Watch Unknown Mortal Orchestra Bring Soulful ‘Multi-Love’ to ‘Late Night’
Unknown Mortal Orchestra stopped by Late Night With Seth Meyers to deliver a soulful rendition of “Multi-Love,” the title track from the band’s new LP. For the performance, frontman Ruban Nielson delivers his lovelorn lyrics while sitting atop a white Yamaha piano as the rest of the band build the Multi-Love highlight around him. The Late Night visit concludes with Nielson uncoiling a sparse, mournful guitar solo.
As Nielson revealed in interviews in the lead-up to their third album Multi-Love, the song and the album were inspired by a three-way romantic relationship between himself, his wife and another woman.
“I wanted to start living a more subversive dream,” Nielson previously said of Multi-Love. “No more hospitals and other strange beds. No more hanging out with my kids with a leaking nose. I wanted to put danger aside and focus on love. A new kind of futuristic multi-love. Not some hippie bullshit, but a hard-edged, cynical, and sharp kind of love. Got to keep it hard-edged or it becomes invalidated.”
In July, Unknown Mortal Orchestra further explored the themes of Multi-Love with their kaleidoscopic music video for the single “Ur Life One Night.” The visually stunning, Manoj Jahson-directed video was inspired by traditional Asian art, and as Nielson told Rolling Stone, “I was really obsessed with working with a director in India because it seemed crazy that they have the biggest film industry in the world and yet I’d never made a video there. I feel really privileged to have connected with Manoj and to have this video.”