At Home With Tenacious D: The Playlist

Tenacious D, the comedy rock duo of Jack Black and Kyle Gass, never expected that their 2018 album, Post-Apocalypto, would take on an entirely new meaning when the pandemic hit. “When we started working on Post-Apocalypto, we were really just reacting to the orange menace,” Black tells Apple Music, referring to President Trump. “We had no idea that there was going to be a global pandemic that made our last album all the more relevant. That was an accidental twist of fate.” Fresh off the release of the tender acoustic song “5 Needs”—which the duo performed for the first time from home during the COVID Is No Joke virtual comedy festival—Black and Gass curate a selection of timeless classics that are rocking their socks off during lockdown on this exclusive Apple Music playlist. Check out some of their picks below. The Beatles, “Help!” Black: "Because we’re saying help the world, and the Beatles saying that, it’s a perfect song.” Paul Simon, “Wristband” Gass: “It’s a late-career entry. Obviously, Paul is an icon, he's a legend. But what do you do if you're a legend and you're 100 years old but you want to come up with new material? It's a risky proposition. I dutifully checked out Paul and then watched the live performance of ‘Wristband’, and it just caught my ear.” The Charlie Daniels Band, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” Black: “There's a great tradition of doing battle with Satan in rock ’n’ roll music and before rock ’n’ roll. And of them all, I think 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' is probably the most powerful, iconic version of that story.” Dio, “Holy Diver” Black: “He was definitely an influence on my teenage heavy metal mind. When we wrote our song about Dio passing the torch to us, we never dreamed that we were actually going to get him to play a cameo in our movie Pick of Destiny. We got a chance to meet the man, the myth, the legend, and what a sweetheart of a heavy metal rock star.”