Interview Date: 12/06/2009
Run Date: 01/07/2010
Interviews Home / Music Home / Bullz-Eye Home
Some bands dream of selling out Madison Square Garden, or winning awards. OK Go is not one of those bands. Their idea of a huge accomplishment is when a top fashion designer makes guitars especially for them, or when “The Simpsons” parodies one of their music videos. (That video, for their 2006 single “Here It Goes Again,” is creeping up on 50 million views on YouTube, for the record.) There are definitely benefits to not playing by the rules, and in doing so, OK Go has positioned themselves as one of the few bands on the scene today that can do pretty much whatever they want whenever they want. Has the album gone gold? Who cares?
With the band’s third album, the strangely titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, set for release in January – and don’t look now, but they just made another incredible, one-take video – Bullz-Eye caught up with OK Go singer Damian Kulash to talk about his love for both Prince and show tunes, and the perils of doing a somersault on a treadmill. Our interview was originally scheduled for 10:00 in the morning, but Damian was asleep when the phone rang. He begged for time to get some caffeine in his system, something we completely understood.
Damian Kulash: Thank you so much for giving me 15 minutes. I really appreciate it.
Bullz-Eye: Oh, no problem. As soon as they told me that this call was going to take place at 10:00 EST instead of 10:00 PST, I thought, “Bad idea.”
DK: Yeah, I’m in Miami right now at Art Week, you know? And 10:00 is really early for Art Week. Things don’t end until four or five in the morning, so it’s not my fault.
BE: Well, you just answered my next question, which is where you are. Have you got caffeine in your system? Are you ready to go?
DK: Yeah, I got my coffee and my water, and I’m, like, at least 20% now.
BE: Well, maybe that number will go up as we go on.
DK: Yeah. No, I’m doing great. I’m doing good here.
BE: For someone who hasn’t released an album in over four years, you’ve been quite busy. Why don’t you tell the people what you’ve been up to.
DK: Well, let’s see. Since the last record, we toured for two and a half years. We played 31 months without stopping and we made a new record. And now, in the last six months or so, we’ve just been making videos and getting ourselves into trouble. But right now we’re in Miami, debuting our laser guitars, which were designed by Fendi and Moritz Waldemeyer. They are covered in white leather and fur, fur that lights up and shoots lasers out of the head. It’s really exciting.
BE: Wow.
DK: Yeah, I mean basically we’ve had some really incredible opportunities to do things that aren’t sort of the normal band oeuvre, as it were. So we’ve been working with a lot of pretty interesting people. We just finished a video with the Notre Dame marching band, in which the video and the recording session were one and the same. The video is not to a pre-existing track; we actually set the whole thing up as a video but then recorded it live. That was really exciting. We’ve never done a video with 250 people in it before.
BE: So this is your “Tusk,” then?
DK: Yeah, this is our “Tusk,” yeah. I mean, I feel like “Tusk” had a very different production value expectation, let’s put it that way. We like things to sort of be funky so we make them that way. [Pause] Sorry, I’m on the beach and I figured there was probably no place more quiet and serene for an interview than the beach. So I got my coffee and came to the beach. And I drew a big picture in the sand for a friend of mine, and took a picture with my phone. There were literally two other people on the beach. And they managed, while I’m pacing around doing the interview, they managed to walk directly through my picture. Motherfuckers!
BE: Nice.
DK: It’s okay, I can draw it again.
BE: Well, let’s talk about the single [“WTF”] for a second. You reference Purple Rain in the press release, but I hear a little more Parade on this one.
DK: You think so? Yeah, I guess it is. I am much more a Purple Rain, well I shouldn’t say much more, I am vastly more familiar with Purple Rain because it was the second record I ever got and I have never stopped listening to it. It really is my desert island record. I think you may be right that this is a little…the Prince-y moments of this have a bolder, dancier, early Prince thing, but in my head it feels like Purple Rain.
BE: Nice time signature, by the way. It’s like “Long Distance Runaround WTF.”
