An Interview with Damian Kulash (OK GO)

6 February 2010 by Max Easton

Having shot to success off the back of a couple of incredibly well crafted and choreographed viral music videos, LA four-piece OK GO cemented themselves as one today’s most unique entertainer’s. Making their way out to Australia for the Playground Weekender festival in February to tour their latest album ‘Of the Blue Colour of the Sky,’ Max Easton called in for a chat with front-man Damian Kulash.

I swear to you, I made none of this interview up. Reading back over the first half of it gives me shivers of cease and desist notices stemming from a lazy fact checking job…but it’s all true, I have it on tape. Speaking to Damian Kulash from Sydney to LA is an event unto itself. Here’s a guy who has been writing a whole array of minor indie hits for over ten years with his band OK GO, yet is currently fraternising with Engineer’s from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. I’m not gonna spoil this interview by wasting time introducing it or trying to jazz it up artfully and cohesively, I’ll just throw you the cold hard transcript of an interview with a guy from a band who make incredible, incredible things.

Max Easton (Soulshine): Hey Damian, what are you up to?

Damian Kulash (OK GO): I’m actually trying to buy cheap books…uh…I’m building a machine...with lots of engineers for a video, so we need crappy parts from junk shops. I had some time off and thought this interview was starting in 15 minutes, so I’m just rushing to a bookstore to buy all these crappy books. I just loaded my car full of like, 200 books.

ME:  Wow…well that’s some great multi-tasking man…

DK: Oh yeah…perhaps at the other end of this you’ll hear me unloading them into our warehouse. We’ve got two floors of this warehouse dedicated to this massive machine. We’ve been building it for four months and the shoot happens on Thursday, so we’re getting really close.

ME: Wait, where are you now?

DK: Uh, in Los Angeles.

ME: And when are you Australia?

DK: The 12th…so we shoot this on Thursday and fly out on Friday.

ME: Are you typically that flat out busy?

DK: Well yeah. But I enjoy it this way. This album we’re trying to do less of the get in the van and go, less tour non-stop for two and half years kinda stuff and doing more two or three weeks at a time, coming back to do a video and then out again. It’s nice to have the stops and starts. When I’m home things are crazy ‘cause we’re working on videos, but these projects are really fun. You know – working with twenty engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion labs…they’re like super super nerd Engineers and we’re building this massive machine. It’s the type of project that I would have no excuse to do if it weren’t for a rock band.

ME: [Laughs] You’re livin’ the dream.

DK: Haha yeah, I guess. The funny thing is…most bands actually hate making videos, they see them as advertisements, they kinda loathe having to deal with the record label or whatever , but we don’t let our record label make them, we just make them ourselves and it’s so fun. It almost feels a little bit like a racket. Once upon a time these videos had to be an advertisement, so they had to deal with all these commercial concerns…but now, all we have to do is be interesting. So anything that seems fascinating to me could be a decent video. So we get to spend a couple of weeks each month on some crazy project. We just finished one with the Notre Dame marching band…we’re doing one where we’re doing a single shot that’s three days long…

ME:  Three days!?

DK: Oh yeah…it’s gonna be really fun.

ME: OK GO have always really embraced the multimedia, with TV, the internet, video games and whatever…how did you get onto all these forms of media? Was it something you really set out to do to get your music heard?

DK: Yeah, kind of. [Damian completes the purchase of 200 books.] Thank you very much. Um...well, Tim and I have known each other since we were 12 years old and have been doing crazy projects together since the day we met…so a lot of it has been music, but it’s less about embracing different forms of communication and more chasing the ideas. The animating thing of our life is chasing down the ideas in our head. A lot of that are the things you expect of any band and a lot of it is just not. We have such a thrill doing stuff like this and it keeps you from being the same all the time. Touring can be really monotonous…yeah, any given show is awesome, but the 200th in the row tends to get a bit, you know. But the internet has made it such that we can have direct access to our fans and be a part of the community with the fans rather than this commercial relationship where you make music, your label sells it and people buy it blah blah blah.

Even when we began our career with a label in 2001…back then everything we made we had to figure out whether the label would promote it or what they would do with it…how we could get it out there and all that kinda stuff. Now, some of the stuff we make our label gets behind and they promote it to radio stations and whatever, some stuff they fund, some stuff they don’t…but if they don’t, then we can still put it out to our fans. It’s really a blessing.

