They’re calling it Twelve Months of OK Go, essentially OK Go will cover a different song each month which will be given away as a free track to their newsletter subscribers. For September it’s the classic Oliver’s Army by Elvis Costello:
Damian remembers:
“When we first started the band (nearly 15 years ago now! holy shit!), nearly every gig we got was opening for someone else, and we realized that the position of the opening band is damned. The audience paid good money to see someone else, and either they think you’re similar (“rip-off!”) or dissimilar (“this is not what I paid for”), and mostly they want to hate you a little. So we decided we’d open every show with a peace offering: a cover.
We’d pick songs that everyone knows, and anyone with good taste likes, and we could all pay homage to something awesome collectively. Then the ice is broken and you can all be friends.
So we picked songs that were good for starting shows: songs that were upbeat, songs that everyone in the audience would know. But they had to be genuinely great, and not songs that were too current or too overplayed, because we didn’t want it to be ironic or snarky. Our first show ever (in Columbia, MO to five people), we opened with “Crimson and Clover.” Within a year, we probably had 15 covers to choose from on any given night. The Pretenders, The Smiths, Toto, The Specials, Simon and Garfunkel, and of course, Elvis Costello.”
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