DK: [Chuckles] Yeah, there’s a little bit of prog influence on the record. You know, when I was in college, I feel like all I ever wanted to do was make songs in weird time signatures. I grew up a huge Shudder to Think fan. They were my guiding light for several years. In fact, for more than several years. I think that I felt like part of what made them so unique was their ability to do things and change time signatures that didn’t actually feel wrong, or don’t feel awkward, you know?
BE: Right.
DK: If you can manage to get a sort of non-standard, odd time signature to feel natural, then the song sounds unlike any other you’ve ever heard because so few of them do that, you know? So for college age, I liked to make odd time signature dance songs all the time, and then this rock band happened. That sort of thing fell by the wayside for a while. It definitely has reared its head back up on the second in a few places. So I like it, it’s a nice return home.
BE: Unfortunately, I have not yet heard the rest of the album. What does the rest of it sound like? How much of an indicator is the single to what the rest of the album sounds like?
DK: Boy, not that much, actually. I mean, there is definitely more of a Prince influence elsewhere but obviously, you’re the writer, decide for yourself, but there is definitely a Prince thing going through. I think you may see the Purple Rain-ness elsewhere because it’s darker and a little broodier. There’s also a lot of …there is sort of like an ‘on the porch’ vibe, except your porch is in the Van Allen belt or something. It’s like very outer spacey, but a sort of jangly acoustic stuff with massive Dave Fridmann distorted drums kind of thing. There are very few distorted electric guitars on this record. It’s like it’s very beat and feel-driven. Which is to say the way I went about writing it…well, the way we went about writing it, I think Tim [Nordwind, OK Go bassist] and I, who do most of the writing, had a pretty similar process at the time, which was instead of sitting down with a guitar or a piano or something, and blocking out the structural elements of the song in trying to get from point A to point B, I just sort of sat down and played without the fundamental elements of the song, like one plus one suddenly equals 400 instead of what it’s supposed to.
BE: Ha.
DK: That’s the thing about music, when it works…what’s so frustrating about writing it – and fucking believe me, it is so fucking frustrating to write sometimes – is that you sit down with a guitar chord and a beat, you add them together and guess what you get? A guitar chord and a beat. Fuck that, you know? But then every once in a while, there’s some combination of notes or some two sound elements or some tiny thing, you add one plus one and you get sadness, or you get sex, or you get unadulterated joy, you know. And the fact that those things can come from these elements that shouldn’t rightfully be producing that is just so fucking magical. And so what we tried to do with this record is just look for those feelings first. So instead of like going for something with songs, it was really just sort of play with things until suddenly there is some weird, magical interaction and then chase that and figure out what the song is. So the songs are much more…like they are kind of based around these root feelings first, and then we sort of tried to choose songs out of them. It comes up to something that I feel like is pretty different than what we have done in the past. And even though I think it’s recognizably my sense of melody and my lyrics and stuff, it goes a very different place than our other records have.
BE: Let’s talk about the video for a second. How many treatments did you see before you decided on this one?
DK: Zero.
BE: Really?
DK: I should say zero or 60 or 80, or something like that. Most bands walk into the video office at your label and they’ve got six or ten treatments that they have pulled from directors that either you have approved or that they want you to work with anyway. And then you read through them and you pick the one you like, and then they give you some money to make a video. And then someone spends two weeks getting the production stuff ready, and the director shows up and the producer shows up and they make this video and you just sort of show up, lip sync along, and there you go. Our videos involve professional filmmakers as little as possible, because their reasons for making films…great videos are great videos but since there is no money in music videos, the professional filmmakers who are doing it are mostly doing it just to have a better calling card for making and producing commercials, basically. So they have to make videos in which the band looks awesome and everything fits a particular format, to show to their future employers how good they are at hitting their marks when they have to do a particular style. So with the way we make videos, we find people who we think will have crazy and interesting ideas and then ask them what they would do if they could make a music video, and then make it with them. Have you seen the making-of video for this video?
