Rob Cantor captained Andover’s forensics team. The internet knows him for a story about Shia LaBeouf.

The state runner-up in Storytelling in 2001 co-founded the band Tally Hall at Michigan, made two of the most-watched music videos of 2014, and now writes songs for Disney, with an Emmy nomination this year.

Rob Cantor

Bloomfield Hills Andover ’01

Storytelling

In October 2014 a video appeared online in which a man sings, with complete seriousness, about being chased through the woods by the actor Shia LaBeouf. Behind him are the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, a children’s choir, a string quartet and a troupe of interpretive dancers wearing giant paper heads of LaBeouf’s face. In the final shot, sitting in the audience and applauding, is Shia LaBeouf himself.

The video has been watched more than ninety million times and won a Webby Award. The man in the tuxedo is Rob Cantor, who wrote the song, and who got LaBeouf by emailing his manager cold. The answer came back in three days. It took 161 people, four months of planning and a single day of shooting, plus five friends who spent sixteen hours folding paper Shia heads.

It is, when you take away the choir, a story told out loud to an audience. Cantor has had some practice at that. In 2001, as a senior at Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills, he was the state runner-up in Storytelling.

Captain of the team

He has not forgotten it. Writing to us recently, Cantor said he was a forensicator in high school, and captain of Andover’s team. It was his favorite activity, he told us, and it did more than build his communication skills. It shaped, in his words, “my personality as a whole, maybe.” He is still close friends with a lot of the people he met through the program.

Five young men in white shirts and coloured ties lean over a carpeted staircase — Tally Hall in their signature coloured ties · Courtesy of Tally Hall

The yellow tie

Music was running alongside it the whole time. His father, a doctor who plays guitar, taught him the instrument at twelve. He played French horn and cornet in middle school, sang in the choir and acted in high school, and played in a band with Zubin Sedghi, who would later join him in Tally Hall.

He arrived at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2001 and was soon testing new songs at the open stage at the Ark. He joined a campus sketch comedy group, and in December 2002 Tally Hall, the band he formed with friends from Michigan, played its first show. There were five of them, each in a different colored tie. Cantor’s was yellow.

Tally Hall was a Michigan band down to its name, which came from a long-gone food court mall in Farmington Hills. Its first album was named for Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum, the beloved Farmington Hills arcade of coin-operated oddities. Cantor wrote several of its songs, including “Be Born,” inspired by his father’s work delivering babies, and “Just Apathy,” which won the pop grand prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in 2005. He graduated that year, having studied molecular biology and music, and deferred his place at Michigan’s medical school to go on tour. The band signed with Atlantic Records, made a ten-episode internet variety show, released a second album in 2011 and then went quiet.

Then something odd happened. Years later a new generation found the songs online. Beginning around 2019 they spread across TikTok, and the streaming numbers went into the hundreds of millions. Two of the band’s songs have been certified gold and a third platinum. Fans who were in kindergarten when the band last played now make pilgrimages to Marvin’s.

Shirtless performers in angular paper face masks pose with raised arms on a dark stage — Dancers in paper heads, from the Shia LaBeouf Live production · Courtesy of Rob Cantor

Twenty-nine impressions

Cantor released a solo album, Not a Trampoline, in 2014, and that summer posted a video in which he appeared to sing an original song in twenty-nine celebrity voices. It drew nearly six and a half million views in a week. Then he revealed how it was done: professional impressionists had recorded the voices, and he had spent thirty-nine takes perfecting the lip-sync. It was a magic trick, and the reveal was part of it.

These days he writes for an audience that is even harder to fool. He has been the songwriter for Disney Junior’s T.O.T.S., wrote more than forty songs for the first season of The Ghost and Molly McGee, and wrote the theme songs for Chibiverse, Pupstruction and RoboGobo. This year one of his RoboGobo songs was nominated for a Children’s and Family Emmy. He has compared the job to getting to be Weird Al over and over.

In June he released “My Boy,” his first music video in twelve years, a song about becoming a father. He says a new album follows on November 11.

Storytelling, as MIFA defines it, is the telling of a tale suitable for children, with nothing but a voice and a body. Cantor now writes songs for preschoolers and once persuaded ninety million people to listen to a bedtime story about a movie star in the woods. The judges in 2001 were onto something.