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I Will Survive | Gloria Gaynor | funk cover ft. Mario Jose

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A disco anthem gets reworked into a one-take funk session in a Highland Park studio.

Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” has been covered more times than almost any song from the disco era, but Scary Pockets took a different route than most tribute acts. Instead of leaning into the string-heavy 1978 arrangement, the Los Angeles funk collective stripped the track down to a syncopated groove and handed the lead vocal to Mario Jose, recording the whole thing live in one room at their own headquarters. The result, released in July 2019, turned a disco standard into a mid-tempo funk workout built around bass, rhythm guitar and a soul singer who sounds like he means every word.

• Scary Pockets, founded in 2017 by Patreon co-founder and Pomplamoose keyboardist Jack Conte with guitarist Ryan Lerman, released the “I Will Survive” cover in July 2019 featuring vocalist Mario Jose.
• The session was filmed live at Scary Pockets HQ in Highland Park, California, with Jack Conte on keys, Ryan Lerman and Tiana Ohara on guitars, Nick Campbell on bass and Rob Humphreys on drums.
• The track was later folded into the band’s 2019 album Off Center, and the group promoted it around live tour dates in San Francisco (Nov. 15) and Los Angeles (Nov. 16) that same year.

From Disco Ballad to Funk Pocket

Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris wrote “I Will Survive” as a triumphant disco kiss-off, and Gloria Gaynor’s original hit rides a driving four-on-the-floor beat dressed up with dramatic strings. Scary Pockets junks that tempo entirely. Nick Campbell’s basslines anchor a slower, syncopated pocket, while the guitars from Ryan Lerman and Tiana Ohara trade off percussive, chord-stab rhythms instead of disco’s sustained sweep. It’s the same chord changes and the same lyric, but the band reroutes the song’s energy from the dance floor into something closer to a Stax or Motown groove.

That’s the formula that’s built Scary Pockets’ following: take a familiar pop, rock or soul cut and rebuild it as a tight funk arrangement, recorded in a single room with a rotating cast of session players. The group has stuck to a weekly release schedule since Conte and Lerman started the project in 2017, and “I Will Survive” fits squarely into that pattern — a well-known melody filtered through a different rhythmic lens rather than reinvented from scratch.

Mario Jose Takes the Mic

The vocal is where the cover earns its attention. Mario Jose doesn’t try to out-belt Gaynor’s original delivery; instead he leans into the funk pocket, letting the phrasing sit behind the beat and giving the performance a soulful, conversational quality that fits the slower groove. It’s a different read on a song usually performed as an anthem — here it plays more like a lived-in statement than a big finish.

Recorded live at Scary Pockets HQ in Highland Park, CA — no overdubs, no click-track disco pulse, just a six-piece band cutting the song in one room.

The Team Behind the Camera

Every Scary Pockets video follows the same single-room, single-take philosophy, and this one is no exception. Caleb Parker handled audio mixing and mastering, while Ricky Chavez shot and edited the video — the same stripped-down, performance-first visual style the band has used across its catalog. There’s no set dressing or narrative cutaway; the camera stays on the musicians, which is the point. The band’s back catalog of these live-in-studio sessions has become as much a calling card as the arrangements themselves.

Touring Behind the Release

The cover dropped in July 2019, and Scary Pockets kept it in rotation heading into their fall tour dates, with shows in San Francisco on November 15 and Los Angeles on November 16. The band also used the release window to push merchandise — new posters and t-shirts through their own site — and to grow their Patreon, where subscribers get input on future song picks along with stems and karaoke versions of the tracks. The pieces work together: weekly covers build the audience, and the live dates and Patreon convert that audience into a sustained fanbase rather than a one-off viral hit.

With Off Center collecting the studio versions and the tour dates wrapped for the year, the “I Will Survive” cover stands as one more entry in a catalog that, by late 2019, had already turned Scary Pockets into one of the more reliable acts on YouTube for hearing a familiar song get a completely different pocket underneath it.