BE: I have not.
DK: There’s a pretty good description of how it all came together. If you go to YouTube…Google okgo.htf, as opposed to wtf, which is “how the fuck we made it”. I actually describe what happened. Tim literally almost got run over in a parking lot by another friend of ours, also named Tim, who does actually happen to be an aspiring professional filmmaker. Tim was like, ‘We just finished a record, we’re making videos” and [filmmaker] Tim was like, “Oh, I’ve got this great idea.” It was indeed a great idea and we made it. We have a big pot of video ideas that we want to make, many of our own and many of our friends’. Everybody who knows us knows that we are constantly on the prowl for ridiculous things to do. So when somebody comes up with an idea that has no commercial application elsewhere, that shit usually comes out first.
BE: How many takes did you need before you got it right?
DK: It was two days of filmmaking. The first was picking what song to do it to, because again, this isn’t the normal way that videos are made, but what we often do is if somebody’s got some great idea, we figure out which song it feels best to. Instead of saying, “Oh, this song is about a girl in love so let’s find a sexy girl and make her look like she’s in love.” So we knew we wanted to make this, but we had done a test with the director, where we snuck into the studio and just shot for two hours, three hours to see if the basic idea was going to work. Once we knew the basic idea was going to work, we booked two days of studio time. The first day, we literally listened to a snippet of every song on the record and just did stand-in moves to see how the effect and the feel seemed to match the pace and like the gestalt of the song, you know? And [“WTF”] totally stood out. We had not thought of this as being particularly apt for a single, but the disorientation of the visuals matched the disorientation of the beat so well, and it’s sort of like absurd, like hyper-saturated color and hyper-saturated oddity of the song. They are of the same type, they both made each other seem more like themselves. So we picked the song by, I would say four o’clock on the first day. And then we did choreography for it until midnight-ish. By the next day we were two-thirds or three-fourths of the way choreographed and we finished it in the morning and then shot…I would say I think we probably got like eight or ten full takes of it by evening. There were definitely only three that we were really picking from.
BE: Wow.
DK: Since you can’t obviously see what the video looks like in real time because those effects take three times’ real time to render, there is a lot of lag time when you do something. We had five cameras on set so that we could do something, and then we would try three or four ideas and by the time it got down with the fourth, the first was ready to launch.
BE: Did you have any misgivings about doing another one-take video? Those can’t be easy.
DK: No. I wish I could say that we had such strict, creative guidelines that this was like a rule, but for the most part what it is is like…I think of film, I think more in terms of it being a document, something the band is doing. I think one of the differences in the way that we think about videos is that I don’t feel like we are making a commercial for the song. So the one take-ness is mostly just like…I mean the challenge in making these…I think giving yourself limitations of something approximating reality, I mean obviously the effects in this make it very non-reality. You can tell that what’s happening in the video is actually being done by the band and is not sort of smoke and mirrors of filmmaking, you know? That’s just something that appeals to me in making videos in general, I think. In fact, we’re working on five different videos right now, and all but one of them are one-takes, I think. Yeah, all but one of them when they are eventually done will be one-takes. And again, it’s not a rule.
BE: I don’t know if the quote was from you or was from one of your band mates, but that working with Tor Johansen, on Oh No, he was a bit of a slave driver. How was working with Dave Fridmann by comparison?
DK: Dave Fridmann is…there is no slave driver element. Tor’s slave driver element was, is, more really an effect that he puts on for people, but one that is spectacular, so amazing. Dave is much more mad scientist, you know? He really loves to play and explore, so like a lot of what he makes can’t be duplicated even on the next take, because he really likes…well, just plug in something else; let’s try plugging that in backwards. There’s a lot of stuff like fucked up-itude, it’s a really infectious way of working. A lot of times Dave was like…our studio days were extensively noon to midnight. A lot of times he would leave from like eleven to midnight, we would just be plugging in these long strings of ridiculous effect styles or something and then he would leave and we would just spend like four hours just tracking a total absurdity. He would come in the morning and help us listen to it and pick out the 20 seconds we actually like, and move on. The reason his music tends to have, there is sort of a particular feel to it that’s kind of outer space-y, Led Zeppelin, I think is because of that. Like it’s very hard to be around him and not want to try to go weirder and farther and differenter, you know?
