OK Go delivers moving music video call for unity during coronavirus crisis
All Together Now came about after singer Damian Kulash's personal experience with COVID-19.
OK Go is a band famous for delivering improbable and delightful music videos featuring treadmills, walls of printers, electric unicycles and weightlessness. Their new video for the song All Together Now isn't about being flashy. It's about hope in the time of coronavirus.
The refrain holds a message of unity: "Everywhere on Earth, every single soul, everyone there is, all together now/ And everyone alone all together on the precipice/ All that mattered then, all that matters now, all that matters after the world shuts down/ All of it dissolved all together in the chrysalis/ Together in the chrysalis."
The chrysalis reference was inspired by an essay from historian Rebecca Solnit published in The Guardian in April. The piece is titled "'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope."
OK Go singer and songwriter Damian Kulash shared a letter detailing his own experience surviving COVID-19. His illness was relatively mild, but his wife Kristin fought a frightening battle. "As she convalesced, I struggled to keep up with our 2-year-old twins, and there were times when her breathing was so labored I worried she just wouldn't wake up," Kulash wrote.
Kulash's family recovered, but left the singer contemplating a scary and unknowable future. "But for me, as this new strain of anxiety has spread, it's brought an incongruous companion: a new breed of hope," he said.
Inspired by his neighborhood's nightly cheer for essential workers, Kulash remotely pulled together his bandmates to write and record All Together Now.
There are no gimmicks, just footage of the band creating the tracks for the song, but it carries a tremendous emotional weight. This may simultaneously be OK Go's most stripped down and poignant music video ever.
