Odesza will bring the curtain down on its final cycle when “The Last Goodbye Finale” tour kicks off with two shows, Friday and Saturday, at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles.
The final shows of his 2022 album cycle for the Grammy-nominated “The Last Goodbye” are the biggest of the artist’s career, with nine dates including stops at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden and the picturesque amphitheater. Gorge in his home state of Washington. .
The eclectic EDM duo of Clayton Knight and Harrison Mills have no identifiable radio hits. However, since 2012, they have built one of the most fervent fan bases in electronic music with four studio albums, a handful of singles and EPs, and constant touring.
Starting out as like-minded college students at Western Washington University in 2012, the pair have become a globally known symbiotic partnership living in the space between rave culture and the pop arena.
Influenced by both the Beach Boys, Moby and Animal Collective, Knight and Mills traverse decades of recorded sound to create soundscapes through samples and soaring vocal characteristics that range from heavenly to heavy, both sonically and emotionally. Their music has taken them from small clubs to top-tier performances and headliners at festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits and Bonnaroo.
The music comes to life through a cinematic production that has few parallels in modern concert presentation, creating sensory overload through large-scale images, bursts of fire, laser marquees, confetti cannons and, what has been become the duo's live signature, an epic Drumline that provides percussive hits and mind-blowing entertainment.
Odesza will pay tribute to everything they've done in their career so far with the finale, which they say will be the longest show they've ever produced. Recently, The Times spoke with Knight and Mills about the album and what inspired it, their creative process, what fans can expect from the finale, and more.
Odesza seemingly levels up with each album cycle. With the creation of the album “The Last Goodbye”, what were you trying to do and convey?
Mills: We are always paying attention to evolution. It's really important for us to change and move forward and not rest on our laurels too much. But we don't want to lose what makes us who we are. We're really focused on trying out a lot of ideas and seeing where it takes us. And then the things that stay tend to be the light that guides us. If we keep gravitating towards a song, it becomes our goal.
That's a big reason why “The Last Goodbye” was our first single. It's this great travel route. It pushes a lot of sounds we were trying to make before, and also new things. We used that as a basis for deciding what this record means. What is the journey we are trying to take? What is our new sound?
We were trying to answer those questions for a long time during COVID. We wanted to look back and not feel like we were trying to lean into the sadness there. We wanted it to be hopeful and feel like something that would bring people together when the world opened up again.
Gentleman: Headphone records have been a big part of what we've leaned on. And of course, we love to enjoy music that way. This one is definitely a little more dance-oriented and started with the idea that you want to play it with your friends and be in those communal spaces because that was a very important aspect coming out of the pandemic.
You can listen to the snippets, family recordings and stuff. That was a starting point for us, just looking back and seeing how we got to where we were and who made us who we are. Many of these songs began as odes to our family and friends. We wanted to have that discovery and be a little more vulnerable than we have been in the past.
Mills: A big part of the record was trying to take these things from the past, make them modern, but also do it our way, adding our own unique touch. It's pretty hard to do that and not ruin good music. For example, Bettye LaVette and [the song] “The last good-bye.” It's such a powerful and incredible record that you want to respect it and do it right. Getting his blessing through all of this was an amazing experience for us.
Gentleman: There's a lot of Moby references everywhere: kind of golden era of electronic music, like Boards of Canada, Four Tet stuff. We really tried to go back to what we fell in love with in the first place, add our touch to it and bring it a little more into the modern world. So, we use sampling techniques and then try to use as many modern synth elements as possible to give it this combination of two worlds. It was definitely a big task. But something we really enjoy doing.
“We are always paying attention to developments. “It’s really important for us to change and move forward and not rest on our laurels too much,” says Mills.
(Julián Bajsel)
Listening to Catacombkid and BeachesBeaches (Knight and Mills' pre-Odesza solo projects), you were doing similar things separately and then you found each other. How serendipitous or strange was it to almost find your musical mirror?
Mills: Yes, it's a lot of love at first sight. I feel like it's strange, because you say musical mirror, but I think we are super different, but equal. That's what makes this work: we push each other in different directions, but it's for the same goal.
And that combination is really powerful. That's what excited us when we met and were playing together. He would add something I would never have added. But then he made a lot of sense to me once I heard it. And I think we were doing that back and forth. And you feed off that energy.
I spent the entire summer driving back to Bellingham. [Washington], where we went to school, just to keep playing with Clay because it felt so special. We both thought we were going to have to get real jobs very soon. So it was like our last hurray. And that was our first album.
Gentleman: We both went to Western Washington University. He's very focused on the band. There is a lot of folk rock, even a lot of punk. We were the only ones who were really leaning towards electronics.
Cheryl Waters of Seattle radio station KEXP said their sound feels like the Pacific Northwest. How would you explain that to people who haven't been there?
Mills: Due to the weather, you're usually stuck inside. So it harbors a lot of creativity, just by being inside. I think we've spent a lot of cloudy, rainy days and us in our rooms trying to make music and experimenting with noises and stuff.
Gentleman: Climate is a very important part of our environment. I think we write very well when you're crouched. But there is this longing for this warmth, longing for these shiny things that you just don't get from the weather. So we put it in music to create some kind of feeling.
Mills: We are fighting seasonal depression.
You create arena-ready music with pop hooks and emotional elements that people latch onto. How do you choose your collaborations?
Gentleman: When we started collaborating with vocalists, we would just do random vocal sessions with writers. And we hit a wall here and there, because the music didn't come together in a genuine enough way.
What we started doing is working with artists that we really wanted to work with, regardless of size. Honestly, the smaller, maybe a little less well-known artists, they're not as locked into one sound. They are a little more willing to explore and push their limits.
“This [album] It's definitely a little more dance-oriented and it started with the idea that you want to play with your friends and be in those communal spaces because that was a very important aspect of coming out of the pandemic,” Knight said.
(Julián Bajsel)
Odesza is known for the live show. How did your show evolve to where it is now and how do you expand it for an ending?
Mills: It all started when we did our first show. We had no idea how to do a live show. We find [an] Ableton template for how to make a live set. And then we started to build on that.
While that seems wrong and silly, what it really did is it allowed us to not only have the freedom to keep changing it, but also learn in real time what works and what doesn't work, how to adapt our sound, how to change. our sound.
Now I think we've done enough shows where we can start to imagine what things will be like live. And because we've slowly built this community of people who want to see us, I think they're more willing to indulge in these more cinematic or theatrical things that we're trying to convey.
Because we're fans of film and soundtracks and all that other stuff, and getting into the music, we just try to emphasize it in the live show. We are very lucky that people are present on that trip.
Gentleman: There's always something to prove to us on some of these stages, because we didn't have a huge single to fall back on, that we could play at the end, where no one really cares what you do for the rest of the set. …Everything has to be good. People have to walk away saying, “What the fuck did I just see?”
