Before it soundtracked its viral treadmill video, OK Go‘s “Here It Goes Again” was just a song. That song first appeared on OK Go’s 2005 album, Oh No, which was released 20 years ago Saturday.
The video was originally supposed to be set to a song called “A Good Idea at the Time,” which turned out to be a bad idea.
“It just didn’t work,” frontman Damian Kulash tells ABC Audio. “So we’re like, ‘Well, let’s try some other songs,’ and we played other songs off the record, and this is the one that fit.”
Since “Here It Goes Again,” OK Go has become known for their elaborate videos. Nowadays, OK Go plans their videos to be more explicitly tied with its song as opposed to the see-what-sticks approach they took with “Here It Goes Again,” which led to the song unintentionally being tied to treadmills forever.
“We’re lucky to have this thing that has carved out a different part of the music industry for us, and we get to do these art projects that nobody else gets to do, and I could not be more thankful for it,” Kulash says. “They’re the, like, the ship that takes our songs off into the world.”
“But,” he continues. “There is a thing where it’s, like, ‘Here It Goes Again,’ you have to actively shut off your mental picture of us jumping around on treadmills to hear that song a different way now.”
While OK Go is at peace with how the world sees “Here It Goes Again,” some longtime fans make it known they got it pre-viral fame.
“Go look at any of our YouTube comments,” Kulash says. “Like, two to six percent of them are someone being like, ‘Been a fan since before the treadmills!'”
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