Atlanta’s many ‘Peachtree’ streets make for viral comedy from New York quartet

Some say there is a fine line between anguish or sadness — and laughter. Atlanta traffic can conjure quite a bit of the former two, but the best medicine just could be the latter.

Viral memes and videos are often good for only ephemeral dopamine hits, but leave the elixir to the humor and talent of the Gregory Brothers, a longtime musical quartet.

The New York humorists and musicians came to fame over 15 years ago with current events spoofs that morphed into “Songify the News.” They’ve made careers off auto-tuning odd or popular news clips into songs they post on YouTube and social media channels.

Their similar parodying of presidential debates has led to The New York Times hiring them for comedic political content.

The Virginia-born group — consisting of brothers Andrew, Evan and Michael and Evan’s wife, Sarah — recently decided to sing a funny, self-composed tune about the confluence of multiple streets named “60th” in Queens. The perplexing intersection was not far from the studio where they record and edit songs and videos.

“It’s the insane, you know, dumbest little tornado streets over there. So, we made a song about it and it was somewhat popular here in New York,” Evan Gregory told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and 11Alive in an interview with his brother Andrew.

But the Gregorys noticed Atlantans, or others familiar with our city’s quirky labyrinth of Peachtrees, were seeing the Queens song and weighing in.

“And lo and behold, we saw who is flying into the comments more than anyone else but the Atlantans coming to say, ‘Please, please, if you think this is bad, please take a look at the Peachtrees,’” Evan said.

Credit: Ben Hendren

Credit: Ben Hendren

So the artists said they did hours of research, scouring maps to verify the confusion and inspire song lyrics. They happened upon a 2022 Atlanta magazine piece which cited an Atlanta Regional Commission figure that counted 71 metro streets with a variation of Peachtree in their names. (The magazine ranked 40 of them, with world famous Peachtree Street landing at No. 1.)

Then the musical group collated the various streets, roads, places, drives, boulevards and cardinal directions into 53 seconds of gold.

“71 Peachtrees (Lost in Atlanta)” was born.

They hired fellow NYC comedians with whom they enjoyed working, they said, to play a chorus of people singing and staring with surprised or bewildered looks. Andrew Gregory holds a makeshift steering wheel in the short, with different images and maps of Peachtrees flashing in the background.

They even cook up some fake history: that Atlanta’s founders mandated there be 71 different Peachtrees. And they act it out using costumes and faux facial hair.

The jingle notes that West Peachtree Street intersects with itself in downtown Atlanta. It bends to the right and down at the same time, with the south portion basically dead-ending right before Baker Street. The east portion of West Peachtree intersects Peachtree Street, doing the same thing it does with “main” Peachtree a few miles north in Midtown. Got all that?

Credit: Rich Addicks

Credit: Rich Addicks

The Gregory Brothers (and Sarah) thought they had a hit with the song about Queens but realized the potential for the Peachtree song as soon as it dropped. And it makes sense to them.

“The 60th Street thing in Queens is really just one little weird part of Queens, where (Peachtree) is the main road in one of the biggest cities in America, Atlanta. Like this is as if Broadway Street was hitting Broadway Avenue running parallel to Broadway Circle in Times Square, Manhattan,” Andrew said.

Atlanta should take the Gregory Brothers’ efforts as a badge of honor. They are not some random kids striking gold on one popular skit. They have done music for nearly 20 years and have worked with the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic on a couple of their political debate songs.

They also told me of another Atlanta tie: Longtime resident and auto-tune extraordinaire T-Pain allowed the Gregorys to auto-tune his part (instead of his own producers doing it) for a cameo on a Gregory Brothers song.

They also composed the theme song to the Netflix sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Andrew and Evan said.

After doing serious music, the Gregorys gained some traction with funny YouTube bits, realizing then that humor was their lane.

“We’re just trying to make each other laugh in a room,” Andrew said. “If we can do that, we’re gonna make other people laugh too.”

Mission accomplished with Atlanta drivers, as I finish writing this piece in front of Chamblee’s Kin Coffee — on Peachtree Road, which intersects Peachtree Boulevard (twice), is flanked to the east by New Peachtree Road and is intersected by North Peachtree Road.

And there is not one peach tree on any of them, so far as I have seen. Go figure. Oh, Atlanta. So Atlanta.

Doug Turnbull covers the traffic/transportation beat for WXIA-TV (11Alive) with Rachel Cox-Rosen. Their reports appear on the 11Alive Morning News from 6 to 9 a.m. and on 11Alive.com. Email Doug at dturnbull@11alive.com. Subscribe to the weekly “Gridlock Guy” newsletter for the column here.