: And music.

Patrick: And music.

Savannah: It’s honestly one of my favorite things we’ve done. It’s really exciting to me.

Patrick: This is another time when Ed had only ever written one song for the band, and it was back in 2006, and we ended up practicing it, but we never performed it anywhere, and he’d never written anything else… Then suddenly he’s got this project where he’s written ten songs!

Savannah: He animated some of the songs too. He did concept art, rough sketches for almost everything and fully fleshed out flash animation for the songs. So if you check us out on YouTube, you can see the animations for the songs. We don’t have the ability to make a full-fledged cartoon, but insofar as we can with flash animation and music, that’s the cartoon we made in our hearts.

Patrick: Ed brought the idea to me, and once I had a good handle on it, I wrote some music for it too. So we kind of collaborated on the main music theme, and he wrote some of the early episode songs and then we kind of switched off and all took turns voice-acting different characters.

Savannah: We’ve been nominated for, and won, some awards.

Patrick: We just won a Best Original Song at the New Jersey Web Fest for a song in the first episode of the podcast.

Savannah: We were nominated for five categories. We were also invited to do a reading at World Con, a science fiction and literary convention. That was really exciting.

Patrick: These things, you never know. We just put something out there and see what happens. You can’t force people to listen to it or like it. You just put it out there and see what happens.

Savannah: One of the awards we got nominated for was Best Chemistry with our two main characters. It’s a will they/won’t they.

Patrick: As much as it can be between a robot head and a human…

Savannah: Despite the fact that we told them to. Reverse psychology. (laughs)

Patrick: Somebody said we shouldn’t call it “Ignore City” because people are not going to pay any attention to it. And I thought it sounded too much like that REM song, “Ignoreland,” and Ed said that’s exactly what he was thinking of [when he named it].

Savannah: So, that’s our newest thing, and eventually, there will be another season, I guess you would call it. But it’s a rock musical podcast. I like dramatized podcasts and dramatized audiobooks, and it’s more on that side

Patrick: We released an album this year of just the original songs, a soundtrack collection. We’re working on the next pop culture-influenced album, like Meddling Kids. I don’t want to say too much about it. A lot of it is already recorded, and some of it is being finished up. We hope to have it out next summer.

The Shake Ups cosplay Scooby-Doo — The Shake Ups cosplaying for *Meddling Kids*
Image Source: The Shake Ups

And you guys are part of another band you put together called the Resounding Maybes.

Savannah: That was our quarantine project.

Patrick: That’s half of The Shake Ups. It’s me, Savannah, and Ed. We are the Resounding Maybes. And that was just because when we were in quarantine, we wanted to do something and couldn’t get all six of us together, so we got three of us together and just did this recording project.

Savannah: Ed, his wife, his children, and us hang out.

Patrick: We were kind of in their bubble

Savannah: We started a new band that was as different from The Shake Ups as we could make it, so instead of being bright and colorful, it’s late 80s goth.

Patrick: Basically, we said, “Whatever The Shake Ups would normally do, we’re going to do the opposite.” The songs are still poppy.

Savannah: And that band is doing something that excites me greatly. We’re playing a Cure tribute in January. As a keyboardist, I really like The Cure, because I was a little goth girl in school.

Patrick: I’m going to have to really tease up my hair for that.

Savannah: I know, right? But I like the keyboard on Cure songs, and get to use all these noises on the keyboard I don’t usually get to use. Now, I get to use them.

Patrick, you’re in a Star Trek-themed band, right?

Patrick: Yeah. Five Year Mission. We started in 2009. And Destination: Earth! is back together. We recently celebrated our 20th anniversary. We also do spacey sci-fi music. And I’m in another surfy instrumental band called The Madeira. We’re working on a second Resounding Maybes album for next year as well. Both that and The Shake Ups album are about the same percent done. Whichever one is done first will be coming out first.

Where can people find you?

Patrick: Theshakeups.net, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook. We’re coming up on about 120,000 Facebook fans.

Savannah: Our website will have upcoming shows, and also the podcast is on a bunch of platforms.

Patrick: If you like anime or giant robots of any kind, check out VoltCon. We’ll be back next October!

Savannah: That’s what it’s all about, and I hope that if anybody is on the fence about starting some kind of project like this with their friends or themselves quietly, do it.

Patrick: Cartoon music is absolutely infectious, and there’s so much great stuff

Savannah: Make your art, make your music. Somebody will like it. And if they don’t, they’re wrong.

The Shake Ups music is available from Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, and the band website at https://theshakeups.net!

The full interview can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.