Folk rock band Dawes are out with a new music video late this week that features a familiar face from late night: Conan O’Brien.
O’Brien plays a starring role in the video for “Mister Los Angeles”—and while it’s a serious song, the performance finds O’Brien at his most classically comedic.
Wanting to capture the “spirit of Los Angeles” in the video, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith told People magazine that it was the band’s idea to ask O’Brien to play a “crazed stranger” in the story they envisioned.
In the video, Goldsmith arrives at the wrong place for audition and winds up trying out for O’Brien. O’Brien’s character doesn’t correct him, but rather gives increasingly absurd notes on his performance—from guiding Goldsmith to smile more and adding a feather boa to the mix, to turning the Dawes frontman into a human puppet.
Eventually, O’Brien takes the stage himself, showing off his own guitar and lip-syncing skills to help a temporarily incapacitated Goldsmith finish out the song.
“So how did I do?” Goldsmith asks O’Brien at the end of the video.
“I don’t know. I’m not really a music guy,” O’Brien responds. “You should move on now.”
“As we tried to come up with a video idea for this song we didn’t want to act out the lyrics literally, but we still wanted to capture the spirit of Los Angeles,” Goldsmith said. “The idea of a mysterious audition in front of a crazed stranger who is being portrayed by Conan O’Brien seemed to do the job perfectly.”
O’Brien and the band have recently struck up a close friendship. Earlier this summer, Dawes served as his back-up band for O’Brien’s (mostly) serious set at the Newport Folk Festival. Although Dawes appeared as a musical guest on TBS’ Conan five times between 2011-2018, Goldsmith told People that it was the Newport Folk performance that led to the band and O’Brien becoming “fast friends”—and, eventually, music video collaborators.
“I reached out to see if he’d be interested,” Goldsmith told People, “and he graciously jumped onboard. He’s truly one of the kindest and THE absolute funniest person I’ve ever met so this was quite an amazing experience for us.”
Since retiring from late night, O’Brien has taken several acting roles, appearing in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain. In June it was revealed that he’d accepted his first dramatic role—a small part in the upcoming A24 film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. No word yet on when that film will be released.
