OK Go is a power pop punk band consisting of vocalist/guitarist Damian Kulash, guitarist Andrew Duncan, bassist Tim Nordwind, and drummer Dan Konopka. They just released their latest album, Oh No, produced by Tore Johansson who has worked with Franz Ferdinand and The Cardigans.
Check out the official site for OK Go
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Tim, what are you up to?
Tim Nordwind: Im in Los Angeles, California. We start the new tour soon.
DRE: You excited?
TN: Im very excited. I cant wait. This is the second big tour. We were recently out with the Kaiser Chiefs. Weve been doing some radio shows. We did Lollapalooza this summer.
DRE: I went to Lollapalooza this year, it was fun.
TN: It was. It was extremely hot. About 110 degrees with 90 percent humidity.
DRE: Is there pressure on you guys to deliver with this album?
TN: I think theres always pressure to do well. Thats my political answer. But we can only make as good a record as we can make and hope that it takes with people. That is pressure. But it never stops so you have to live with it.
DRE: Where does the pressure come from?
TN: We put a lot of pressure on ourselves and last year there was a lot of pressure on ourselves to write songs that we liked. That was actually harder than we thought it would be. We were on tour for two years for the first record and we thought wed come back and have two years worth of great songs welled up in us. But then we got home and all of a sudden we started writing again and no one liked what they were writing. We didnt know what to do. Luckily, we started doing it enough that we got in a groove and started getting a sound that we liked but we wrote somewhere between 60 and 80 demos for this record.
DRE: Oh my God!
TN: Yeah, most of which we hated.
DRE: Thats not a good thing.
TN: It is and it isnt. Maybe not for Led Zeppelin, but for a band like us, one in every five or one in every ten songs you write is one that everyone can go, yes thats a good song. It just kind of takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what we like and we wrote about 60 to 80 songs and pared that down to 20, which we went to Sweden to record and then pared that down to 13 that we put on the record.
DRE: Did you go over to Sweden specifically to work with Tore Johansson?
TN: Yeah he has a three year old daughter so he couldnt leave to come to the States. So he basically invited us to come to record in Sweden.
DRE: Whose idea was it to go with Tore?
TN: It was us. Wed been big fans of his for awhile. We really liked the record he had done with The Cardigans. Then we really liked the Franz Ferdinand record that came out the year we were looking for producers so we sent him a handful of demos. He wrote back and liked it a lot.
DRE: What does he bring to the table?
TN: Our first record was purposefully kind of a hi-fi over-produced, sugary sweet studio production and this time around we wanted to something that was more along the lines of how we sound as a live act. The Franz Ferdinand record had a simple, raw and live sound to it that sounds almost dangerous. I think thats what he brought to the table. We did most of the record live and he just has a good ear for sound and he would just kind of putz around on really crappy amplifiers until we got a great sound out of it. Our drummer used a six dollar snare drum that he purchased at a garage sale and Tore wouldnt let him tune the drum. He wouldnt let us record with foot tracks or anything which gave it a really live feel.
DRE: What made you all decide to go with that less polished sound?
TN: Three years went by between the first record and the second record. I think we had all grown up a little bit more and started listening to different things. We were listening to stuff like The Pixies, The Clash and Fugazi which all has a very live feel to it.
DRE: What were you listening to on that first album?
TN: The first album was more like Queen and Cheap Trick and stuff like that. So we purposely made a highly produced sounding record. This time we just sort of listened to things that werent as highly produced and were into that.
DRE: Tim Nordwind is kind of a Dungeons and Dragons type name.
TN: Nordwind is actually a German last name. But it does get mistaken for a Nordic name. It means North Wind in German. My family were sailors.
DRE: How do you keep up the sailing fight?
TN: I was absolutely terrified of sailing as a child. My mother had a small boat which I refused to set foot on. So I think Im the end of the line.
DRE: What happened on this boat that you were afraid to set foot on?
TN: I was just afraid Id fall off.
DRE: You were afraid of falling off the Earth?
TN: [laughs] No, I was pretty aware that the Earth was round at that point. I was afraid of falling off the boat into the water. I was not a strong swimmer.
I have a brother but Im not sure if hes into the whole nautical thing now or not. But I am the youngest of the family and I think the sailing stops with me. Unfortunately. Sorry Dad.
DRE: OK Go has a real sense of humor which youve been criticized for. Where did that attitude come from?
