{"id":1450,"date":"2010-09-12T16:14:10","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T23:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=1450"},"modified":"2010-09-12T16:14:10","modified_gmt":"2010-09-12T23:14:10","slug":"ok-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2010\/09\/ok-go\/","title":{"rendered":"OK GO"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK GO<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Here they come again, sounding more like themselves than ever<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dan Konopka, Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Andy Ross<\/p><\/div>\n

It was time for OK Go to get off the treadmill, literally and figuratively. The Grammy-winning video for the 2006 power-pop gem \u201cHere It Goes Again,\u201d which featured the foursome performing a wildly entertaining synchronized routine on treadmills, drew the kind of online traffic usually reserved for piano-playing cats. It\u2019s been viewed nearly 50 million times, but got the band unfairly pegged in some quarters as a novelty act. With its third studio album,\u00a0Of the Blue Colour of the Sky<\/em>, OK Go intends to prove that characterization wrong. We spoke recently with lead singer and guitarist Damian Kulash and bass player Tim Nordwind at Kulash\u2019s Los Angeles home.<\/p>\n

This album is a major detour from your previous two. Why? <\/strong><\/p>\n

KULASH: It comes from the same set of ideas, but our process was very different. In high school we listened to a lot of Fugazi and punk rock. That taught us that the way to write a rock song is to sit down with a guitar and figure out chord shapes. After two and a half years on tour for the last record, we\u2019d played a lot of that kind of music and it was very hard to get excited about it when we got home and it was time to write again. At the end of the tour, we were done not just with those songs, but with a way of working.<\/p>\n

After that, it took a year of writing before we were comfortable going in the studio.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This album sounds like it was <\/strong>built from the beats up.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kulash: Exactly. We\u2019d expended our guitar rock influences and that cleared the path for older, more root-level influences like Prince. You hear a lot of the music I listened to when I was 12.<\/p>\n

You write a lot of the band\u2019s <\/strong>songs together. How does <\/strong>that work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nordwind: We generally start apart and come up with bits and pieces and grooves, then play them for each other.<\/p>\n

Kulash: There\u2019s a back-and-forth once we get a few basic elements together.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cone plus one is two\u201d for hours, and then suddenly \u201cone plus one is sadness\u201d or \u201cone plus one is sex\u201d or melancholy or joy. It\u2019s still such a mystery to me that simple elements, a piano note or a drumbeat, added with one tiny other thing can induce so much communicative human emotion. This is both the happiest and saddest record we\u2019ve ever made. It\u2019s also the most all over the map\u00a0and the most focused\u2014and I know these things are obviously completely contradictory.\u00a0 This feels much more uniquely us than\u00a0our other records have. It makes me\u00a0think we\u2019re actually starting to sound\u00a0like ourselves.<\/p>\n

What did noted producer David Fridmann bring to the process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kulash: He\u2019s an incredibly trained engineer. He understands the physics of it and can break all the rules the way that he wants to. There\u2019s a lot of free-form experimentation.<\/p>\n

Was there a downside to <\/strong>the popularity of the <\/strong>\u201cHere It Goes Again\u201d video?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kulash: The short version is no. Do we already know we\u2019re one-hit wonders for the rest of our life? We do. There will be nothing that hits like that again. But it had almost nothing to do with a rock band. It was like a great weird art project where 65-year-old women were stopping Tim in Times Square saying, \u201cYou\u2019re the treadmill guy, aren\u2019t you?\u201d It opened so many doors. There was a time when we would walk homemade videos into our label and people would say, \u201cIf this gets out, you\u2019re sunk.\u201d Now people are like, \u201cCould you please bring us some more?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nordwind: People expect weirdness out of us more than they expect another treadmill video, which is a good place to be.<\/p>\n

\u2013Melinda Newman<\/p>\n

Jan\/Feb 2010 Issue of M Music & Musicians<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK GO Here they come again, sounding more like themselves than ever It was time for OK Go to get off the treadmill, literally and figuratively. The Grammy-winning video for the 2006 power-pop gem \u201cHere It Goes Again,\u201d which featured the foursome performing a wildly entertaining synchronized routine on treadmills, drew the kind of online […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[948,950,946,32,927,947,737,949],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1453,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions\/1453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}