Five People Playing One Guitar: Walk Off the Earth’s Viral Music Video
Using almost every inch of a single guitar, five musicians play a cover of Gotye‘s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The video, posted on 5 January 2012, gathered over 42 million views in 25 days.
The band responsible for the video is Walk Off the Earth, a Canadian rock band featuring Sarah Blackwood.
The video was taken in a single, uninterrupted shot. Walk Off the Earth explained its motivation for the music video in a tweet: “We wanted to shoot a video with everyone, but we only had one guitar at my house.”
The cover caught the eye of Ellen Degeneres, who invited them onto her show. “You won’t have to use one guitar anymore. We are going to give all of you Fender guitars and amps,” she told the band. “It’s a good thing you don’t play ukulele,” Ellen joked, but indeed they do — watch Sarah Blackwood catch a flying one in the band’s cover of Adele’s “Someone Like You,” another example of the group’s creative music video techniques.
The original musicians, Gotye and Kimbra, also know a thing or two about viral music — their official video, posted 11 July 2011, has reached almost 57 million views, with a leap alongside the Walk Off the Earth version. The original song hit #1 in Germany, and Gotye was recently announced as the only Australian act in the line-up for the Coachella music festival in April.
Both Gotye and Kimbra have expressed their approval of the Walk Off The Earth version, calling it “Hilarious and brilliant,” and “truly amazing,” respectively, via Twitter and Facebook.
While the rest of society seems to have such a preoccupation with control and ownership, it’s nice to see the spirit of collaboration between not only an original artist and cover band, but also between the five people impressively clustered around a single guitar.
the song is amazing in its own right! very, very cool
LOVE THIS
[...] week we took a look at that massively viral cover of Gotye and Kimbra‘s smash hit “Somebody That I Used to Know” by brilliant Canadian indie [...]