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A Highland Park garage turns Diana Ross’s 1980 disco anthem into a full-band funk workout.
Scary Pockets, the Los Angeles funk collective built around keyboardist Jack Conte and guitarist Ryan Lerman, spent 2019 releasing weekly reinterpretations of pop and soul staples with a rotating cast of Southern California session players. Their take on “I’m Coming Out” pairs the band with vocalist Kenton Chen and runs about two minutes and 27 seconds, stripped down to the groove and built back up live in the room rather than assembled in post-production. The clip was shot at Scary Pockets HQ in Highland Park, California, with the band’s usual streaming-and-Patreon release model attached.
- The cover features Kenton Chen on lead vocals alongside Jack Conte on keys, Ryan Lerman on guitar, Kaveh Rastegar on bass, and Carlin White on drums, with Rett Madison, Olivia Kuper Harris, and Gabriela Welch on backing vocals.
- Audio was engineered, mixed, and mastered by Caleb Parker, while Ricky Chavez handled cinematography and editing for the live-in-studio performance.
- Scary Pockets, formed in 2017 by Conte and Lerman, releases tracks through Pockets, Inc. and funds stems, karaoke mixes, and merchandise through its Patreon community.
The Band Behind the Groove
Jack Conte is best known outside Scary Pockets as the co-founder of Patreon and one half of the duo Pomplamoose, and that crowdfunding instinct carries directly into how this project operates. Rather than chasing a label deal, Scary Pockets built a subscriber base that votes on which songs the band covers and gets rewarded with downloadable stems and karaoke versions in return. Ryan Lerman, the band’s arranger and guitarist, is the one shaping how a disco original like “I’m Coming Out” gets translated into a live funk arrangement without losing the bounce that made the 1980 original a hit for Diana Ross.
That rotating-ensemble format is the whole engine of the channel. Kaveh Rastegar’s bassline anchors the arrangement, Carlin White’s drums push the syncopation, and the three backing vocalists — Rett Madison, Olivia Kuper Harris, and Gabriela Welch — stack harmonies that give Chen’s lead room to stretch. It’s the same session-musician culture that has made Southern California’s studio scene a draw for artists chasing that live, unpolished feel, the kind covered in outlets tracking interviews and interesting news from working musicians rather than headline acts.
Kenton Chen’s Lead Vocal
Chen doesn’t try to replicate Ross’s original phrasing so much as reroute the melody through a soul-club register, leaning into the syncopated pockets Lerman’s arrangement carves out. The band’s whole appeal rests on that tension between faithfulness and reinvention — keeping the hook everyone knows while letting the rhythm section improvise around it in real time, which is the reason Scary Pockets built a channel around weekly covers instead of one-off singles.
Recorded live at Scary Pockets HQ in Highland Park, California — no overdubbed vocals, no rebuilt rhythm track, just the band and Kenton Chen playing the arrangement straight through.
Production Behind the Camera
Caleb Parker’s engineering and mix work is built to preserve the room sound rather than sanitize it, which is part of why Scary Pockets’ catalog reads as a live performance archive as much as a streaming release schedule. Ricky Chavez’s cinematography and editing frame the ensemble the way a small-venue set would be shot, tight on the interplay between Conte’s keys and Rastegar’s bass rather than cutting away for effect. It’s a production approach that fits comfortably alongside other channels tracked under film and animation coverage built around performance-driven video rather than narrative storytelling.
The song itself dates to Diana Ross’s self-titled 1980 album, produced by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, and its disco-era DNA — four-on-the-floor pulse, horn-ready hooks, a chorus built for a dance floor — is exactly the kind of source material Scary Pockets has gravitated toward. The band’s catalog leans heavily on that late-’70s and early-’80s funk-disco crossover, the same stretch of pop history that keeps resurfacing in retrospectives on 70s fashion and style trends that never really left.
Distribution runs through Pockets, Inc. across digital streaming platforms and YouTube, with the Patreon tier system funding the stems, karaoke mixes, and merchandise sold at scarypocketsfunk.com. That’s the model — vote on the song, get the extras, keep the weekly release schedule going — and “I’m Coming Out” slots in as one more entry in a catalog built entirely on turning familiar hits into live-room funk arrangements.
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