The infectious nature of OK Go’s music seems to always be matched by a seemingly genius – and always quirky – marketing device. From the moment the group borrowed a friend’s camera back in 2005 to record some sweet dance moves (in a backyard) for the video "A Million Ways," OK Go has been a veritable Internet phenomenon. The buzz grew even more a year later with the music video for "Here It Goes Again," otherwise known as "that treadmill video." With such an amazing grasp on the cyber world, you might think the band would be hard-pressed to come up with fresh, groundbreaking ideas to promote its music. Of course, OK Go is not your average, every day band.
This December the quartet, along with the help of tech designer
Moritz Waldemeyer and fashion leader
Fendi, will be creating a stage show at the conference Design Miami/ (and yes, that slash is supposed to be there) that should push the envelope on what’s typically seen as your run-of-the-mill rock concert. Let’s just say there will be lots and lots of lasers. Musically,
OK Go will likely raise a few more eyebrows in January with the release of their next album
Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, which is fueled by a funkier
Prince-like style more than ever before. Singer/guitarist/idea guru
Damian Kulash recently talked with Ultimate-Guitar about
OK Go’s latest activities, which should likely inspire plenty of other musicians to rethink their latest marketing plans.
UG: The new songs on Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky definitely have a funkier feel to them. I recently read a quote stating that you believed the new material sounded more like what you’ve had in your head than anything you’ve written in the past. Can you elaborate on that idea?
Damian: Yeah. I probably always thought I was writing the thing that was closest to in my head. At least for right now, these songs are much more like me than anyone else we have made. It’s not so much that these songs have been fighting to get out and I was pursuing something else entirely. In high school I learned how to play guitar after hearing Fugazi and Jawbox and punk rock bands. For me, that kind of shifted to other kinds of guitar rock. It took several years of touring and sort of hitting a lot of power chords and playing in front of a lot of big amplifiers to get that out of my system. These songs, they sound a lot more like what I was listening to as a little kid or a weird amalgamation of the things I heard at 14.
"My internal self critic has a lot less power over these songs and I had a lot more fun with them here."
It was much more the latter. It took us a lot of time to write this record, and we wrote 106 songs. Not all of them were finished. A lot of them were just like a beat and a chord progression. When we got back from touring on the last record, which was 31 months in a row and two-and-a-half years of nonstop shows, I got focused. I pulled myself into my own studio thinking that I’ll have all this energy and I’ll be so ready to go. It’s not like I was out of practice, but I had changed so much as a person and a musician. All of my go-to beginnings, like sitting down with the guitar, weren’t making stuff that was that exciting for me anymore. It wasn’t like I knew what the direction was. I just kept on trying to write songs through the process that I normally used. They didn’t seem real because they sounded like me covering me. It was like me trying to drum up this version of myself from a few years ago. It just didn’t make any sense. There was a lot of trial and error and teeth pulling and bashing heads against walls. The things where I allow myself a lot more creative lateral space and sort of move sideways, I start thinking they’re totally wrong. There are songs where I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t for the band anyway.” It was like I was just getting them out of my system or something. But in each decision, I don’t look back like, “Was that wrong?” My internal self critic has a lot less power over these songs and I had a lot more fun with them here.
The first single “WTF” features some amazing sounds and tones. Can you give us an idea of what we’re hearing in that song?
Yeah. That bass sound is a P-Bass through a Z.Vex. I don’t have it here, so I can’t look at the knobs. There’s one that is all the way up and one’s all the way down, but I can’t remember which is which. So it gets this totally crazy, nasally sound. That bass was recorded in my garage, and it took some time to get the insane white noise feedback out of it. The sound was so wildly overdriven. I had to cut a lot of bits of the white noise. The weird sounds that start it before you hear the bass sound, that’s actually my voice. I was using a Pro Tools LE system and was running way too many effects, and it kept crashing. So it was crashing while I was recording the vocals takes. You get this weird, stuttering kind of background. While it was recording the crash, it recorded that little bit. So I took lots of little chunks of it for the intro.
