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."

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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