A Conversation with OK Go’s Damian Kulash – HuffPost 7.20.10

Mike Ragogna: You have a new video of the song “End Love” from your latest album, Out of the Blue Clour of the Sky. Beyond its time-lapsing element, I think one of the most striking things about it is your yellow, peach, powder blue, and orange hoody jump-suits. Strangely, they mesmerize about as much as your treadmills. How did you do that?

Damian Kulash: Basically, we have been playing around with different types of choreography. So, with this, we were trying to choreograph time in itself. Throughout, it’s a single take that takes about a week long. Basically, the whole video takes place in the first twenty-one hours, but for the band, it was a twenty-one hour single take. That meant that we started one afternoon and ended around noon the next day, so the video was shot overnight in the park. We choreographed ourselves sleeping, and we basically spent a week coming up with this routine, and then we had two chances to get it right, which, of course, took us four days. It’s just one long performance and at times, goes five hundred times faster than real life, and the slowest we go is about five hundred times slower than real life. There is very little normal speed in there–there are four beats late in the video where we go back to normal speed, and it’s actually sort of shocking to see people moving the real speed after you’ve seen two-and-a-half minutes of people sort of Busby Berkeley-ing around.

MR: You’re loved because of your music, but also because of “Here it Goes Again,” or as a lot of people call it, “The Treadmill Video.”

DK: That was a dance performance that we did on eight treadmills, and we choreographed it at my sister’s house and filmed it in ten days, it was a single shot of dancing on treadmills.

MR: Now you performed the new single, “End Love,” on Leno’s show, right?

DK: Yes, we did, uh huh.

MR: And you’ve been playing this out a lot.

DK: We were at Bonnaroo, we were at Sasquatch, we did a festival called, Rock the Garden in Minneapolis, and we’ll go over to Europe and do some festivals.

MR: Now in Bonnaroo, didn’t you synchronize playing before the World Cup started?

DK: No, the video premiered at 1:20, before the World Cup started, then we played on Saturday afternoon…or maybe it was Friday afternoon, and then the video premiered the following day right before the World Cup.

MR: This was in association with your latest album?

DK: Yeah, we have a new album that came out in January, and we are re-releasing it because we left our major label and have decided to put it out ourselves.

MR: Oh, that’s wild. What is the story behind that?

DK: We were basically not headed in the same direction as the major label business model, you know? Things have been going really well for us, but not in ways that make major labels happy. Our record sales are fine, but they’re not spectacular. We surely don’t sell the same kind of records as U2 and Coldplay do. But we have millions and millions of views online, and we have a lot of people coming to our concerts. Our merchandise sales are good, and we license our music and stuff like that. So, we’re doing fine, but the label wasn’t getting that. It’s just an awkward situation. The major label system is built on assumptions from ten or fifteen years ago, but really, it’s fifty or eighty years ago, when the main building block of value was recordings, and, of course, that’s the one thing that has inherently lost a lot of value with digital distribution and digital media in general, and the infinite duplicability of things.

For us, it’s opened a lot of artistic doors, to be able to make things cross different media that aren’t necessarily just beats and chords and lyrics, things that don’t have to just fit on a CD and don’t have to fit on the shelves of a Wal-Mart. That’s been very creatively freeing for us, but the label finds it hard to make money off of that. So, we just, after years of trying to fit our square peg through their circular hole, decided to split ways, and it was actually very amicable. Most bands, when they leave their labels, do it in a big, furious flame out, and the label keeps their record and they get into this big legal battle and stuff. The label was actually very kind to let us take out record with us, and we’re now distributing and promoting and selling it ourselves. So, our digital version has been on iTunes for a few weeks now, and the physical copy will be in stores tomorrow.

MR: Let’s talk a little about your latest album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. Can you give a little history behind it, and sort of what’s been going on with it to this point?

DK: It’s kind of a new sound for us. The first two records we made were sort of like the way you write language–you have a thought, try to parse it into words and grammar, and then out it comes. Our first big single on the radio was a song called “Get Over It,” and that was us wondering, “Why doesn’t the world have stadium rock anthems anymore?” So, we wrote one. This record, I think we started with the same goal. It was the “we know what we want to make, so let’s make it” approach. But the songs just ended up sounding really hollow and fake, and being a band that’s been together for ten years, what we have as end points for ourselves was so reflexive that it became us covering ourselves, or us doing an impression of ourselves, it just seemed kind of hollow and fake.