TN: Some people like it, some people dont. I think weve just always enjoyed having fun at our own expense. I think the attitude itself comes from the fact that [lead singer] Damien [Kulash] and I have known each other since I was 11 and he was 12. We met at summer camp and became best friends. Weve been doing stupid things together since 1986 and it just hasnt really stopped.
DRE: Was it a music camp?
TN: Basically it was an arts camp. Funny enough, neither of us went for music. He went for visual art, I went for theater.
DRE: So it was an artsy fartsy camp.
TN: It was the highest band-dork artsy fartsy camp you could get.
DRE: The highest of the fartsies.
What made you all decide to do those monthly appearances on Air America?
TN: They more or less came to us and asked us if we wanted to do it. We were just doing podcasts on our website and we thought this might be a good way to do podcasts on the road. It worked out nicely.
DRE: Was it politically motivated at all?
TN: I think they came to us because we were politically involved during the election last year. The biggest thing we did was Damien wrote a 15 page manifesto to other bands called How Your Band Can Fire Bush. It was inspired by the fact that the right wing is pretty well organized and they have a lot of institutions where they can go and preach their word. In the last election there was a big push to appeal to younger people. When big bands are on tour, theyre in front of anywhere between 500 and 20,000 people depending on how big your band is. In the rock and roll world you would hope that a lot of those kids are leaning to the left. The point of what Damien wrote was that you dont have to know everything in order to spread the word about how you feel about politics. So the manifesto gave a bunch of facts that the bands could use if they wanted to talk to their fans about the election. It got sent to a bunch of bands and managers and labels and stuff like that.
DRE: How did the Million Ways to Be Cool video come about?
TN: It wasnt meant to be a video actually. We usually end our shows with a choreographed dance to one of our own songs. We were learning a new dance and we decided to record it to see what it looked like. We recorded it and passed it around to a couple friends at the show to show them what we had been up to. So its just us dancing in a backyard. Pretty soon it was on the internet and then it was the number one most watched video on myspace. Entertainment Weekly was writing about it and all that. So it has become our first single.
DRE: Its like a naturally born single.
TN: People ask me how we convinced the label to use this video. I basically said it was the other way around. Were sort of following the video and not the other way around.
DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?
TN: A website full of hot girls I would love to date.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official site for OK Go
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Tim, what are you up to?
Tim Nordwind: Im in Los Angeles, California. We start the new tour soon.
DRE: You excited?
TN: Im very excited. I cant wait. This is the second big tour. We were recently out with the Kaiser Chiefs. Weve been doing some radio shows. We did Lollapalooza this summer.
DRE: I went to Lollapalooza this year, it was fun.
TN: It was. It was extremely hot. About 110 degrees with 90 percent humidity.
DRE: Is there pressure on you guys to deliver with this album?
TN: I think theres always pressure to do well. Thats my political answer. But we can only make as good a record as we can make and hope that it takes with people. That is pressure. But it never stops so you have to live with it.
DRE: Where does the pressure come from?
TN: We put a lot of pressure on ourselves and last year there was a lot of pressure on ourselves to write songs that we liked. That was actually harder than we thought it would be. We were on tour for two years for the first record and we thought wed come back and have two years worth of great songs welled up in us. But then we got home and all of a sudden we started writing again and no one liked what they were writing. We didnt know what to do. Luckily, we started doing it enough that we got in a groove and started getting a sound that we liked but we wrote somewhere between 60 and 80 demos for this record.
DRE: Oh my God!
TN: Yeah, most of which we hated.
DRE: Thats not a good thing.
TN: It is and it isnt. Maybe not for Led Zeppelin, but for a band like us, one in every five or one in every ten songs you write is one that everyone can go, yes thats a good song. It just kind of takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what we like and we wrote about 60 to 80 songs and pared that down to 20, which we went to Sweden to record and then pared that down to 13 that we put on the record.
DRE: Did you go over to Sweden specifically to work with Tore Johansson?
TN: Yeah he has a three year old daughter so he couldnt leave to come to the States. So he basically invited us to come to record in Sweden.
DRE: Whose idea was it to go with Tore?
TN: It was us. Wed been big fans of his for awhile. We really liked the record he had done with The Cardigans. Then we really liked the Franz Ferdinand record that came out the year we were looking for producers so we sent him a handful of demos. He wrote back and liked it a lot.
DRE: What does he bring to the table?
