As Michael Bolton recalled, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer understood his concerns and said they could try and make it work. “So the guys said, ‘We’ve had other people who worked with us who had concerns like this, and we’ve worked it out,'” Bolton told Vulture. “‘We can tweak it. We’ll send you different ideas, and hopefully we can do something that will work for both of us’ … but within a week or so, I got the tweaked treatment and they made it even worse. They just went to some dark places.”
Luckily, it all got ironed out, as Bolton revealed: “They said, ‘Okay, well, we’ll go at it again.’ At this point, I thought they were pulling me along. I didn’t know how likely it was that we would be doing anything together. But they got back to me with another version a few months later that was heading in the right direction.”
The finished sketch, while still vulgar at points, is ultimately pretty light-hearted. After the fictionalized version of Bolton tells the Lonely Island guys that he wrote them a “big, sexy hook” for their new song, it turns out that, after binging the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, the whole hook is about Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and what a cool guy he is. (This doesn’t really vibe with The Lonely Island’s existing banger about being hot dudes in the club.)
