Trying something new isn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence for OK Go. In fact, the opposite is usually true for them. Ever since the Chicago-based band arrived on the scene with their viral sensation video for “Here It Goes Again”, they’ve continually taken unlikely steps to forge their own path, be it in music or business.
2010 was just the latest series of unique moves for a group that has made a career out of doing things differently. Of the Blue Colour of the Skywas a critical success. The music videos for the album’s singles all followed OK Go’s unique brand of combining the physical and the experiential. They even broke contact with EMI to create their own label, Paracadute. What’s the icing on top of this splendid cake? How about a musical parade through Los Angeles? Yeah, that’ll do it. We got on the phone with singer and guitarist Damian Kulash to discuss the parade, the videos, and what next year holds for the band.
How did the idea for OK Go’s parade through Los Angeles come about?
It came about at the end of our last album cycle. We had toured for about 31 months and were coming off of two very large opening tours where we were the main support in 15-20,000-seat arenas. We were playing essentially the same 45-minute set every night for months at a time. Playing to thousands of people, we were growing ever more disconnected from the thing we were doing because it sort of felt like a job. At the end of this cycle, I went to New Orleans to do a bunch of political work and walked into some second line parades. I was smacked in the face with how music can be an experience and not just a product.
As professional musicians, and even as music consumers, we tend to think of music as recordings. For 100 years, we’ve gotten into this mode where recordings are what we think of music as being. Shows are just a promotion for that, and videos are just an advertisement for that. Songwriting itself is just a way to have an album. When you walk 5 or 10 miles through New Orleans with 200 people who are just banging on pots and pans, dancing, and wearing crazy costumes, it’s like the glue that keeps society together. It’s so beautiful that it has nothing to do with the industry of music. We were thinking if there’s any way to do that in rock and roll. We realized that we could use GPS tracking as an art medium rather than just a reflection of where you had been in your day.
What type of performance are you planning? Will it be a standard OK Go set, or are there a few surprises on the way?
The main problem is that normally everyone knows the same song. In Los Angeles, that’s not necessarily the case. What we’ve done is we’ve picked our 15 simpler songs and sent chord sheets out to a bunch of our friends who we knew would be there. We made a songbook of about 50 songs, none of them being OK Go songs. It’s from all genres of the last 50 to 100 years. So there’ll be Elvis songs, The Beatles, Al Green, [John Mellencamp’s] “Jack and Diane”, “When the Saints Go Marching In”, and other stuff. Hopefully, we’ll have a little body of communal knowledge. We’re going to give everyone a little keychain with laminated chord changes on it, so anyone who wants to join in can follow along. We don’t care much about the songs being played accurately or well. We care about it being fun.
What are you hoping those who come to the parade will get out of it?
What we’re hoping people get out of it is actual music experience. We’ll get to enjoy music as a thing that connects people and live it as an emotion rather than a product. We’re trying to get the experiential joy of music to a public place.
You recently posted your music video for “Last Leaf”. It’s very different from the other videos you’ve released for this record. You guys don’t appear in it, and it features rapid photos of toast to create a storyboard. Why did you move in that direction?
It seemed appropriate to the song. We’ve done a lot of videos in a particular mold that follows the thread of choreography in weirder and weirder ways. It started with just dancing in the backyard, and we started thinking about what it was we loved about classic systems like that. Like, why is dancing so amusing and thrilling and so fun? We realized it has a lot to do with why music is. You get these systems of discreet action when the whole is much bigger than the sum of its parts. In music, you add a chord progression to a drumbeat, and out of the other side, hopefully you get joy or melancholy or some sixth dimensional combination of emotions you could never possibly describe.
In dance, it’s sort of the same thing. One person walking along is just one person walking along. But two people walking along in exact sync suddenly generates this crazy feeling. So we’ve been thinking about other systems that do that. That’s how we got into the Rube Goldberg machine [from “This Too Shall Pass”] and all sorts of different things where we’re trying to come up with a group of collaborative systems. We realized that animation itself can be that. What we wanted to do is bring animation back to a very physical place. We’re all so used to seeing animation that when you see Gumby move, you don’t see a series of a hundred Gumbies. You see this fluid thing. We thought that if we made the animation on something visceral where each frame is a loving, produced object, you would see that collaborative system again.
We worked with Nadeem Mazen and Ali Mohammad from Serious Business Design, and they spent a million hours burning this stuff. I can’t thank them enough for doing that. We were on tour the whole time, and there were hundreds and hundreds of hours of burning toast and laser-etching. I think it came out really beautifully and provided a way for us to get into music that we often don’t make videos for. We have a lot of contemplative or sad music that we never really made videos for, because the ideas we’ve had don’t line up with that type of music. It was nice to do something that revealed a different side of how we make music and how we feel about music.
OK Go is known for very complex and physical videos. Out of all the videos you’ve done so far in your career, which has been the most difficult,which is your favorite, and why?
The most difficult from an endurance perspective was the “End Love” video. Each take was 21 straight hours, we were sleeping in a park in the middle of it, and geese kept pecking at our faces. It was not a comfortable evening. But that video only took a few weeks of preparation. The Rube Goldberg machine took months and months of preparation. So it depends on what you’d call difficult. I think the least comfortable moment was some time during the middle of the night during the “End Love” shot. The thing that seems farthest from possible but actually wound up happening was either the dogs [“White Knuckles”] or the Rube Goldberg machine.
If I had to pick favorites, I think the dogs and the Rube Goldberg machine were the two videos that took the longest and I developed personal relationships in. I can’t tell you how fun it is to go to the set for a couple weeks straight and just play with dogs. One of the things we try to do is work as much as we can with real humans who have good ideas. On “White Knuckles”, the entire crew was 12 dog trainers, my sister, and a couple people to operate the camera. The band and my sister have made so many films together that technically we’re professional filmmakers, but the spirit in the room was definitely just “Let’s play with dogs!” That doesn’t really happen on most music video sets.
After all the craziness of 2010, capping it off with a parade through Los Angeles, what does OK Go have planned for 2011?
First, we actually have a show in L.A. on November 27th. We hope to document this parade and actually show it at that concert. We’re doing radio shows and holiday festivals around the country throughout December. In February, we’re beginning a collaboration with the Pilobolus Dance Company in New York. I don’t know when the fruits of that labor will come into existence. I think we’re going to do a performance in New York in July and August 2011. I’m speaking at two conferences, one on the music industry in January. I think we’re also doing some shows in Europe in February. We have a couple more video projects planned, and our hope is to get back in the studio by the spring. We haven’t released any truly new music in a while, so we want to make some for the next few months.
OK Go is currently working on a collaborative arts project as part of the Pulse of the City campaign to launch the new Range Rover Evoque.
