If you’ve empowered vegetarians everywhere, collaborated with high-profile pop acts like Katy Perry and Ke$ha and harbor a not-so-secret love for singer Seal, then you have a little bit of an idea of what it’s like to be electronic-pop duo 3OH!3.
Taking their name from the area code of their native Boulder, Colo., the singers brought their cheeky music to the bay on Thursday, March 20, playing to students for the USF St. Petersburg Spring Fling concert at Jannus Live.
Composed of Nathaniel Motte, 30, and Sean Foreman, 28, the duo began their musical collaboration as 3OH!3 when they were college kids themselves.
“We started 3OH!3 when we were in college, so it makes a lot of sense to play for colleges,” Foreman said.
“Our live shows are more than just straight performances and more like parties,” Motte said. “I think it’s great to play colleges because that’s kind of the mind set. Sean and I went to school [and] we had a lot of fun.”
Fun is the name of the game when it comes to 3OH!3’s shows. Motte said, “We’ve always come out to our live performances, always wanting to be energetic and fun, and most importantly, inclusive.”
This mindset is evident in the duo’s signature hand gesture, two hands meeting in the middle to make a circle representing the band’s logo, which fans sport through shows.
“The hand sign is fun because when we throw it up, it’s something people can to do to interact with us,” Motte said. “It really does contribute to that inclusiveness.”
But not every effort to connect with a crowd has gone over well.
Before the band earned radio play for songs like “Don’t Trust Me” and “My First Kiss,” they played one of their worst shows, a promotional gig at an amusement park in Chicago, to a clueless audience of kids.
“We went and played at the music park to like, eight 10-year-olds that didn’t know anything,” Motte said. “It was very strange.”
The response in their hometown, however, has been just the opposite.
“Our hometown shows are always pretty amazing,” Foreman said. “There’s an amphitheater in Colorado that I would consider one of the best amphitheaters in the world. It’s called Red Rocks, and it was one of my goals in life to play it, and we played it, so that was really amazing.”
In addition to cranking out their own tunes, Motte and Foreman also pen songs for other acts.
“We’ve been writing so much for other artists in the past year,” Motte said, who co-wrote and co-produced Maroon 5’s “Love Somebody” with Adam Levine and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder.
“It is interesting to come back to our own music and find our groove. But for us, it always boils down to just getting in the studio, having fun and being creative; doing new things.”
“We try not to get too bogged down into the idea of what we’re making,” Foreman said. “It’s just about maintaining that and not over thinking a direction or a sound. Whether it’s electronic, hip-hop influenced, rock stuff, it’s kind of a part of what we do now.”
Their willingness to incorporate and try out different styles may be attributed to 3OH!3’s musical roots.
“We grew up listening to a lot of different kinds of music,” Motte said, who cited Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” as one of the best songs ever made. “We inherited our parent’s love of older stuff. Kind of on our own, we grew to like hip-hop and electronic music. I guess our music is the weird materialization of all of that.”
The bandmates’ parents also played a role in their early hijinks.
“The early days were interesting, I can tell you that,” Motte said. “It was less musically involved, and more [about] props. My mom would make fake blood for us. We were in college, and we would have sword fights and fake blood. They were theatrical.”
It’s not hard to imagine a younger Foreman and Motte jousting in jest on stage. This is, after all, the same 3OH!3 that danced around in loin cloths for their “Don’t Trust Me” music video.
“It actually ended up being the reason why we’re still here, because we had fun with it, and we didn’t get too uptight about it, how we’re supposed to look or [what] we’re supposed to do,” Foreman said.
“We took advantage of the fact that someone was giving us a stage to be on, because we were like, ‘What idiot would give us a stage and just let us run around on it?’ We like to just make it feel like we’re at a house party.”
Despite having garnered more than five million likes on Facebook and finding success with a triple-platinum single, Foreman and Motte are still the same crazy college kids who started making music in 2004 at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
“Outside of music, we love playing sports. I play a lot of basketball, and I like to climb; stuff like that. Just normal stuff,” Foreman said.
But, they’re still 3OH!3.
“Aren’t you skydiving in to start the show?” Foreman asked his bandmate.
“Skydive straight to zipline on,” Motte joked.
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Photos courtesy of USFSP Connect.
