Upside Down & Inside Out

Album: Hungry Ghosts (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This tune finds OK Go singer Damian Kulash in a state of confusion after the relationship he's in gets corrupted. He explained to Purevolume: "A lot of our songs over the years have been messages written to myself. Usually I'm trying to convince myself to stop overthinking everything and listen to my emotions more. This song is in that family; it's me pleading with myself to let the chaos of feeling win out over the safety of logic."

    "As a device, I imagined myself in an insane state that I once witnessed my girlfriend in. She'd taken an Ambien on a plane flight, but was for some reason fighting the urge to sleep, and she went crazy in a super beautiful and poetic way. She complained that her eyes were not doing what she told them to do. I asked her what it was she wanted them to be doing, and she replied, 'They should be helping me figure out where I am.' I asked her if she could make any guess as to where she was, and she answered, 'On a horse. (long pause) To make bread. I'm on a horse to make bread.' I imagined myself in that kind of logic-free soup of feelings and wrote a song to me, as that guy."
  • OK Go are well known for their elaborately staged visuals and this song's music video takes them to new heights – 35,000 feet up in the air. The clip features the band floating in microgravity on board a zero gravity Russian Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft.

    The apparent one-shot clip was shot in a single, 45 minute take but trimmed out portions during non-micro-gravity to the song's three-minute length. Two airhostesses from S7 Airlines, Tatyana Martynova and Anastasia Burdina, also perform various aerial acrobats with the band.

    Bass guitarist Tim Nordwind recalled in a Reddit AMA: "It was the craziest adventure I've ever been on. It was thrilling and terrifying. Zero gravity is such a foreign feeling that I'm still trying to figure out a way to describe the experience."

    "We spent three weeks outside of Moscow rehearsing and filming. Most people know that the zero gravity flights cause a lot of people to throw up. No one in the band nor Trish our director threw up. But there was a lot of throwing up around us from the crew. Almost 60 barf ups!"

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