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OK Go interview
March 10, 2010 by Beatweek
But lest the visuals get in the way of the fact that this is in fact a band that makes music, we chatted with founding bassist Tim Nordwind about OK GO’s new musical approach to their latest album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, in which the guitars take a back seat to the rhythm and the lyrics are far more direct than on the band’s previous work…
How do you feel your sound has evolved since your last album came out?
We toured for two years on our first record, and two and a half years on our second record, and those records were inspired heavily by the music that inspired us in high school and college, rock n roll and punk rock, things like T. Rex and The Pixies and The Cure and Fugazi, and I guess a lot of guitar centric music. After writing two records and touring them for so long, I think we sort of expended those influences. When it came time to write for the third record, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, we sat down with guitars again to write and it just didn’t seem inspiring anymore. And so this time around we wrote a lot more based around the groove and around drums and bass, and we wrote songs that were, more so than ever, this album sounds more like songs we’d like to listen to and we hear in our head, vs songs that we just know how to play with our hands on the guitar.
They were just written from a very different place. This time around, instead of having a lot of distorted guitars, we have a lot of drums. If the guitar was the star instrument on our first two records, I think the drums are the star instrument on our third record.
Do you feel like the songs have more of a funky groove to them?
Yeah, there’s definitely a much heavier groove element to a lot of the songs on this record. We went backwards in time as far as musical influences. One of our very early influences was Prince, so we listened to a lot of Prince and a lot of music like Prince, and sort of wrote in that spirit, very direct, very groove based songs.
Do you still find yourself writing from the same lyrical perspective?
Lyrically, I think this is maybe the most difficult album that we’ve written. I think more so because Damian does a lot of the lyrical content, and I think it was very important to him this time to be as direct as possible. In the past, he writes interesting lyrics, and sometimes the meanings are sort of hidden behind kind of abstract notions and ideas and lines and things like that. And I think this time around he wanted to be very clear and very direct with his meanings. But that’s often hard to do because there are a million songs written that say “I love you” or “I miss you” or something like that, but figuring out how to convey “I love you” and “I miss you” in an interesting way, that’s the art of trying to write a good pop song, I guess. And so that was the challenge of this record, and the rule that we came up with for ourselves was that the lyrics need to be direct, and you don’t want people guessing what the songs are about, you want them to know, but it also needs to have a certain kind of artfulness and poetry to it. So that was kind of a challenge. And I think at the end of the day, he did aa good job of balancing the artfulness with the directness.
You guys released an EP with Bonerama a few years back. What was that experience like?
The EP we did with Bonerama was a a benefit EP, and all the proceeds went to and still continue to go to an organization in New Orleans called Sweet Home New Orleans. That organization helps musician who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. It helps them to come back to the town and help them get settled again.
The experience of it was really great. Bonerama was in an excellent rock orchestra. I don’t know how to explain them, but they’re probably the most rocking musical act I’ve ever seen in my life. I think horns are highly underestimated instruments.
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