The funk guitar sound is a guitar that I bought at a shop in New Orleans for $75. It sort of looks like it’s a mix of four or five different Fenders. It’s kind of somewhere between a Strat, a Tele, and a Jaguar. It’s vaguely Fender-shaped, but it’s really not a Fender. It’s some knock-off. I think it had been through the flood because there was also water damage. It’s made out of plywood, which I discovered when I brought it to a guitar shop in L.A. where I had it fixed. I had new pickups put in there that were supposed to sound like P-90s, but they don’t at all. It has this sound that is somewhere between a Tele and a Strat, but I’ve never heard another guitar like it. It has some sort of midrange tone to it that makes it not entirely sound like that kind of Strat-y, clean Jimi Hendrix sound.
Is that guitar used on quite a bit of the album?
Yeah. That guitar is on a lot of it. It’s one of my two main guitars. It’s great because you always dream about walking into a junk shop and finding some beat-up, old guitars and having them be great. Everybody thinks they’ve got some rare, wonderful thing. It took $300 or $400 of repairs because it was so incredibly beat-up, but you totally don’t need a guitar from 1956 for it to sound good. There are plenty of great sounds out there. They don’t all have to be an Archtop.
You’re about to undertake a pretty impressive live show at Design Miami/, which is going to incorporate a laser system designed by technologically inspired designer Moritz Waldemeyer. What are the specifics involved with that show?
We met Moritz while playing a show in London. Smirnoff was a sponsor of the show. They were like, “We’re going to give you guys a budget to do something just crazy. We know you guys will come up with something that we wouldn’t have.” It was wonderful because we got to make these suit jackets that had LEDs in the back of them. There was animation that runs with it. So basically we hooked it up to the sound system and when we walked onstage, things would show up across our back. It was really super-fun. We worked on these in London with Moritz, who is a German-born designer who has lived in London for eight years. He’s a super-creative, wildly intelligent guy who lives between all of these different fields. He’s an electronic designer and you could also call him a conceptual designer, but he’s also purely an artist. We just got along with him so incredibly well.
So we’ve been dreaming years of making these laser guitars. The guitars themselves, they have lasers out of the headstocks. So it’s kind of like an extension of the strings. We talked about this back and forth for a couple of years. Fendi, the ultra-fashionable, Italian designer and Design Miami/ approached Moritz originally and said, “We want to do an event that would be something that no one has seen before.” He was like, “Well, I have an idea. I’ve been talking with this band for awhile and we want the guitars to do this.” They were just awesome. The head designer for Fendi and Moritz got together, and they talked about what a Fendi guitar should look like. We asked Gibson if they would build guitars for us because they have been wonderful supporters. Gibson gave us some guitars, and Fendi covered them in leather and fur. Moritz then covered them in LEDs and lasers.
We’re performing once per day at the Miami conference. There’s a wall behind us while we’re playing. There’s actually a rear-projected screen. Say my guitar has red lasers coming out of it, then it will leave a big, red stripe behind me every time I play the guitar. We showed Moritz the new video where there are sort of things trailing behind us and he was like, “We’ve got to do that with the guitars in Miami.” I haven’t yet gotten to see one of the guitars finished. We’ve been sending images back and forth to track their progress, but they’re in Italy right now working on them.
"Gibson gave us some guitars, and Fendi covered them in leather and fur. Moritz then covered them in LEDs and lasers."
It opened a whole new world for everyone else. We as a band have always been trying to chase down our crazy-ass ideas. The thing that unites OK Go and makes it easy for us to make decisions together and get along and work together is to have the opportunity to chase down our creative ideas. We love music, but we don’t particularly want to have to write the same song over and over and over again. So every time we have an opportunity that makes us say, “Wow, I’ve never thought of that before” – then that sounds like a story I’d want to tell my grandkids. That’s the thing that makes us go.
Seven years ago it was pulling teeth to get any of these things to happen or to get anyone to allow us to do them. Either from a corporate perspective, a legal perspective, or a label, you’re in a rock band and people want you to act cool all the time. They don’t want to put their time or their energy or resources into something that might be perceived as dorky or different or whatever. That’s crazy. The only things that ever succeed in music or art or any creative endeavor are things that are different and surprising and interesting and new in some way. Seeing from the perspective of a record label, it’s the exact opposite.
