Hobbs’ Songs: The Improvised Comedy Journey of a Serious Musician
By Ames Doyle and Lily Stancill
"Cheese Tax", "Big Stretch", "Stuck on My Teefs", "When Mom Comes Home"…the viral TikTok series Puppy Songs is comprised of fully-produced and wildly popular songs about two of the internet’s favorite dogs, Leni and Mar Pup. But did you know that the man behind the viral sensation is part of the Dad’s Garage ensemble? Matt Hobbs, creator of Puppy Songs, is a well-known entity on the keys here at Dad’s Garage, in his Old Fourth Ward music studio (where he created the smash-hit original musical Hot Jambalaya with fellow improviser Travis Sharp), and in the ears of Puppy Songs fans around the world. However you know him, it’s clear that Matt Hobbs is a renaissance man: composer, performer, playwright—what can’t this guy do?
In his latest production, Puppy Songs: The Musical Journey of an Oblivious Dog Dad, Matt gives audiences a peek at the man-behind-the-pups in a live one-man show at Dad’s Garage. We sat down with him to dig into his artistic journey up to this point and what we can expect from his new show.
Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Dad's Garage.
I moved to Atlanta in 2010. I was staying with my friend's family in Dunwoody and we wanted to do something fun in town. I didn't know Atlanta, so we opened up Creative Loafing and saw something about how Dad's Garage had shows.
So we came in and saw shows at Elizabeth Street, and I just really loved it! After a while, I went up to Eric Frampton, who was a musician at Dad's Garage at the time, and I said,“How do you do this piano for improv thing?”
And then things just started happening; auditions, a couple workshops, and then…me just not really leaving is probably the biggest thing! And now it's been thirteen years.
If Dad Garage wasn't here, would you have stayed in Atlanta?
That's a good question. It's like an existential question, because I was ready to leave Atlanta when I'd lived here for two or three years.
The first time I almost moved to Nashville to follow my then-significant other who was moving there from Atlanta, and I didn't move because I had Dad's and my job was fine. That kept me here.
And now, Dad’s is one of the things that I'm really glad is here in Atlanta. It's keeping me here. We had a baby a year and a half ago—Oliver—so we're gonna be here for a little while, but Dad’s in this moment is just an incredible place for me to be, building and supporting my projects.
I'm really fortunate that Dad's and [Co-Artistic Directors] Jon and Tim and the whole team are all betting on my stuff. It's not something I take lightly. I know it's a big deal and there's not a lot of people getting shows produced, but I am. I'm very lucky. If Dads wasn't here in Atlanta and the studio that I work at didn't have new ownership[...]I probably would be somewhere else.
We almost moved to Nashville again right before Oliver was born. We were either gonna stay in Atlanta and make it work or leave, and we decided to stay. The studio and Dads Garage are the one-two punch right now.
Can you talk a little bit more about your studio, where it is, and why it’s important to you?
So I work out of two studios: one's my basement at my house, and the other is a professional studio about a mile away from Dad’s Garage called 800 Studios East. It's been active in Atlanta for at least two decades. Not a lot of recording studios in Atlanta tend to stay open. That's where Travis and I met and where we worked on Hot Jambalaya. It's where I record a lot of music I make, and it is the other leg of the professional two-legged stool that has kept me in Atlanta.
Can you walk me through the crystallization of Hot Jambalaya itself, or maybe when you said, “Hey, I'm really throwing my hat in the ring to become composer, producer, show creator, etc.”?
In the 2010s, I was primarily a musical improviser for improv shows, but more and more opportunities kept coming up to be music director, composer, and songwriter for events and projects, and as time went on I was like, “I wanna make a show!”
I had no idea what I was talking about.
I pitched a show with Travis in 2017 that was a musical. It didn't get voted highly enough by the ensemble, and so it faded away.
[Note: shows produced at Dad’s Garage are vetted by the staff, ensemble, and general company in a yearly voting process during season planning.]
Later that year, after an improv show—not long after the pitch that didn't go well, actually—I was talking to Kevin Gillese—the Dad’s Garage artistic director at the time—and he said, “Matt, you need to make the show that only you could make.”
And so I was driving home at 1 a.m. that night and I was like, “That would probably be New Orleans and murder mysteries,” which I really enjoy. So I combined them. I said, “Travis, what if we try it again with a different project?” and that was what we pitched in 2018.
It did well and made it to the next round of consideration for the ensemble voting and season planning process, and then we kept working on it. Then, the pandemic happened, Travis and I kept meeting remotely, and then in person. Between 2018 and 2025, we managed to do three table reads and three corresponding complete rewrites. We were touching stuff up and refining the story. We just never stopped.
By early 2025 when it was go time for Hot Jambalaya at Dad’s Garage, we'd been working on this thing for a really long time. And then it wasn't in our hands anymore—that's when Candy McLellan Davison (director), Javar La'Trail Parker (musical director), Dad’s Garage, the cast, and production team took over. The rest just happened.
Is there anywhere that you've been, even in New Orleans, that can really develop “the next step forward” like Dad's Garage does?
Nothing that I've seen yet. I reflect a lot on the role of being an individual who's working on getting better at something, whatever that discipline is—the small community you engage with, how you support it, and how it can support you, the big umbrella of the city that it's in, and the market that it's in. Dad’s Garage has been really good for me because I think it's introduced me to a lot of people. It's been a non-stop supply of inspiration through those people, their work, and through the things that are happening here.
