Local Songwriters Take Musical Roles in ‘The Righteous Gemstones’

For a song parody to land, the music has to be good. Mike Mitschele and Rick Randall know that, while they can write lyrics as silly as they like, the music always must be on point or the whole thing falls flat.

In a varied career, the two Charlotte natives and songwriters cofounded the Queen City’s legendary parody rock band Alternative Champs and drew on their tunesmithing talents to launch songwriting and scoring company Hot Goat Music, but Mitschele and Randall are best known to fans of hit HBO comedy series The Righteous Gemstones as members of cringeworthy Christian megachurch rock band Tears of David.

Mitschele and Randall write and perform ersatz Christian rock music for the show, the saga of a family-run Charleston televangelical empire, that stars series creator Danny McBride as associate pastor Jesse Gemstone and Walton Goggins as former child star and Jesse’s charismatic and unreliable uncle, Baby Billy Freeman.

Mitschele and Randall landed that gig in 2019, but still didn’t know what to expect three years later when they entered Truphonic Recording Studios in Charleston with Goggins to record a theme song for a scripture-based game show

After a few seasons on Righteous Gemstones writing earnest Elevation Church-style rock with saccharine yet authentic-sounding lyrics, Mitschele and Randall were offered the opportunity to stretch out by writing and playing something a little different. This time they were tasked with composing an outlandish Vegas-style showtune introducing Uncle Baby Billy’s absurd brainchild, a Bible-based game show called Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers.

Mitschele imitated Goggins in a demo he and Randall recorded when the pair went down to Charleston to cut the song with the Justified and Hateful Eight actor. They were worried Goggins might be insulted by the impersonation.

“Walton was great,” Mitschele says. “He totally jumped into Baby Billy in front of us and showed us some dance moves and what he was going to be doing. He transformed into the character.”

In the completed sequence, Goggins boogies as the 60-something Baby Billy on a glitzy yet tacky set, surrounded by dancers clad like refugees from a 1980s variety show:

“Let’s go Bible Bonkers/ Buzzing in in the name of the Lord/ We’re going Bible Bonkers/ Where Jesus has the highest score/ From Abraham and Sarah, to Adam and Eve/ A little burning bush to an olive tree/ Let’s go Bible Bonkers/ God’s favorite game…”

Unfortunately for the Gemstones, the game show goes downhill from there, culminating in a swarm of locusts inundating the studio like a biblical plague. Uncle Baby Billy escapes the raging maelstrom to wreak comic carnage another day.

Mixing music and funny business

Having both grown up in Charlotte, Mitschele and Randal met while attending Myers Park High School. The two soon realized that they shared a similar sense of humor.

They both played guitar, though both are proficient on other instruments. They met bassist Brent Dunn and drummer David Massi, who attended Appalachian State University alongside Randall, and decided to form a band that would mix music and comedy.

When it came time to name the nascent group the band members convened at Lupie’s Cafe in east Charlotte.

“We threw a bunch of adjectives in one hat and nouns in another and took turns drawing them,” Mitschele recalls. Notable combinations included “Hot Goat” and “Sausagey Guys.”

“Alternative Champs” was the winning combo, although “Hot Goat” was later resurrected for Mitschele and Randall’s songwriting and recording business.

“Alternative Champs has always been a humorous rock band that jumps genres — everything from country to heavy metal to soul,” Mitschele says.

“It’s a nice break from being constrained inside a genre,” Randall adds.

In 1993, Alternative Champs played its first gig at Klondike Cafe in Boone, and subsequently dropped its first release, a cassette entitled Love Mouth.

Even in those early days, Alternative Champs followed the comedy adage “commit to the bit,” which exhorts performers to fully embrace a character no matter how outlandish.

As a result, the band consistently nails the multiple genres showcased in its repertoire, and plays it straight while singing absurd and/or silly lyrics on parody tunes like sultry suburban slow jam “Swimming Pool,” and “Cherie Berry,” an ode to the former North Carolina politician best known for plastering her name in elevators across the state.

“Even though we were writing funny songs, Rick and I have always been good at writing catchy music,” Mitschele says.

