Interview: OK Go, Hunting For Magic In The Dark
*MP3: OK Go - “This Too Shall Pass”
OK Go are becoming an icon and I couldn’t be happier about it. Their easily accessible – while still maintaining a flare for the experimental – sound has gone bigger, better and farther than ever before with their new album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. Last week, I had the good fortune of interviewing Tim Nordwind, the be-speckled, vest-wearing multi-instrumentalist of the group and really enjoyed his perspective on the process of making their new album.
Much of that process had as much to do with the overall band mentality as it did the process itself: “I think throughout the years, if nothing else, the band has gained confidence in the things we know and like and want to convey to the world,” Nordwind said. “I think the new record by and far is the best one we’ve written, mostly due to the fact that we’ve made two before and we’ve been able to see what works and doesn’t work. The things that worked were the things that came from the gut. We weren’t taking cues from anyone. It may not be what people are expecting but it was what we felt. We are trusting our instincts a bit more than we did when we were younger, now we’re doing what we want to do.”
The freedom that came from trusting their own sense of direction seems to be the real catalyst behind the album’s creativity and eventual end result, “The goal is to always be moving forward and to push ourselves creatively,” he said. “What we don’t want to do is repeat what we’ve done before … People expect us to do the unexpected and that is a really great place to be … Guitars are great and cool, but we just sort of were done with guitars for the moment and weren’t writing around the guitar anymore.”
Leaving the guitars behind will be the telling factor of Colour, it changed the writing process entirely and moved the band into a creative headspace that allowed the songs to reveal themselves to the band: “This time, we were hunting for magic in the dark,” Nordwind said. “We’d make a beat and do something as little as add sonic information to it, and we’d ask ourselves, how does this make you feel? We were very much writing towards emotion. If the song made us feel a certain way, we thought then the song was worth pursuing. Therefore, this record takes more left turns and leads you down a path that we haven’t really led listeners down before. I love writing that way, it’s much more of a mystery adventure.”
This choose-your-own-adventure style of writing also lent itself well to the producer manning the helm, Dave Fridmann, who has worked with the likes of The Flaming Lips, MGMT, and local favorites Tapes ‘n Tapes: “Dave Fridmann is awesome,” Nordwind said. “He basically gave us the keys to this 3-D, psychedelic, wizard of oz world. He really knows the science of sound, so if you tell him you want a certain sound, he’ll give it to you, because he knows the physics behind. He’s the gatekeeper of this very interesting and unique sonic world … we were more or less left to run amuck. Every piece of equipment in his studio is broken just the way he likes it. As far as he’s concerned, the weirder the better. The more out there, the happier he will be working on the project. This record really sounds like that space at that time. The record is the product of us plugging in three types of pedals, while punching buttons, while someone is playing guitar, and then someone is tweaking knobs on a microsynth.”
The result of this new approach is an album that has a sound completely unique to OK Go, and also a sound completely unique to their catalog: “This record more than any of our others, sounds the most like what we hear in our heads and what we listen to versus what we know how to play,” Nordwind said. “This time around, more so than ever, was about trying to get at how the songs we love make us feel, not so much about how can we actually play these songs. This is a record that I am happy to sit down and listen to from beginning to end. As we go on, I kind of like the music more and more. I’m glad we’re there.”
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(Ian Anderson)
