“Conan O’Brien Channels ‘Mad Stranger’ in New Dawes Music Video”

Folk-rock band Dawes is releasing a new music video later this week that features a familiar face from the late-night scene: Conan O’Brien.

O’Brien stars in the video for “Mister Los Angeles” – and although it’s a serious song, O’Brien is at his classically comedic best in the performance.

Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith wanted to capture the “spirit of Los Angeles” in the video and told People magazine that it was the band’s idea to ask O’Brien to play a “crazy stranger” in their planned story play.

In the video, Goldsmith arrives at the wrong audition location and ends up trying out for O’Brien. O’Brien’s character doesn’t correct him, but rather makes increasingly absurd comments about his performance – from instructing Goldsmith to smile more and adding a feather boa to turning the Dawes frontman into a human puppet.

Eventually, O’Brien himself takes the stage and shows off his own guitar and lip-syncing skills to help a temporarily incapacitated Goldsmith finish 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 replies. “You should move on now.”

“When we were trying to come up with a video idea for this song, we didn’t want to recreate the lyrics verbatim, but still wanted to capture the spirit of Los Angeles,” Goldsmith said. “The idea of ​​a mysterious audition in front of a crazy stranger played by Conan O’Brien seemed to work perfectly.”

O’Brien and the band have recently formed a close friendship. Earlier this summer, Dawes served as his backing band for O’Brien’s (mostly) serious performance at the Newport Folk Festival. Although Dawes appeared as a musical guest on TBS’ Conan Five times between 2011 and 2018, Goldsmith told People that it was the Newport Folk gig that led to the band and O’Brien becoming “fast friends” — and eventually music video collaborators.

“I reached out to him to see if he would be interested,” Goldsmith told People magazine, “and he kindly jumped on board.” He is truly one of the nicest and absolutely funniest people I have ever met “I met him, so it was a really amazing experience for us.”

Since retiring from Late Night, O’Brien has taken on several acting roles and appeared in Curb your enthusiasm, Strange: The Al Yankovic StoryAnd Please Do Not Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain. In June, it was announced that he had accepted his first dramatic role – a small role in the upcoming A24 film If I had legs I would kick you. There is no word yet on when this film will be released.