Twinmusix got to speak to Damian from Ok Go about their new album and more.
TM - Hi this is Amelia and Elizabeth from Twinmusix, and we are here with Damian from OK Go, Thank you for having this interview with us today We appreciate it.
DN - Thank you.
TM - What can fans expect from your upcoming Tour?
DN - A sweaty rock show, I am excited to play for humans. We worked so hard on this record and our video and putting it out into the world. No matter how many hundreds, thousands or millions of people our songs get to, all you see is a click and a digital counter and you would like to know that there are people out there who care about your stuff. Then you get all these nice texts and emails, and it is wonderful to know that people out there are listening. There is nothing like playing in front of people and experiencing the human connection. It feels rarer these days as we all work remotely, and it gets easier through our digital devices. Just being in a room and feeling that wave of emotion is bigger than you can describe, and it can happen with a single person, it is a great feeling.
TM - How have fans responded to your new album "And the Adjacent Possible"?
DN - It has been a super good response, and that makes me very happy. It took us too long to bring out a new album. Our last album came out 10 years ago, and we didn't mean to take this hiatus. We just spent a long time touring and making videos. Our guitarist had kids, and I had kids, and there was this pandemic that you probably heard about. I directed a film for Apple with my wife and that took two years. Then we were like Oh my gosh, it has been a long time. We had been writing and recording little bits of stuff the whole time and not thinking about when it would come out and suddenly it was 8 years and we were like Oh my god, we have to finish this. It is weird because we never felt like we went away, but the numbers say otherwise. Our fans wanted us to come back, and it is weird to have this perspective. I feel like we have never taken our foot off the pedal for long enough before to have this kind of perspective. We came back to the things that we do and see it more clearly, because we are not stuck in the driver's seat trying to figure out how to make the car go faster, then we got out, inspected everything, and now we are getting back in.
TM - How did you regain your fan base after ten years?
DN - People have discovered us from our music videos. We are not reliant on a major label to tell people that we exist or on radio play or from the traditional music industry. We made sure our social channels were alive and we have started putting our old videos back on our social channels to remind people. We are not the world's biggest band, but the fans we have a very committed and we thank them for following along. It is very easy to tell everyone, Hey, we are awake. We started a funding thing called The Producers Guild of Ok Go, which was modelled after the Producers Guild of America, which is a producers Association. It is our fans helping us produce stuff, and we were amazed by how many people wanted to chip in to help us make a video, and that made us excited.
TM - What was your writing and recording process for your new album "And the Adjacent Possible"?
DN - We start with music and sounds and chase the emotion that we think we can uncover. I know there is the Bob Dylan type of writers that can come up with a poem and can whip a song around it. For me, it is the other way around, where you put one cord after the other and you get a chord progression. It is like two sounds are there together and they make a third sound, but every once in a while something magical happens and what pops out of the other side isn't just sound. It is a ball of emotion and that ball of emotion for me is unpredictable and multi-dimensional. It is like you want to cry and laugh and jump on your bed, and scream at the same time. It is like this itch in your brain that words could not possibly have got at, and that is the thing, I am chasing. When we are able to keep that ball of emotion growing and changing until it is the full shape of the song only then I'll be looking to put lyrics to it. The big danger is that those lyrics will collapse, the lyrics could add a dimension to it or add a counterbalance to it or a tent pole within it, and it is never an easy translation, you can't just come up with examples of the feelings, you need to extend the feelings.
TM - How did you come up with your Album cover for "And the Adjacent Possible", and Who designed it?
DN - Yuri Suzuki is an old friend of mine, and we knew we wanted to do an album that had a pop-up sculpture on the inside, and we wanted that sculpture to be representative of the feeling of the album. The album title is "And the Adjacent Possible", so it is a pop-up sculpture spear. It is two spheres, a spear within a spear, and you see half the sphere and the other half of the Spear is seen in the reflection because of the foil paper that is on the inside. It is super magical and a process of trial and error to come up with the right cover.
TM - You use 64 iPhones to film your video "A Stone Only Rolls Downhill", How did you come up with your video, and how did you plan it strategically?
DN - "A Stone Only Rolls Downhill" was Sixty-Four Shots on Sixty-Four phones, and it was three or four months of non-stop planning. It was a small crew, and I directed it with my friend Chris. We had an editor edit all our tests together to see what would work, but that was it. We had several days of shooting to get the individual shots, and we needed a larger crew for that. It was a fun project because it was mostly done just hanging out in my studio and doing little tests. The most recent video we have done is for Love, which just came out. I think it was about sixty-three mirrors on Twenty-Nine robots in a train station, and I am very proud of it, it is one of the most emotional videos that we have made in a long time. It has the spectacle and wonder that Ok Go videos are known for. I also think the video pulls at your heartstrings, which is very personal to me, and I hope people check it out.
TM - Do you think that your innovation with videos and the fact they are in line with technology and the fact that your videos can go viral, can help you reach a new audience?
DN - Many people go viral, I think it has to do with gaining algorithms and dumping tons of quantity and videos on the internet and hoping something hits. I think we were one of the first to make viral stuff about 10 or 20 years ago at the dawn of YouTube. It was the careful and strategic, and elaborate things that we had made that went viral, but we could only make one of those every six months. It doesn't work in the age of social media to make these elaborate things as a strategy for going viral but what it does work for is making art, and we are proud of the over the top videos we have made. The videos we make are emotional, and it moves people, and our existing fan base loves them. Will I get millions or billions of people viewing it around the world, I have no idea.
TM - If you could have any band play one of your songs, what band would it be, what song would it be and would it be in your style or their style?
DN - The Pixies play "Skyscrapers" in their style.
TM - Who was the first band or Artist you saw as a kid, and can you tell us a story?
DN - The first ever show I went to was a radio festival for a hip-hop station in Washington, DC where I grew up. The opening act was a rapper who didn't have a record out, and his debut record was about to come out, which is why he was on the show, and that was "MC Hammer". "Patti LaBelle and Experience Unlimited" was also there and it was a great show. No one knew who "MC Hammer" was, and 6 months later, he was the biggest thing in the universe.
TM - Is there anything else you want to say to your fans?
DN - We can't wait to come and play in Australia, hopefully, get there soon, and hopefully we will get there in 2026.
TM - Thank you for having this interview with us today, We appreciate it.
DN - Thank you, have a good day.
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