The One Moment

Album: Hungry Ghosts (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Aware that their relationship is not going to last forever, a man urges his lover here to enjoy the moment.

    And this will be
    The one moment that matters
    And this will be
    The one thing we remember
    And this will be
    The reason to have been here
    And this will be
    The one moment that matters at all
  • OK Go were already playing this song live before the release of Hungary Ghosts and it quickly became a concert favorite. Vocalist Damian Kulash told Purevolume:

    "This one has become one of the most cathartic and satisfying moments of the show for me. The particular flavor of yearning and release feels extra transparent on stage. It almost feels like the sound disappears and there's just a direct emotional download from stage to the audience. It's a great feeling."
  • The video is mostly made up of 325 big and small events shot in a matter of 4.2 seconds then slowed down. That segment is followed by a 16 second real-time section, and the clip ends with a short slow motion scene.

    "What we wanted it to be was a contrast between the harshness of the outside world and the beauty of that one moment," Kulash told Radio.com. "The verses are about how the most beautiful thing, but the most tragic thing, is how fleeting and how temporary everything is. So take this moment and do something with it! So, what we wanted this video to do was to pull apart a moment of absolute chaos, which even verges on violence. And then to unpack that moment to reveal that it's beautiful inside."
  • Asked by Artist Direct what inspired the band to create a video that captured an entire track in a few seconds, Kulash replied:

    "The song itself is so much about those moments in life when you feel the most alive. When Tim and I wrote the song, it was very much about the moments, a prayer for those moments when you feel most alive and when everything changes.

    I don't think we had any idea when we wrote it that it would be coming out at this time when everything has just changed maybe not for the better, but it's still to me… there's so much treading water in our lives and then there are these moments when everything changes, when everything goes good or everything goes bad, every thing lives inside that one moment.

    We're always trying with our videos to embody the sort of feeling of the song like that and hear it was really wonderful to make that so literal. We made the most chaotic and confusing and almost violent moment we could, so we could unravel it and show how insanely beautiful that moment can be on the inside - how much information can live in such a small spot."

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