Michael King (l.) and Olivia (r.) pose at an iHeart Radio event. (Olivia)
As Michael King stepped to the mound Saturday, he did so to a familiar sound.
King, pitching in a major league game for the first time since July 22 after a stress fracture in his right elbow ended his breakout 2022 campaign, showed some rust. The right-hander allowed two earned runs over 1.2 innings in the Yankees’ 7-5 loss to the Giants, but simply returning to the bump qualified as an accomplishment after King’s freak injury a season ago.
Doing so also gave the 27-year-old a chance to reintroduce his warm-up song, “Messin’ with the King,” to the Yankee Stadium crowd. The tune, a rap written by his recording artist sister, Olivia, has been welcoming King to the hill since his junior season at Boston College with these opening lines:
I step to the mound and I put on my crown,
I royally put them down after you hear this sound,
Even the crowd knows you in for it now…
“I love the lyrics,” King told the Daily News of the track, which features Olivia’s vocals and verses from the rapper Maye Star. “I was just honored that she even wrote it for me.”
Always the musically inclined sibling, Olivia used to help King pick his warm-up songs during his first two years of college. But finding the perfect anthem proved difficult, so Michael would joke that Olivia should just make one herself.
She took her little brother seriously, though, after watching The Roots create a walk-up song for Yankees legend Derek Jeter on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. So Olivia reached out to a producer friend, Toye, who provided a beat. Still living at home, Olivia then began writing and recording in the makeshift studio she had built in her bedroom closet.
She knew she had something lyrically, but she didn’t think she could singlehandedly pull off the aggressive tone she envisioned.
“I just remember writing the rap and being like, ‘OK, I really like the flow. I like some of the lyrics,’” Olivia told The News. “‘But I’m not going to be able to rap this. It needs a little bit of that edgier flair. It’s not going to be as cool if I’m trying to rap when I’m not a rapper.’”
That’s when Maye Star entered the picture. He made a few lyrical tweaks and participated in filming for an accompanying music video, which included Easter eggs from King’s playing career, like his high school championship ring and apparel from Boston College.
King’s roommate, current Reds pitcher Justin Dunn, helped collect the items.
Once everything was shot and recorded, Olivia knew she had come up with the present of a lifetime. She delivered it on Christmas Day in 2015.
That morning, King found himself shoved into the bathroom of his parents’ home. With the fan running, Olivia queued the music video on a large TV, which she draped a blanket over. Once ready, she called Michael into the room for the big reveal.
“I just remember him hitting my leg so hard and being like, ‘Liv, are you kidding me!? Are you kidding me!?’ He was hitting my leg so hard that I was like, ‘OK, chill out a little,’” Olivia said. “I took that as he liked it. Ever since then, he’s used it, and he claims it’s the best song he’s ever heard, but he might be a little biased.”
Indeed, King loves the song. He had a fleeting concern when he first realized what his sister had concocted that holiday morning, but his fears were quickly put to rest.
“I got nervous thinking, ‘My sister is making me this. If it’s awful, I still have to use it because it’s my sister’s song. I can’t be mean to my sister,’” King said with a laugh. “But it ended up being unbelievable, and I’m definitely gonna keep it for the rest of my life.”
Olivia and her co-creators have found joy in the song’s journey from Boston College to the minor leagues to Yankee Stadium. Olivia used to alert Maye Star and Toye when King reached a new career milestone, such as getting drafted by the Marlins in 2016.
But when Miami dealt King to the Yankees, the team he grew up rooting for, Olivia and her cohorts began dreaming of her brother’s — and the song’s — potential.
“My brother and I had always talked about it playing in Yankee Stadium. He obviously was not even close to there at the time,” Olivia said, referring to King’s prospect status back then. “But that was always the end goal because I feel like Yankee Stadium is as big as you can get. So why not shoot for the moon? We always talked about that. Now it’s happened, which is pretty crazy.”
Since then, Olivia said ESPN, the NFL and the NBA have all licensed the baseball-centric track — she finds it funny that MLB hasn’t yet — and she and Maye Star recently performed the song live for the first time at iHeartRadio’s headquarters in New York City.
It was the first time they had seen each other since recording the song. An emotional King also attended the performance.
“He said that he was getting teary-eyed,” Olivia said. “He’s a little soft.”
King’s teammates, including Aaron Judge, have also complimented the song, though no one has asked for their own custom walk-up or warm-up. Not that Olivia wouldn’t oblige if they did.
“My dream would be to write personalized songs for everyone on the Yankees,” she said. “That could be their shtick, which would be kind of cool.”
Even without requests from King’s colleagues, Olivia still makes music while also running an influencer marketing company with her husband, David. An independent artist, she has 146,458 monthly listeners on Spotify and tries to release one new song a month, or 12 per year.
Moving forward, Olivia would like to do more live performances, something she only occasionally dabbled with prior to the pandemic. But nothing beats hearing her song blaring in the Bronx while her brother pitches in pinstripes.
She tries to soak the moment in every time she experiences it.
“Not only am I watching my brother pitch for the New York Yankees; my song is playing as he’s doing it,” she said, still in disbelief years later. “It’s just so wild.”
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Originally published at Tribune News Service