The band soon became noted for picking a theme for each show, dressing alike in eccentric outfits like giant flower headdresses or lederhosen and playing a set as if everything is completely normal.

“No two shows are ever the same,” notes Mitschele.

“It’s definitely ridiculous and bizarre, but it’s not campy like Weird Al [Yankovic],” Randall adds. “It’s more like performance art.”

Charlotte’s comedy rock champs

For a short while, Alternative Champs was put on the back burner. Randall met his future wife Andi at Appalachian State University, moved to New York for a bit, then returned to North Carolina.

During that time, Mitschele played and toured with alternative Americana bands Jolene and Athenaeum. Randall played with grungy post-punk outfit Husbians. Both continued to join up with Dunn and Massi for occasional Alternative Champs gigs.

In 2000, Randall and Andi married and moved to Winston-Salem where they raised their daughter. Alternative Champs wasn’t dead, however. The group released its debut LP Fort Awesome in 2005.

The album contains a mix of songs already in the Champs’ live repertoire and new numbers composed in the studio, including bar band boogie parody “Mississikki,” mirrorball disco throwback “The Gay ‘90s” and on-target soul pastiche “Swimming in the Pool.”

The band toured after that release, playing CMJ Fest in New York and Cleveland, and South by Southwest in Austin in 2006.

Eight years later, Alternative Champs dropped its follow-up album Feelings, which includes “Cherie Berry.” The collection also boasts two guest appearances by Charlotte singer-songwriter Benji Hughes: “Drop the Ball,” a funk banger about bad sex and erectile dysfunction, and “Cigarette,” a buoyant soul satire about smoking like a chimney and developing incipient emphysema.

Over time, Mitschele and Randall perfected their empathic, almost telepathic songwriting process that has enriched Alternative Champs and the pair’s work on Righteous Gemstones.

“Back in the day, we would just get on a four track [recorder], have a beer or two and come up with the most ridiculous song we could think of,” Randall says.

“We know each other so well that it’s comfortable to bounce ideas off each other,” Mitschele adds. “We never feel like we can’t tell the other person, ‘Nah, that’s kind of dumb.’”

Even though the songwriting partners live in different cities, Randall in Winston-Salem and Mitschele in Charlotte, they still frequently write in the same room.

“There have been times where we had to split off, and Mike would take some songs and I’d take a song or two,” Randall notes. “But we would always hit each other back.”

Through their connections in the Charlotte music scene, Mitschele and Randall befriended several people who went on to work on Righteous Gemstones, including production designer and assistant director Richard A. Wright; Concord native, director, producer, screenwriter, and actor Jody Hill, who plays Tears of David guitarist Levi on the show; and composer Joseph Stephens, who cofounded the Charlotte experimental indie-rock band Pyramid and played in instrumental rock outfit Sea of Cortez.

Becoming Tears of David

According to Mitschele, it was always a goal of Danny McBride’s to cast an Elevation-type band for the megachurch in Righteous Gemstones that was an actual band rather than actors pretending to be musicians.

Mitschele and Randall’s friend Richard Wright immediately recommended Alternative Champs, telling McBride that the band dressed up according to a specific theme each time it played and stayed in character through its set.

“What [McBride] wanted, we were doing already,” Randall says. “We’ve spent decades playing multiple genres and dressing up like weirdos so it wasn’t a stretch.”

“When [Righteous Gemstones’ creators] asked us to write a song for the pilot, we immediately thought they wanted the Alternative Champs so [we wrote] something funny,” Mitschele remembers. “We quickly realized they wanted us to play … and write real Christian rock songs.”

Mitschele and Randall found it weird writing Christian rock lyrics because neither is particularly religious.

“I don’t know a whole lot about Bible quotes,” Mitschele says. “You can only sing so much about his love shining down on you … and looking into the light.”

“Not to be overly critical, but some of these megachurch bands are playing sort of hip music but they’re at least five years behind,” Randall notes.

Mitschele and Randall quickly mastered the art of writing and playing their pious pop with straight faces — even when Randall’s character gets to rock a flashy keytar onstage — and leaving the comedy to the show’s deeply flawed yet relatable characters.

