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= Not OK! (song) = "Not OK!" is a song by American alternative artist Chaz Cardigan. The song was recorded for Cardigan's debut EP Vulnerabilia, and served as its lead single.

Background
"Not OK!" was written by Chaz Cardigan and Todd Clark in 2018. Cardigan has explained that the song was written after he'd started regularly attending therapy. “I was in this really intense place of picking apart some of my bad habits, the walls I felt like I kept coming up against," he says. "So instead of feeling down on myself or feeling guilty for these things in my life I didn't like, I would think, why am I this way? And then in that unpacking, realizing that, actually, no one knows what we're doing. There's no magical level you get to in life where it all starts to make sense. So why pretend that we're put together? That’s what it’s about for me.”

Music Videos
The single was originally accompanied by an official video directed by Al Kalyk. . The video featured Cardigan in a bathtub full of gummy bears. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a "quarantine edition" video was released, directed by Will Kindrick. The re-imagined video featured footage of Cardigan, his band, and fans shot entirely on mobile phone cameras.

Background
Cardigan self-released a series of singles throughout 2018 that continually were placed on Spotify's New Music Friday editorial playlist. Within an 8 month span these songs accumulated 1 million streams. A quick rise in streaming numbers and a series of sold-out hometown shows attracted the attention of several record labels. On the writing of Vulnerabilia, he's said: "It’s wild, actually: as a Pop music scene started forming in Nashville, every writer in town that didn’t work on country music sort of got thrown under that umbrella.  My background is more rock and indie stuff, and I was suddenly working in rooms with electronic producers, which was a really cool creative period — I got some really cool songs from that year and I was just excited to put them out even if they were a little more electronic-sounding than I was really focusing on.  So everything that felt a little more immediate I put out as a single, and everything that felt more like a body of work I kept and worked on together.  Through ’18 I would test songs out by slipping them in and out of set lists at my shows, and the EP became whatever resonated the most on stage."

"Towards the end of 2018 I spent 2 weeks in my bedroom carving out the sound of the EP and producing the songs, and then I was really lucky to finish the vocals and some of the trickier sounds with Jamie Liddel." He's commented that the title was imagined after a silent retreat at a monastery, and that it means "a collection of personal moments".

Like his previous work, Cardigan self-produced and played every instrument on the EP. It was completed before Cardigan was signed to Capitol Records, and at one point was planned as an independent release. . The EP was preceded by the lead single "Not OK!", Cardigan's first song to receive radio play.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EP was announced alongside tour dates with Cardigan's label mate Barns Courtney.

Personnel

 * Chaz Cardigan - production, all instruments
 * Jamie Lidell - additional production, engineering
 * Jon Kaplan - mixing

Vulnerabilia
Category:Indie rock EPs Category:2020 debut EPs