Wonderlick Premiere Their Far Out “Otis Redding’s Disco Album” Lyric Video

As a musical unit, Wonderlick approaches their songwriting with a cerebral point of view. You’ll be sure to take notice of that with their brand new single “Otis Redding’s Disco Album.” It comes from the duo’s new album Undisciplined, which will be released on April 5th. Right now, they are releasing one new track per month in the lead-up to the album’s release. The two previously released singles to this one were “Begin Again” and “Sob (Forever).”

This clip goes way above and beyond your typical lyric video with its futuristic-looking animation and its grand presentation. It’s well in line with Wonderlick’s big, bold approach to their music, with their sort of “never say never” attitude.

Discussing the song and the approach to the lyric video, Wonderlick states:

“‘Otis Redding’s Disco Album’ is about a Berkeley physicist who proves the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics when he finds a ’70s disco album by Otis Redding while shopping at Rasputin’s in Berkeley, California. We get really depressed when we think about all the amazing music that could have existed if Otis Redding hadn’t died far too young. Even though there’s a decent chance that music would have also included a mediocre disco LP, we really, really wish there were some way to hear it all. And once you start dreaming of an alternate universe where it does, it’s hard not to think about what else might be better over there (we’re pretty sure Hillary won the election in 2016, in that universe).

“Since we find lyric videos that include nothing but the words to the song typed over a static image (or, even worse, an otherwise blank screen) pretty uninspiring, we fed the lyrics into an AI video generator to see what would emerge. Some of the results were exciting. Others were atrocious, so we also mixed in some clips of people dancing, which felt appropriate. Total cost for the video was 14.99. Of course, that doesn’t count all the time (singer) Tim (Quirk) spent revising his prompts, or typing in the lyrics, or arguing with Jay (Blumenfield) about edits. If you add all that up it probably cost a couple million dollars.”

They add:

“A lot of artists like to rag on AI. Wonderlick do not include ourselves among them. We do think such engines should only be trained on public domain materials, or items that are duly licensed from the copyright owners. But beyond that we consider these things tools just like typewriters or guitars or sample libraries. None of the AI-generated sequences in this video would exist if the lyrics to the song hadn’t been written first. It’s fun seeing how robots try to visualize those words.

“Granted, it’s a lot more fun if you take some edibles before watching. But it’s some kind of fun either way.”

Undisciplined will feature twelve new eclectic tracks centred around the question of “What if Albert Camus wrote pop songs?.” Camus is, of course, the famous and widely respected French philosopher of the mid-20th Century. It speaks to their cerebral kind of songwriting. Quirk and Blumenfeld, former bandmates in Too Much Joy, wrote the album with the overarching rule of not saying no to any idea. No matter how bold, unconventional, or even outrageous, they must give that idea a try and see where it takes them. That approach seems to have guided them well, with a new album that will sound like nothing else you listen to this year.

Wonderlick ‘Undisciplined’ album artwork