“We didn’t want to act out the lyric literally, but we still wanted to capture the spirit of Los Angeles,” frontman Taylor Goldsmith tells PEOPLE
Taylor Goldsmith is ready to take over Hollywood, and it’s up to Conan O’Brien to grant him the keys in Dawes’ new music video for “Mr. Los Angeles.”
PEOPLE has the exclusive premiere of the hilarious new video, which finds the folk-rock band’s frontman auditioning for a talent manager portrayed by O’Brien, who is ultimately not who he says he is.
While the musician describes the song as “just poking a little fun at parts of LA culture knowing full well that it’s applicable to a much larger swath of my generation — all while admitting my own complicity in the nonsense,” he tells PEOPLE that he and his brother/bandmate Griffin Goldsmith wanted its music video to capture the “spirit of Los Angeles.”
“As we tried to come up with a video idea for this song we didn’t want to act out the lyric literally, but we still wanted to capture the spirit of Los Angeles. 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,” Taylor tells PEOPLE.