But I think that, yeah, there's magic here. At the same time, you have to be someone who's going in that direction no matter what anyway. But if you are, and you can give to an organization and to a community like Dad's, and you're patient and you do it for you—not because you're waiting for an organization like Dad's to put a crown on your head—as long as you're doing it for you and on your journey, and you just keep doing it stubbornly—aggressively stubbornly, in my case—then you'll be fine. You'll benefit tremendously from places like this. But if you come in without that grit and without that individual fire, I think like anywhere else, you'll probably just get lost or frustrated. And that's human too. But it's been a good combination of factors for me so far.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it's like working with Kevin Gillese for Puppy Songs?
Yeah. Kevin's great—we’re very complimentary and have been working together in a team capacity for a long time. Back during Kevin's tenure as artistic director, he would throw me projects, like, “Hobbs, I need a song for this thing at the Fox Theater,” when Dad’s did our big show at the Fox or—
Oh, so that was you?
Yeah, I was the bandleader for Dad’s Garage and Friends in 2015. That was me and Chris Adams on drums and Ben Holst on bass or guitars, and then we had Nico, who's a friend of Kevin's, on cello.
Kevin gave me a lot of opportunities. He had his one man show this time last year where I wrote a couple songs for it, and I was actually in it as a musical sidekick. I'd worked with him while he was developing parts of the show for a while, so by the time this show started and I had him officially come on as the director of Puppy Songs, he and I had worked on a lot of projects together.
That's Seven Minutes in Kevin, right?
Seven Minutes in Kevin, which was produced here at Dad’s Garage, upstairs and downstairs last spring. I really like to focus on epic emotional songs and a lot of times when Kevin’s doing theater, even when he's doing his improv scratch, he loves these big emotional, dramatic musical sequences and I like to make that kind of music. So we have a lot of symbiotic stuff.
But when I was putting together the team, and I knew Puppy Songs’ strength for the show were these songs, I really wanted to come out and do vulnerable storytelling that was comedic as a thematic wrapper for the whole show. I was like “That's gotta be Kevin,” because Seven Minutes in Kevin was exactly that.
So it's been great working with him. He pushes me in ways that I don't even have the muscle groups for. I'm learning about all these complementary disciplines like storytelling and jokes and being brief, which is something I naturally do when songwriting, but not when talking.
It's been good working with Kevin.
You get to see a lot of new projects. Can you tell me more about the variety of things that you've seen while you've been here?
That's, I think, been my favorite part of what's kept me at Dad's. What's inspired me the most are new works, creators and, for a long time, supporting people who just had this show. Whether it was chasing Kevin to the Fox; when Linnea Frye, Megan Leahy, and their team had Woman of the Year, which was a sketch review upstairs—I got to write some songs for that; Black Nerd, which was incredible and I got to do two musical moments and one music direction
moment for the finale; working with Candy McClellan Davison, who would later direct Hot Jambalaya.
I love improv. I’ve always said it's the best job. I get to play piano and drink beer and that's a great way to spend a Friday night working. But I've always been especially inspired by people writing, producing, and making shows. Like Mike Schatz with King of Pops: The Post Apocalyptic Musical, which was my first big musical at Dad’s, and is how I met Ben Holst, who is my roommate, mentor, and longtime friend at 800 Studios East.
There's just been so many projects, musicals, one-person shows. Baconfest used to be a thing—I made a song for Baconfest one year. It's given me a lot of practice and experience, which I'm really grateful for.
Is there anything else you want to tell me about? It can be about your shows, it can be about you, it can be about Dad’s Garage, it can be about your left foot.
This guy right here (points at left foot), I've been dancing on this foot to get ready for Puppy Songs and I'm excited for it. The Musical Journey of an Oblivious Dog Dad, I think—is that where we landed?
You got it.
We only had 400 versions of that catch phrase of that tagline.
This show I'm excited about. I'll say this about Puppy Songs: I had a version of this show that I toured with after “Cheese Tax" got popular, and I played seven or eight shows all over the country—it was really neat—all the coasts. But I hadn't lived the rest of the experience of being that oblivious dog dad, 'cause I didn't grow up with dogs. That's really key to this whole thing. So all the way through this whole experience, now that Leni and Mar Pup are no longer with us and I’ve had a five-year career as a musician and a content creator doing something I never thought I would do, we're now in this world where as of the last three months, I'm able to look back on the whole thing. The stories and the anecdotes that stitch the songs together are a humble way, I hope, to introduce myself into the Puppy Songs story, because that hasn't been as much a part of it. I've been the host and trying to sell merch between videos.
In terms of my role as a human and an artist in this show, there's no screens or technology, this is just telling stories and playing songs. It's a reaction to TikTok, to this world where Puppy Songs came from, but I hope it adds some personal touch and connects with people. So far Puppy Songs has shown that music and dogs do a great job of bringing people together. I hope this show continues that and I'm excited for everyone to see it. It's really fun.
Catch Matt Hobbs in his one-man show, Puppy Songs: The Musical Journey of an Oblivious Dog Dad at Dad’s Garage on Thursdays, May 2025 at 8 p.m.