ME: It’s funny how spruiking your own stuff is almost…ultra-commercial in a way…but without any of the commerciality…if that makes sense.

DK: [Laughs] Yeah I guess so right? It feels like one in every three interviews is someone being like ‘so how did you guys come up with this ridiculous marketing plan?’ [laughs]…you know at the end of the day it’s not rocket science. The reason records and the music industry existed was to connect people who wanted music to people who wanted to make music. There were people playing songs and people who wanted to hear them who couldn’t make it to the shows and luckily they had these things that could record it. People start to think of someone’s artistic product as a crafted commercial advertisement but they only really work when it’s art. Nobody wants to hear music that sounds like it’s advertising itself and frankly -there are beautiful videos made in a glamorous, expensive way – and I’m not saying that people can’t do a good job of it, but by and large, people aren’t stupid. They know an advertisement when they see it. People see rock videos and they don’t see the real musician in them or the real artist, but they see the production of a film-maker. So we would rather have them as something we make than anything else. It’s the same with music; if you bought a rock band’s record and it wasn’t them, it’s just weird you know?

ME: Your new album, and a few of the singles in particular is a real departure from what you’ve done before with strange stilted tempos and such…do you set out to fuck with what you’ve done before, or is this just what comes to you as you write?

DK: Definitely the latter. I think it’s less that we decided to take a big left turn, and more that we expended a set of influences and stuff that we’d done before. We all came to the idea of being in a rock band when we were teenagers listening to the Pixies and realising ‘hey, I can pick up a guitar and make rock n roll.’ So that type of guitar based, structural, chord music was just how we thought about music for years…and if you go on tour and play that type of music for 700 nights in a row, when you come home and write a song in that style, it becomes very hard to impress yourself. You lose that thrill…you become so done with it. So it’s less that we wanted to take a new direction, and more that every time we tried to write a song that we thought we were good at, it would come off as fake.

Eventually we just had to come up with a new way to write music. Thinking less about end points and not imagining a song. It’s not like we said ‘I want to write a stadium rock anthem’ and then we did. It was more imagining how a song would make you feel and then trying to get there. This time around we didn’t start out with any end points…we started with only starting points. So we’d play around with different beats and sounds until there was some magical spark. Most of the time you play a beat and a piano chord and you get a beat and piano chord, you know, one plus one equals two: no shit. But then once every blue moon you add a beat to a piano chord and you get lust or fury or excitement or melancholy…or all of these things added together in one, beautiful, nine-dimensional emotion…or at least some glimmer of that. When you start to feel that feeling…we just tried to go chasing those moments over anything else.

ME: It sounds like you’re really starting to get on top of things.

DK: Well, the truth is we never felt on top of it at all. It’d be like…our bag of tricks would just stop working and we’d go ‘fuck, what do we do now?’ It took us a long time to write it and because of our particular process, it made it even harder. If you go to the grocery store and you know where you’re going, you get out of your house and you walk to the grocery store. But imagine trying to find the grocery store just by walking in every direction in once you know what I mean? So there were a lot of failed attempts. When we got to the studio there were a hundred and six songs we were working on…and those were the only ones that were still alive. We’d thrown away ten times more…then it got down to eighteen by the time we were at the end of the session and then thirteen or fourteen by the time we were done. It’s just a…just a shit load of failure. You get a lot of successes and you get a lot of…fuck you know?

ME: Well, I think that’s our fifteen minutes up man…

DK: Ha…I didn’t give you a chance to ask any questions did I?

ME: Actually, I was really unprepared, so I only had three questions that were any good…

DK: Well there you go! Five minutes a piece!

OK GO are taking a short tour of the country in February in support of Sydney’s Playground Weekender Festival. With latest single ‘WTF?’ plaguing (the good kind of plague) airwaves at the moment and a brand spankin’ new record sitting on the shelves, there’s plenty of OK GO to get a taste for whilst they’re out here.

OK GO will be playing The Hi Fi in Brisbane on the 17th, the Oxford Arts Factory in Sydney on the 18th, the Playground Weekender on the 19th and 20th and finishing up in Melbourne at the Hi Fi on the 21st. They’re a band who is definitely worth heading out to see…whether they’re dragging second hand books along or otherwise.

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