“The joke is not in [our] songs,” Mitschele says. “Our job was to be authentic and by doing that, it’s ridiculous and funny.”

Mitschele and Randall reckon they’ve landed about 20 songs on the show out of the more than 40 they submitted to Stephens and music supervisor DeVoe Yates.

“Joey we already knew, and we developed a good friendship with DeVoe,” Mitschele offers. “DeVoe has an amazing breadth of knowledge when it comes to music, but he’s not a musician. He would give us what he needed [with] a little description and Rick and I would take a stab at it. We’d submit two [versions of] a song and pretty quick, one would get approved.”

“It was like a game of telephone,” Randall notes. “Danny [McBride] would decide what he wanted and then it would go through DeVoe to us.”

Often Mitschele and Randall would nail the tune on the first try, but there were a handful that needed more massaging and a few more passes.

“Danny’s spontaneous and if he hears something and loves it, he might say, ‘What if they tried this?’” Mitschele says.

He recalls a long outro he and Randall wrote for one tune. Word got back to them that McBride loved the music but wanted it to be a little more “Space Mountain.”

“Then we had to figure out what he meant by ‘Space Mountain,’” Mitschele says.

“We did a lot of Tears of David-style songs, but then after a season or two they started throwing us more challenging songs and we branched out a bit,” Randall says. “We got more funky and rocking and Vegas, and it expanded the palette.”

Those new opportunities included writing and playing the theme for Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers and scoring a few scenes as soundtrack composers.

The launch of Hot Goat Music

In 2022, Mitschele and Randall started their company Hot Goat Music, through which they compose and record songs for TV and movies. The business has gotten off to a hot start.

Mitschele and Randall composed a song for Nutcrackers, a 2024 comedy-drama directed by David Gordon Green and starring Ben Stiller. They also collaborated with Stephens on music for Upload, an Amazon science-fiction comedy drama series created by Greg Daniels of The Office and Parks and Recreation.

Hot Goat has also recorded a song for actors to sing on The Hunting Wives, an upcoming drama series on Starz.

“We didn’t write [the song],” Mitschele notes. “It’s an old spiritual that we did a couple versions of.”

Meanwhile, Righteous Gemstones forges ahead into its fourth and final season. Both Mitschele and Randall say they love working on the show and playing Tears of David band members, so they’re sad to see the series come to an end.

“It was such an awesome experience,” Randall says. “We’ve become friends with the actors and everybody on the set.”

At the same time, composing, playing and performing on Righteous Gemstones has been a lot of hard work.

“We’ve been busting our butts,” Randall says.

One of the duo’s higher profile songs for the show will appear on episode eight, which airs in late April. It’s another tune with Goggins.

“Baby Billy will have the summer of 2025 fucking hit,” says Goggins, promoting the tune on the Dax Shepard podcast Armchair Expert. “Come June … you will be singing this fucking song.”

Mitschele asserts that he and Randall are still in “the excitement phase” of working on Righteous Gemstones.

“It’s not quite over yet for us,” he says.

It’s also far from over for Alternative Champs. While Mitschele notes that he and Randall haven’t done much with the band recently amid the pair’s flurry of writing, recording and filming, they’ve recently started writing new material.

Alternative Champs even has an upcoming hometown gig booked, playing Comet Grill on Saturday, May 24, to mark bassist Brent Dunn’s birthday. It’s a rare occasion, Mitschele notes, since nowadays the band only plays four or five local shows a year.

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Mitschele hopes everyone who can see the show has a good time, but zooming out, he also aspires to leave a lasting impression. His and Randall’s goal with their music, whether through Hot Goat Music or Alternative Champs, is to elevate whatever project they’re working on.

“I love coming up with something that’s catchy; I love dropping ear worms,” Mitschele says, adding that he’s been disappointed at concerts where he was impressed with a band’s musical virtuosity yet couldn’t recall a single tune the group played.

When it comes to Alternative Champs, he says the same principle applies. It’s great when people laugh at tunes like “Swimming Pool” or the Bible Bonkers theme, but the two songwriters and lifelong friends’ goal has always been to write music that people will remember.