OK Go Channel "Purple Rain" On Funky January LP "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky"

OK Go are promising fans a fresh, funkier sound on their new album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, due January 12th, 2010. The band broke out with their unforgettable Grammy-winning viral video for 2006 hit "Here It Goes Again," and as they told RS in February, they've spent the last few years embracing their inner Prince. "There's a lot of Purple Rain on this record — an album I haven't stopped listening to since I got it when I was 11," singer-guitarist Damian Kulash said in a statement. "It's not so much that we headed in a new direction. I think we've just expended the guitar-rock ideas from our teens and we're starting to get at more root-level influences."

The new record includes groovy cuts like "Skyscrapers," "All Is Lost," "White Knuckles" and the Paisley Park-indebted "WTF?" As for the album's title, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky is taken from an 1876 book — Augustus James Pleasonton's The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky — that advertised that all of life's ills could be cured by blue light. Although Pleasonton's theory was proven incorrect, the same spirit of experimentation pushed OK Go into new ground musically.

The band recorded Of the Blue Colour at the secluded Fredonia, New York studio of producer Dave Fridmann, whose credits include the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin and MGMT's Oracular Spectacular. "We were there to work, and for weeks on end it snowed and we just lived in the bubble with our songs," Kulash said, noting the band worked up more than 100 song ideas.

As Rolling Stone reported yesterday, "Shooting the Moon," one of the songs from the Of the Blue Colour sessions, will end up on the soundtrack for the upcoming Twilight sequel New Moon. "Shooting the Moon" tells the tale of an astronaut involved in a conspiracy, and songs on Of the Blue Colour are equally imaginative — some deal with hope and heartbreak, while one track features a man who trades places with his reflection.

"I think it sounds more like us than anything else we've done," Kulash said. "It's more like the music that's in the back of my head, just out of reach, that I've been trying to get to for so long."

Related Stories:
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• "New Moon" Track List Reveals New Music From Thom Yorke, Killers, Muse
• VIDEO: OK Go at the VMAs

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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