If You Think You Need Some Lovin

Pomplamoose is best known for their covers and mashups (they famously merged "Sweet Dreams" with "Seven Nation Army") but they also have a robust collection of original songs, including "If You Think You Need Some Lovin'," where lead singer Nataly Dawn makes it clear what she's willing to give. Money, no. Conversation, not in her house. Lovin', that she can do.

Pomplamoose was about 18 months into their journey when they posted this song to their tremendously popular YouTube channel January 19, 2010. They're the first band to make a sustainable living with YouTube as their primary platform. The band is the duo of Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, who met when they were students at Stanford. When they formed Pomplamoose in 2008, they decided that instead of touring, making demos and striving for a record deal, they would make fun little songs with videos showing exactly how they made them, post them to YouTube, and see what happens. YouTube had been around only since 2005 (Google bought it in 2006) and didn't have much to offer in terms of original music videos. Pomplamoose were the rare creators (a term that was bludgeoned into irrelevance over the next decade) posting good songs with videos they made themselves. YouTube rewarded them with feature positioning, and their subscriber count grew rapidly. By 2010, every video they posted was guaranteed to get a substantial view count. None of this earned them much money, of course, but their expenses were low and it led to other opportunities. Hyundai, courting the trend-setting young demographic, put them in commercials that aired in the lead-up to Christmas. They sold a good amount of merch, and eventually the view counts led to real advertising dollars. They had a raft of loyal subscribers that would happily make regular donations to keep the Pomplamoose machine running, but there was no application to do that. So Jack Conte built one. He launched Patreon in 2013 and made Pomplamoose one of their original artists. Both entities grew like mushrooms in the rain; Patreon became a billion-dollar company, and Pomplamoose upped their game by employing a team of audio and video professionals to help with their increasingly elaborate songs and videos. By 2022 they had over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and over 2000 regular donors on Patreon. They never did sign with a label.

Nataly Dawn got a bit worn down with the business of Pomplamoose around 2011 and started work on a solo album as an outlet for more personal songs. Using Kickstarter, she funded it herself and released it in 2013. "I write songs for Pomplamoose and they tend to be more upbeat, more playful," she said in a Songfacts interview. "Sometimes I write songs that are trying to get to the heart of the matter and dig a little deeper. Also, just in terms of the genre, I try to write songs that are more in the traditional singer-songwriter vein, maybe a bit more folksy."