The last time Lady Gaga was in town, she apparently had more business to conduct besides filling Climate Pledge Arena three times over.
Last August, the pop superstar and Oscar winner brought her wildly inventive “Mayhem Ball Tour” to Seattle for three shows over a four-night span. With an off day in between turning the local arena into a haunted opera house, Lady Gaga ran down to a Burien recording studio to film a Pokémon commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.
“We about fell off the couch,” said Joe Reineke, who owns the Temple of the Trees studio with his wife, Karyn Reineke. “We were like, ‘Holy (expletive), there she is! Oh my God, look!’ And then my phone absolutely blew up for the next three hours.”
Suffice it to say, seeing the ad run during the Super Bowl was more of a shocker than the heavily favored Seahawks winning the Vince Lombardi Trophy for the second time in franchise history. According to the Reinekes, everything about the making of the star-studded commercial celebrating Pokémon’s 30th anniversary was “cryptic” and hush-hush, requiring the studio owners to sign a nondisclosure agreement before they learned who exactly would be dropping by their secluded studio.
“We 100% did not have a clue it was coming,” Joe said.
“Everything was so tight-lipped,” Karyn added. “It was just very mysterious. But then when we were watching the Super Bowl and it came on, we were like ‘OMG, it’s happening!’”
The longtime studio operators and local musicians in the band Society of the Silver Cross only found out it was Lady Gaga the day before an 80-person crew — many flown in from Japan — descended upon their Burien property, setting up from 6 a.m. to around 8:30 p.m. to film Gaga’s relatively brief appearance in the spot. In the commercial, the singer is one of a handful of celebs, including Trevor Noah, Blackpink’s Jisoo and Formula One driver Charles Leclerc, detailing their favorite cartoon Pokémon characters. Gaga was also a part of the Super Bowl halftime show, performing alongside headliner Bad Bunny.
“We had signed the NDA and they said it was going to be Lady Gaga and we kind of gasped — ‘Oh hell yeah, this is going to be cool,’” Joe said.
The woodsy, gothic studio was a perfect aesthetic match for Lady Gaga — particularly amid her spooky “Mayhem Ball Tour.” Dressed in all black with jet-black hair, Gaga is shown in Temple of the Trees’ wood-lined, candlelit studio singing with her animated duet partner and Pokémon pick, Jigglypuff.
“It sounds amazing and it’s really inspiring to be there,” Joe said of the room. “And matter of fact, Lady Gaga was like, ‘Ooh, I love the gothy vibes.’”
The Reinekes have run longtime Pioneer Square studio Orbit Audio since 2002, but Temple of the Trees was a newer project born during the pandemic. The couple built the studio outside of their Burien home with “help from a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll friends” in exchange for future studio time. To make room for the studio, where Seattle indie-rock heavyweights Car Seat Headrest recorded their latest album, they cleared a bunch of trees on their property, milling the wood that now lines the studio’s walls and 20-foot-tall ceiling.
“We hand-treated all of the wood,” Karyn said. “It was months of work to dry, and we hand-cut every plank and planed it and jointed it and stained it all. There was a point partway through that process where I was just looking around at all the work we’d done and all the work left, and I thought to myself, ‘I think we’ve made a terrible mistake.’”
Besides the Reinekes’ hosting duties, Joe’s sound engineering skills came in handy after the ad agency forgot to hire one of their own, he said. Joe (or at least part of his head) makes a brief cameo in the commercial, earning him a little extra pay as an actor playing the role of sound engineer — a part you could say the singer/guitarist of early 2000s rock band Alien Crime Syndicate was born to play.
All told, Gaga was on-site for about seven hours of shooting and left an impression on the Burien studio owners.
“She was very nice and very friendly,” Karyn said. “We got to meet her, but we were trying to also be respectful of everything going on and not try to be all fanned out on her. But she’s really kind and gracious, and she shared with us how much she really was glad to be there and really loved the studio. It was very exciting.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