BE: Fucked up-itude, I think that’s my new favorite expression.
DK: Yeah, well it does fucking describe a lot, doesn’t it?
BE: I asked my Facebook friends if they had any questions for you. Are you ready?
DK: Yeah.
BE: Why did you name your album after the healing effects of the color blue?
DK: I named it after a book written about that. But the book is wrong, so…technically, what I named my record after is what I think is perhaps the most sublime poetry that I can think of. This fucking guy got a patent on the color blue. Come on, that’s amazing. The U.S. patent office actually verified his claim and said that it was the most important patent issued in the 19th century. This guy got a patent on blue light and he was not a charlatan. He may have been a quack, or his science was bunk and he wasn’t quite up to speed to figure out he was wrong. But he went to his death bed believing he had discovered, essentially, the life force, you know? And for two years the entire world believed him, and then of course they figured out he was wrong. But I feel like our record has…there are sort of these broad, sweeping claims all over our record and these attempts to be hopeful that are very clearly failing. The record was written such a dark time, both personally and globally, that it was hard not to be searching for ways to be optimistic and hopeful, and a lot of times the music seems to belie the failure of those attempts. I kind of feel like this guy, just trying to save the world and in the process getting a fucking patent on a whole color. I hope our record is of a feather. I’m not sure that I can actually say that it is, because who can touch the genius of getting a fucking patent on a color?
BE: (Laughs) All right, next question: “Ask them to do an entire show tunes CD.”
DK: It’s not actually going to be that hard to convince us to do that. But we’re not going to do…well, I guess we could do a variety of show tunes. Either I would do like, have you ever heard that Bryan Ferry record of standards, like…
BE: He’s done a bunch of those, actually. Are you talking about the most recent one?
DK: I don’t think that’s the one that I’m talking about. The one I know well I got maybe eight years ago or something like that. And I have since lost it and they don’t have it on iTunes and I never remember what I want when I get into a record store. And then a half hour later I realize what I went there looking for.
BE: I know which one you are referring to now. [Note: it’s called As Time Goes By.]
DK: Yeah, we could do something like that, and it could be really fun. But I think ultimately, [it’s] self-indulgence; if we were really going to launch ourselves into the wonders of show tunes, what we would truly do is we would do “Les Misérables,” the entire thing.
BE: Oh, awesome.
DK: That is the record that brought Tim and I together at age 11 and 12, respectively. We literally met playing ping pong, and within an hour or two, we realized what little homos we were, I guess. I mean, how we were both so into “Les Misérables” and I had never even seen it? My sister was obsessed with it and I picked it up with her obsession with the music, but I had never even actually seen the fucking play, but I knew every word to that by the time I was 12.
BE: “Les Misérables” on treadmills. I see a Broadway smash.
DK: I think my relationship with treadmills does not extend that far.
BE: Actually, that was one of my wife’s questions. How many ankles were sprained during rehearsals for “Here It Goes Again”?
DK: There were a lot of superficial injuries, mostly rubber burns, waffle tread bruises on our backs. Here’s one thing not to try: somersaults on a treadmill. You think that seems like a self-containing little machine, right? You just sort of keep rolling, the ground moves under you and you could just do it instantly. And in fact, that part is true, but it’s really super-painful. Really painful. Have you done a somersault recently?
BE: No.
DK: Because when you were four and you your skeleton is basically made of rubber, it doesn’t hurt. But now, if you do that, like rolling across your spine on the ground is fucking incredibly painful.
BE: I’ve got two little kids, and just crawling on the floor with them hurts.
DK: Yeah, well then don’t crawl on the floor with them on treadmills, because that will hurt more.