TN: Our first record was purposefully kind of a hi-fi over-produced, sugary sweet studio production and this time around we wanted to something that was more along the lines of how we sound as a live act. The Franz Ferdinand record had a simple, raw and live sound to it that sounds almost dangerous. I think thats what he brought to the table. We did most of the record live and he just has a good ear for sound and he would just kind of putz around on really crappy amplifiers until we got a great sound out of it. Our drummer used a six dollar snare drum that he purchased at a garage sale and Tore wouldnt let him tune the drum. He wouldnt let us record with foot tracks or anything which gave it a really live feel.
DRE: What made you all decide to go with that less polished sound?
TN: Three years went by between the first record and the second record. I think we had all grown up a little bit more and started listening to different things. We were listening to stuff like The Pixies, The Clash and Fugazi which all has a very live feel to it.
DRE: What were you listening to on that first album?
TN: The first album was more like Queen and Cheap Trick and stuff like that. So we purposely made a highly produced sounding record. This time we just sort of listened to things that werent as highly produced and were into that.
DRE: Tim Nordwind is kind of a Dungeons and Dragons type name.
TN: Nordwind is actually a German last name. But it does get mistaken for a Nordic name. It means North Wind in German. My family were sailors.
DRE: How do you keep up the sailing fight?
TN: I was absolutely terrified of sailing as a child. My mother had a small boat which I refused to set foot on. So I think Im the end of the line.
DRE: What happened on this boat that you were afraid to set foot on?
TN: I was just afraid Id fall off.
DRE: You were afraid of falling off the Earth?
TN: [laughs] No, I was pretty aware that the Earth was round at that point. I was afraid of falling off the boat into the water. I was not a strong swimmer.
I have a brother but Im not sure if hes into the whole nautical thing now or not. But I am the youngest of the family and I think the sailing stops with me. Unfortunately. Sorry Dad.
DRE: OK Go has a real sense of humor which youve been criticized for. Where did that attitude come from?
TN: Some people like it, some people dont. I think weve just always enjoyed having fun at our own expense. I think the attitude itself comes from the fact that [lead singer] Damien [Kulash] and I have known each other since I was 11 and he was 12. We met at summer camp and became best friends. Weve been doing stupid things together since 1986 and it just hasnt really stopped.
DRE: Was it a music camp?
TN: Basically it was an arts camp. Funny enough, neither of us went for music. He went for visual art, I went for theater.
DRE: So it was an artsy fartsy camp.
TN: It was the highest band-dork artsy fartsy camp you could get.
DRE: The highest of the fartsies.
What made you all decide to do those monthly appearances on Air America?
TN: They more or less came to us and asked us if we wanted to do it. We were just doing podcasts on our website and we thought this might be a good way to do podcasts on the road. It worked out nicely.
DRE: Was it politically motivated at all?
TN: I think they came to us because we were politically involved during the election last year. The biggest thing we did was Damien wrote a 15 page manifesto to other bands called How Your Band Can Fire Bush. It was inspired by the fact that the right wing is pretty well organized and they have a lot of institutions where they can go and preach their word. In the last election there was a big push to appeal to younger people. When big bands are on tour, theyre in front of anywhere between 500 and 20,000 people depending on how big your band is. In the rock and roll world you would hope that a lot of those kids are leaning to the left. The point of what Damien wrote was that you dont have to know everything in order to spread the word about how you feel about politics. So the manifesto gave a bunch of facts that the bands could use if they wanted to talk to their fans about the election. It got sent to a bunch of bands and managers and labels and stuff like that.
DRE: How did the Million Ways to Be Cool video come about?
TN: It wasnt meant to be a video actually. We usually end our shows with a choreographed dance to one of our own songs. We were learning a new dance and we decided to record it to see what it looked like. We recorded it and passed it around to a couple friends at the show to show them what we had been up to. So its just us dancing in a backyard. Pretty soon it was on the internet and then it was the number one most watched video on myspace. Entertainment Weekly was writing about it and all that. So it has become our first single.
DRE: Its like a naturally born single.
TN: People ask me how we convinced the label to use this video. I basically said it was the other way around. Were sort of following the video and not the other way around.
DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?
TN: A website full of hot girls I would love to date.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
doolittle:
i love that video for a million ways, i watch it randomly and just crack up. good stuff.
mhyque:
THIS JUST IN: FUN "ENJOYABLE."