ok go (the interview)

Originally published in the Brock Press Febuary 25, 2003.

Critics (and by critics I mean me, about four weeks ago in this very publication) have called OK Go’s debut album the best record of 2002. Formed in Chicago in 1998, this ab fab foursome stand poised on the brink of stardom, with their first major hit clawing at the edges of mainstream consciousness, and the talent and gusto to back it up.
In the middle of a busy schedule of MuchonDemand (kicking Rick the Temp’s ass at ping-pong) and some airtime on The Edge before a recent show at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, lead vocalist and guitarist Damian Kulash sat down with the Press for a chat. In covering everything from the state of popular music to drunk ex-girlfriend stories, Kulash proved to be something of a rare commodity in today’s musical climate: dare I even say, down to earth?
The group formed after Kulash, a Washington D.C. native, moved to the Windy City and met up with childhood friend Tim Nordwind and they did what all good college males have done at one point or another: started a band.
“[Chicago] is a great music town,” said Kulash, “and I had many friends who I wanted to play music with; among them Timothy J. Nordwind and Andrew Scott Duncan who are now two of the members of OK Go. I’ve been friends with Tim since I was 12 years old, and Andy since I was 15, and we had always vaguely planned on having a band together but we always had school and that kind of stuff in the way. So they both wound up in Chicago for college having grown up in two different cities … and that was sort of winding up about the time I arrived in Chicago. So it all made perfect sense and we made a rock band and everybody was happy, and eventually we found ourselves in Canada, and we were rocking in Canada, and we were rocking all the way across the United States.”
While reading other press or biographies on the band, you can see a plethora of different influences being thrown around in trying to pin down the group’s sound, which is at once both extremely accessible in a familiar sort of way, yet also very unique. Individual writers, reviewers or interviewers all try to show off their large repository of miscellaneous musical knowledge in an attempt to classify OK Go, but the sound is slippery, and defies easy classification. When asked if he could narrow down the list — which can include The Pixies, The Beta Band, Elvis Costello, Weezer, The Promise Ring, even Queen — to the influences that the band themselves feel most completely represent their sound, Kulash was unsure.
“I’m bad at narrowing down the list actually,” said Kulash. “The fact of the matter is we listen to a lot of music, and don’t really model ourselves after anyone in particular. The Pixies were a huge influence on all of us growing up, but I don’t really think you hear that too much in the music to tell you the truth, but I think if we all had to pick a favourite band of all time, it would be the Pixies.
“We all listen a lot to Shudder to Think … Cheap Trick, The Cars, The Cure, and we listen to a lot of T-Rex, but I don’t know if we sound like them. There’s a lot of brit-pop that Tim and I listen to … and a lot of D.C. punk rock stuff; Fugazi, Shudder to Think again, Circus Lupus, and of course we’re all big straight up pop fans. A lot of Joan Jett, The Cars, Adam Ant, and all that shameless, exuberant rock that we grew up with.”
Next, Kulash discusses exactly what it feels like to see their first single, “Get Over It,” becoming something of a minor pop-culture anthem, playing everywhere from TV network bumper advertisements, to radio ads, to sporting arenas.
“It feels pretty great,” said Kulash. “I don’t want to seem all sourpuss-y or jaded in any way, but having seen from the other side how promotion works and how stuff winds up in a video game, or on MTV or MuchMusic or in a TV commercial or something, I think it’s actually gonna be 25 years until you can actually here ‘Get Over It’ and go ‘there’s an anthem.’ It’s everybody’s job to make it an anthem somewhere, and I’m extremely excited that it’s successful, but an anthem is not chosen by marketers. I mean, Queen is nobody’s marketing job anymore, it’s just who’s going to hear Queen and not want to stomp their feet or jump on their bed? All I’m trying to say is we haven’t earned true anthemic [status] yet, I’m just happy with the way it came out. I love the fact that they play it at sports games, that’s just perfect.”
But moving on to a discussion of how OK Go’s music has been received critically and popularly, Kulash talks about the sometime disparate reactions between critics and the general public. The issue came about when the group’s style of songwriting was criticized by various critics who call the album too simplistic or ineffectual. Kulash believes that simply because something is done in a pop style doesn’t mean that it has to be dumb.
“Obviously we’re aware of the fact that we’re making a pretty accessible kind of music,” said Kulash. “It’s not like we wake up every morning thinking we make really obscure high art music, and finally the whole world gets it. We know we’re writing accessible music, so our retort to such critics would be that all the music they grew up listening to is pop. I guess there are the snootiest of critics who can only reference Wire and not Led Zeppelin, and Zeppelin’s great, and the Beatles are great, and Jimi Hendrix and the Stones, they’re all geniuses, of course they’re great, but they also all wrote widely accessible pop music that everybody likes. It might seem like either the lowest brow, or the most ridiculously high-falootin’ aim, but it is our belief that accessible, exciting, happy, energetic pop music doesn’t have to be stupid.
“Well, Tim fucked up the first record,” joked Kulash. “No, but seriously, we recorded an album on our own, and all of those things you’ve read are kind of true, because everyone wants to extrapolate from what I’ve said that there’s some kind of deeper, darker reasoning for it, but really what happened was that this is sort of our greatest hits of our first 20 years of writing. There’s something Elvis Costello once said that I find myself quoting, that you’ve got 20 years to write your first record and six months to write your second.
Most of the tracks are the same tracks, we’d go through one by one and maybe say ‘we could do the drums better on this one,’ and that was sort of the case. We’d sat down to write a bunch of songs for the first record, and they all had to everything in them … but they didn’t sound like rock songs. They didn’t hit you in the gut first, you could really enjoy them in a cerebral way, but they weren’t emotional. So we wrote some new songs and we re-recorded a bunch of the older ones, we just wanted them to rock more. Our live show was this frenetic, kinetic, bouncing ping-pong balls on the stage sort of feeling, whereas our record was this overthought, overwrought, piece of work. We didn’t want a piece of work, we wanted a fuckin’ rock record.”
But, as to the most “important” question: how does it feel to be Carson Daly’s pick of the week?
“It’s a fairly surreal feeling, I think,” said Kulash. “Had that happened two and a half years ago or something before we’d ever like had seen anything else good, then I think I probably would have soiled my pants. But as it is it’s sort of like a notch in your belt.”
If Kulash and the rest of OK Go’s talent and plain old moxie are any indication, they’re going to need to buy some bigger belts to hold all the notches by the time this whirlwind winds down.

- Liam Dynes