If you’ve got Pearl Jam selling, you have to find yourself the other 30 bands that have singers that sound exactly like that. The last thing you’re going to do is put the money on the guy who is dancing in his backyard. You’re certainly not going to be like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea!” There’s a lot of money you could lose. I remember when we first turned in our backyard dance video to our label, the person whose job it was to promote that, his word-for-word response was, “If this gets out, you’re sunk.” There’s a whole different crew of people who work on the label. This was years ago before people realized the power of videos on the Internet.
I’m not saying that we had this all figured out. It’s not like we had some big Machiavellian game plan. We did know that if you make cool shit, crazy shit, shit that people aren’t expecting…if we like it, our friends will like it. If our friends will like it, then our fans will probably like it. That’s why a band exists. That’s how a band exists. There are people out there who like your shit. I don’t think any of us had any idea that our video could be downloaded 50 million times or that dancing in our backyard would be an Internet sensation. At the same time, why not?
What would you recommend to new bands in terms of marketing? Are methods like YouTube and webcasts still viable methods?
At the end day, make cool shit. It’s so ridiculously oversimplified. It’s true that YouTube is no longer outside of the box or cutting edge. It’s become the main medium for videos. People make their videos for YouTube now, not MTV. Music videos had to exist for a very particular reason, and they would be released on that show Friday Night Videos or whatever. People made videos that made sense in that format. Now that world doesn’t really exist anymore. So we’re thinking of new ways like events, something like a totally insane performance. Instead of shooting a video ourselves, you have 1,000 people show up with flip cameras and that’s your video. Then you have 1,000 handmade shots. You don’t get what to control what they’ll look like, except you get to control the performance. So is that a video? Is that an event? What is that? It doesn’t really need a name. It’s just a cool idea. Things are exciting. Thinking about it like, “I have a band and I need to figure out a clever marketing plan” – that will always fail. If you look at it like, “I have a band and I want to make cool shit” – if you’re really good at that, it will market itself.
As far as the musical performance goes, what is your background?
The first real training was as a violin student as a very young child. I started when I was in the second grade. I hated practicing, so I never got good at it at all. So I gave that up by the time I was in fifth grade. When Tim and I were 12 years old at summer camp, we decided we wanted to start a rock band. Seeing as we had never played guitar at all before, it was my experience with a string instrument, the violin, that made me the guitarist. I picked up the guitar and tried to figure it out. When I was around age 16 I started taking lessons. It was the same thing. I loved playing, but I hated practicing! So I never got very good.
Throughout my life, I’ve gone back and forth. I’ll sporadically take lessons at guitar and piano. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten past three or four lessons. When I got to something that was actually hard to figure out it’s like, “Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow.” I’ve only gotten moderately competent because we play every night. Now I have to practice every day because we’re onstage for an hour-and-a-half every day, if that constitutes practice. In high school and college I took music theory class. I’d learn the basic counterpoint and total harmony. I don’t read music very well. I can hack my way through it like a second-grade Spanish student would. I write a lot of music, but I don’t ever write it using notation.
"We as a band have always been trying to chase down our crazy-ass ideas."
Yeah. Keep in mind that Brown is an institution that prides itself on being forward thinking. I sort of had a double major at Brown where I did Cultural Theory and Visual Arts. With my Visual Arts, I wound up doing music for it. I wrote a lot music that wasn’t notated. I did a lot of electronic music and recorded music. I did win a compositional prize for it, but it was not me versus the classical students.
The new record is set to launch in January. Is it safe to assume you’ll have another big tour in store?
We’ll be doing a lot of touring, but we’re hoping to link it up with other projects a little more. We’re making a ton of videos for this record. We’ve already started on five of them, and we hope to keep going. Most bands shoot a video in a day or two after the production company has worked on it for a month or two. Because we make our own, we have to put in that pre-work ourselves. Usually it takes like a month or two. We’re going to try and keep ourselves a little more sane. Being on the road for 31 months, it wasn’t fun at the end of it. It took a long time for us to feel creatively energetic again. It’s pretty evident that we actively pursue things that don’t really fit the known record cycle schedule. If we can find weirder, crazier things to do than just get in a van and play the same six clubs, then we will.
Interview by Amy Kelly
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2009