So, we decided to go about writing in a different way, which was to forget about where we were headed and just start playing with sound until we got that spark, that thing that makes music. It’s just a bunch of sounds put together and then, suddenly, emotions start jumping out of it. You add a drum beat to a base line and, nine times out of ten, what you get is a drum beat with a base line. But every once in a while, you get lust or fury or melancholy, and in choosing those moments that are most resonant to us, we’d follow those paths hoping that we’d actually wind up at a song. And a lot of the time, we wouldn’t get there, so we ended up writing hundreds of themes for this record. By the time we got to Dave Goodman’s studio in western New York, we had one hundred and six things to play him, and of course, the record is only fourteen songs long. Anyway, it brought us to a very different place sonically. It doesn’t sound a lot like our earlier records; it’s much more dance-y and much more anthemic. There’s not a lot of distorted guitar, but there is a lot of distorted drums. There’s a lot of Prince influence in it, and it’s much more melodic than our earlier records. It’s really different for us, and I’m really, very proud of it.

MR: “WTF?” was the first single, right?

DK: Yeah, “WTF?” was the first song we made a video for. We’re in this weird place where the idea of a single has been changing in the music industry for a long time. Not a lot of people are going out and buying 45s, so a single, in that way, doesn’t really make sense. So, it was a single meaning “a song that people promote to the radio.” Since our record label wasn’t really promoting anything to the radio, a single to us started to mean “whatever we decided to make a video for.” We did make a video for “WTF?” first, then we made two different videos for two different versions of the song “This Too Shall Pass.” That’s been one of the songs that’s been on the radio the most, and is on MTV and that kind of stuff.

MR: Is that the one with the Notre Dame band on it?

DK: Yeah, there’s a live recording with the Notre Dame marching band, which is shot like a video, but it’s actually a live recording. And then the album version of the song is set to a video that we made in a warehouse in Los Angeles, in a giant Rube Goldberg machine.

MR: Of course, you’re going to be working your tail off to promote Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, so what are your plans?

DK: We’ve put two new songs on the record since it’s been reverted back to us, so it’s re-released with these two new songs on it. And, of course, it doesn’t particularly matter to us how people get our music as long as the rent stays paid and we get to keep making it, so we’ve been having a lot of fun getting it out there in different ways. Recently, we did a two month tour of the States, and for every show, we’d record the whole show, put it on a USB drive at the end of the night, and five minutes after the show is done, you could get the entire concert plus the album on a little memory stick. (It’s) something that would have been very hard to do when we were on a major label, but it means that there are that many more copies of our record floating out there in fan’s hands. And every night, we were generating another recording of each of those songs, so instead of the song being this pristine object that can’t be screwed with, we just made a new recording every night.

MR: That seems to be a paradigm some bands are following now, something kind of institutionalized by The Grateful Dead way back. Normally, labels like to grab a band that has a following already, and although you didn’t come into this a totally newbie band, you benefited from what the label did for you

DK: Yeah. We certainly benefited from things the label did for us. There were also a lot of times when a lot of energy was spent fighting with the system. When you want to do things your own way but you have to convince fifty people up the chain to allow you to do them your way, you spend a lot of time doing what feels like spinning your wheels. There was a lot more time spent on business than I would have liked and a lot less time working on records. So, I’m happy now that we can just do the things that we want for the reasons that we want.

MR: That’s really cool that you’ve decided to take your career into your own hands. What’s interesting is that more and more bands seem to be figuring out how to do this on their own. And it seems that the label’s way of compensating for lost sales is to create these 360 deals, which, personally, I think is the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard of. They not only want to sell a product, they want a cut of your every dollar while controlling your name and likeness.