BE: Speaking of “Here It Goes Again,” you received what I consider to be the most prestigious of honors when “The Simpsons” parodied the video in a 2007 episode. Now how stoked were you when that happened?
DK: I was huge stoked, like a hundred and thousand percent. And that is certainly the highest honor that you can have achieved. I considered committing suicide so that I could die as happy as I was at that moment. That, and the Common song. There’s a Common song that references a girl being always on the treadmill like OK Go. It’s like being knighted, do you know what I mean?
BE: You and Common are both from Chicago. Did you ever run into each other?
DK: I have run into him several times, but never in Chicago. Twice in Los Angeles, just like in cafes and stuff. And then a couple of times we’ve played shows, like college shows, where we’re both on the same bill.
BE: I suppose you guys probably ran in different circles back then. I lived in Chicago when you guys came together, and I’ll admit that I didn’t keep close tabs on the local scene, but I never heard you until the first album came out. What clubs did you play most frequently?
DK: The Empty Bottle. There were two families that we were associated with in Chicago. The Empty Bottle and the places they owned. And then the Joe Shanahan empire, you know the Metro and Double Door. And both of them were very kind to us and gave us great shows. But the Empty Bottle is the first place we ever played in Chicago and sort of our home for a long time. We played there exactly once a month for a year, I think.
BE: Well, you have been very generous with your time and I’ll let you get on with your day, or go back to bed, or whatever it is you have planned. But because it’s the end of the decade, I wanted to get some lists from you: your five favorite albums were from this year, or from the decade. Or both.
DK: Oh boy, I’m not sure I can do that off the top of my head, but I will try. My favorite album right now, by orders of magnitude, I think this is like the best fucking record I have ever heard, is by the band Discovery. Have you heard of them?
BE: No.
DK: I’m guessing that they must be named after the Daft Punk record, because it’s electronic-y dance music, but with like a really pretty, sort of absurdly pretty boy’s voice, singing pop songs over it. It’s just gorgeous. It’s stunning. What led me to it was they do a cover of “I Want You Back,” the Jackson 5 classic. You think that there is no way they could do that justice, but they completely do it. It is so beautiful what they have done to it. And a friend passed that on to me, I liked it so much I got the whole record. And every second of the record is amazing.
BE: Well, that Daft Punk record is one of my favorite albums of the decade, so that’s a good tip. Thank you.
DK: That Daft Punk record ismy favorite record. Rolling Stone is doing this interview where they name the top 25 whatevers of the decade, and I don’t know how many will actually be there but there’s a few dozen people who get to vote, and this year I am one of them. And so I had to think very hard about what my favorite albums and what my favorite songs of the decade are. My favorite album is Discovery. I mean that record…sadly I had not yet heard the band Discovery when I had to make those votes, so they didn’t make the list. They should have, because those guys are so damned good. What were my other top albums? I mean of the decade, I would say Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco is right up there. What other perfect records are there? You send me an email and I will send you my top songs and albums of the decade. [Note: Damian’s picks are at the end of the interview.]
BE: That sounds great. Thanks so much for talking to us and have fun in Miami.
DK: My pleasure, man. I appreciate you being so flexible about the time.
BE: Oh, no worries.
DK: All right man, well, thank you.
BE: Ah, no problem. Thank you. Bye.
But the conversation didn’t end here.
We stopped the recorder, but Damian was still on a high from the events of the previous night, so we rushed to start the recorder again and continue chatting as long as he was willing. And so, we go back to Art Week…
DK: I have met the craziest, most intense people. Last night I dined with the 2004 women’s Korean ping pong champion. And she is a supermodel. She is like the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. She is a ping pong champion. Along with her two, sort of ping pong soul mates, I guess, these guys who run a ping pong club in New York. It’s unbelievable. And a guy who makes sails, who makes giant racing sails. Like he has a 5,000 square-foot hydraulic bed in the middle of nowhere Nevada, that he flies over, in a harness, with carbon fibers to draw along the lines of the strain lines on a sail. And he builds these massive sails. And fucking the list goes on and on. The insane collection of weirdoes that this place brings out is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
BE: Now, think back to when you guys put your first record out. Did you think that you would be saying what you just said, right now?
DK: No. Well, yes. No and yes in the sense that what was a real drag about the first few years of our career is that rock bands…there really is a path that the entertainment industry wants these rock bands to be on, because it’s predictable and they know how to market it. And so you have to be on the radio in a very particular way, and you have to do a set of…it’s like you have to exist within this a news cycle, except it’s the rock cycle, you know? And you do all of the same promotional opportunities. You do these festivals, and you play these club circuits and stuff. And it’s all fun stuff for a month or six months, but after a few years of it…I mean, first of all, there are not that many musicians who can hold a fucking conversation, you know? There’s certainly not a whole lot of, like, stoned dudes working at the back door of a club that are that riveting. I mean, sometimes there’s interesting people, but it’s basically one type of person over and over and over again. Like the grumpy dude in the crappy club, and that’s all you deal with for years.
We’ve had the incredible luck to have our craziest ideas be our most successful ones, so it’s done a good job of opening up crazier and crazier opportunities for us, so that eventually we find ourselves playing in the Fendi Design…I mean, Fendi? I still can’t figure out how this happened. So we have one of the world’s highest fashion friends building us leather and fur guitars, with lasers shooting out of them, and we’re playing at a design conference. That’s just vastly more interesting to me then yet another night at a tiny rock club, you know? I mean, we’ll do many, many tiny rock clubs this year and next year, and we obviously love playing rock shows. But the fact that these opportunities have sort of spiraled into a living for us…I mean, I go to bed with a grin on my face every fucking night because it’s so amazing, you know?
And, as promised, here are Damian’s Top 25 Albums and Songs of the 2000s.
Albums
1. Daft Punk: Discovery
2. Arcade Fire: Funeral
3. Elliott Smith: Figure 8
4. Jay-Z: The Black Album
5. Starlight Mints: The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of
6. Sade: Lovers Rock
7. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
8. Spoon: Kill the Moonlight
9. Sam Phillips: A Boot and a Shoe
10. Outkast: Stanktonia
11. Blonde Redhead: Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons
12. Radiohead: In Rainbows
13. Rufus Wainwright: Poses
14. Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
15. Mirah: Advisory Committee
16. Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
17. Kanye West: Late Registration
18. White Stripes: Elephant
19. Hives: Veni Vidi Vicious
20. Strokes: Is This It?
21. Cat Power: The Greatest
22. Nickel Creek: Why Should The Fire Die?
23. Mew: Frengers
24. Metric: Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?
25. My Morning Jacket: Z
Singles
1. Gnarls Barkley: “Crazy”
2. Modest Mouse: “Float On”
3. Beyoncé: “Crazy in Love”
4. Shins: “New Slang”
5. Imogen Heap: “Hide and Seek”
5. Outkast: “Hey Ya”
7. Bonnnie Prince Billy: “The Way”
8. Jay-Z: “99 Problems”
9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: “Maps”
10. Cat Power: “The Greatest”
11. Apollo Sunshine: “Magnolia”
12. Justice and Simian: “We Are Your Friends”
13. Wilco: “Hell Is Chrome”
14. MGMT: “Time to Pretend”
15. M. Ward: “Poison Cup”
16. Sam Sparrow: “Black and Gold”
17. The Streets: “Let's Push Things Forward”
18. Queens of The Stone Age: “No One Knows”
19. Quit Your Dayjob: “Coconut”
20. Guided by Voices: “Glad Girls”
21. Professor Murder: “Free Stress Test”
22. Missy Elliott: “Get Ur Freak On”
23. Califone: “Pastry Sharp”
24. Band of Bees: “Listening Man”
25. System of a Down: “Chop Suey!”
You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for content updates. Also, sign up for our email list for weekly updates and check us out on Google+ as well.