DK: Well, from there perspective, it makes a great deal of sense, and if fact if you look at the mechanics of the music industry at large, it does make sense. There are three things that, traditionally, record labels are needed for–promotion, distribution, and investment. The distribution is obvious, that’s what the whole thing is built around. In the beginning, they had musicians and people wanted to hear them, so once recording came along, they needed an infrastructure for distributing that. Once you have an infrastructure for distributing things and you actually have a marketplace for these musical products, then promotion becomes the issue, and so they built these systems for promoting music. Nowadays, distribution can be done with the click of a mouse by, basically, anyone, so we don’t really need the major labels for that.

As for promotion, they still have a pretty big promotional staff that can do a lot for bands. But in our position we don’t really need that anymore. In fact, we’ve always liked doing our own promotion in our own way. We don’t fit the stereotype of what a rock band should look like or sound like, so we are not a very good fit with the promotion staff at a major label that basically wants us to fit the mold.

And the last thing, of course, is investment. Basically, every band that’s not independently wealthy needs investors at various times in their career. The obvious time is when you’re first starting up and you want to go on tour for two months or whatever. You have to quit your day job, and you’re not going to get paid much playing to fifteen people in a bar somewhere. So, it takes a while of schlepping around the country, and someone’s got to be paying for the food and for the gas and for the equipment. Generally, getting a record deal is when a band finally gets somebody they can tour with, and there’s all sorts of other stuff–videos are not cheap to make and albums are not cheap to make. People need that kind of investment, and the only place you can expect it to come from are the people making money off of you. Of all bands, even bands that get to the level of getting major label offers, generously, about five percent ever make that money back. It’s a very low success gamble, so the way you make that work from the business perspective is to aggregate all that risk. You bet on a hundred bands and hope that three to five of them not only pay you back, but pay you back such alarmingly huge sums that it pays for the rest of them.

MR: Yes, it’s always been that two or three huge acts that support the growing process for the rest of the acts. For instance, at A&M Records, acts from Joan Baez and Joan Armatrading to Styx and Supertramp initially were funded by profits generated by the sales of Carpenters hits. At Warners, Randy Newman was among the beneficiaries, and at Columbia, Bruce Springsteen. But that was a part of the important nurturing process, and my feeling is that the whole nurturing process is gone in lieu of the quick hit and quick buck.

DK: That’s definitely true, although that is not necessarily a function of risk aggregation. There are a lot of different ways you can aggregate risk, and one of them is to bet well at very long terms. So, you bet on twenty acts in the hope that all of them will happen at some point in the next twenty years. Or you bet on one hundred acts and hope that three of them make it big this year and don’t actually invest in the futures of the rest of them.

MR: Honestly, I think you’ve articulated the labels’ perspective in the best way I’ve ever heard it explained.

DK: I’m trying to get to your point about the 360 deals. What I’m saying is that it makes sense to do the 360 deals. If somebody is going to be investing money in bands, it needs to be somebody who is making money off of music. However, from a musician’s perspective, you have to look at who is at major labels right now, and whether or not you would want your entire career in their hands. Basically, if you didn’t see the end coming in the last five years and you’re still at a major label thinking that that’s the right business model, you’re probably something of a moron.

MR: (laughs) Damian, that’s exactly right. And I think that’s evidenced by the fact that many established acts are proudly going indie. What advice do you have for new acts?

DK: Honestly, it will sound very curt, but the only thing that really matters is making good stuff, you know? Making good music, making good art, making good videos. Just make the things you make well. We’re one of those bands that has had lot of success in non-traditional ways, going around the system so everybody expects us to tell them that there are secrets around the system, and really, there aren’t. No amount of marketing savvy is going to make crappy music good music or make people care about it. People are always asking us, “What’s the secret to a viral video?” It’s just to make a good video, you know? It’s actually pretty simple.

Obviously, even if you’re making great things, there are a lot of mistakes you can make. You can really screw things up, you can certainly make deals with the wrong people, or be in it for the wrong reason. But there’s not a lot of money in rock ‘n’ roll. People that want to be in a rock band because they want to be rich and famous, or because they want to be professional alcoholics, it’s not that satisfying a job from those perspectives. So, if you are the type of person who is animated when you wake up in the morning and all you want to do is go make something, then it’s a pretty good job, but it’s a low shot of success and you’d better like making things for years and years before anyone’s going to give you any money to do it.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney