OK Go frontman embraces “the unknowable” on first LP in decade & revisits ‘Here It Goes Again’ ingenuity
Written by: Ian Saint
In the decade since OK Go last released an album — and toured Texas — frontman Damian Kulash has experienced several immense personal life events: divorce (his second), marriage, fatherhood, co-directing a feature film… in addition, of course, to a global pandemic and drastic shifts in politics and the music industry.
And the Adjacent Possible is OK Go’s fifth album since their 2002 self-titled debut, but it’s Kulash’s first album since having children — that he’s raising amid rising structural instability across the globe. This all challenged his songwriting in novel ways.
OK Go had faced a daunting precipice right before they became world-famous. MTV, long a crucial launchpad for unconventional rock bands — as Nirvana’s Nevermind producer, future Garbage drummer Butch Vig, recalled to me in September — was rapidly eschewing music video play in favor of non-musical “reality TV” fodder like “Laguna Beach” and “Hogan Knows Best,” after “The Osbournes” set a new viewership record.
Sophomore album Oh No was released in August of 2005, the year that YouTube launched. Kulash’s sister, Trish Sie, choreographed a dance for “A Million Ways.” A rudimentary video of OK Go executing that in a backyard unexpectedly went viral on the Internet. Soon after, the band and Trish Sie revisited the aesthetic with a set of treadmills for fifth single, “Here It Goes Again”…. and when OK Go uploaded the result to YouTube on July 31, 2006, they quickly “broke the Internet” — well before that became a popular term.
The subsequent influence of OK Go on rock ’n roll’s direction is arguably quite understated by their Billboard chart trajectories and RIAA sales certifications. Neither institution counted YouTube plays toward single sales until 2013, nor toward album sales until years after that.
When And The Adjacent Possible finally dropped on April 11, the album was released in tandem with another remarkable new music video: “Love.” The song’s simple title belies the astonishing intricacy of its epic production: 60 people, 60 mirrors, and 26 robotic arms were employed to visually accompany the song with a refrain of “in this grand ballroom of nothingness, we soar, we sail to the song that’s only been: love.”
OK Go is back on tour, playing their first Texas and Oklahoma shows since 2015 — Dallas’ House of Blues, Houston’s House of Blues, Austin’s Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, and Oklahoma City’s Tower Theatre consecutively — across Thursday through Sunday, November 6 to 9.
Damian Kulash spoke with Buddy’s Ian Saint on Monday afternoon. A transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
IAN SAINT: Hi, Damian. I just got off a Zoom with Scott Hamilton, the Olympic gold medal figure skater. Then I’m switching gears to you, the “Here It Goes Again” video comes up and I think “hmm, they kind of careen like figure skaters there.” Was figure skating an influence on you?
DAMIAN KULASH: Wow. We did indeed call that the “ice skating maneuver,” just because that’s what it looked like. Figuring out things to do on treadmills is mostly trial and error — you hurl yourself at them, and 9 times out of 10, that’s minor injury. And then the 10th, it’s something genius. So when you get the genius thing, you just name it what it looks like. It’s not really a matter of influence so much as it is just, “oh, that’s what that is.”
IAN SAINT: Congratulations on the release of And the Adjacent Possible, the first OK Go album since Hungry Ghosts. That was released in October of 2014; weeks after the Ferguson riots, Michael Sam starting in the NFL, the Ray Rice wife-beating video — I personally feel like the tides of the country were beginning to rapidly shifting then, and so much has happened in the decade since. What experiences have you gone through between these albums — whether it’s societal things, or personal things — and how is that embodied on the new OK Go record?
DAMIAN KULASH: Oh, man, that’s a great question. It is 10 years between the last two albums, not because the band ever took an intentional break. It’s because our guitarist [Andy Ross] and I both had children around the same time, and both of us really wanted to be very present dads — we didn’t want to be out on tour, or even really writing and recording. Then there was the pandemic, of course.
Then my wife [Kristin Gore] and I were lucky enough to get greenlit for a movie we wanted to direct: a narrative film called The Beanie Bubble. It’s about the Beanie Babies craze of the nineties, talking about the weird times in American history and things changing. I guess you’d call it a “dram-edy,” told from the perspectives of three women who did not get the credit they were due. Zach Galifinakis plays the inventor of Beanie Babies, Ty Warner. I don’t have any particularly great love of Beanie Babies, but I thought it was a hilarious sort of lens through which to see American insanity.
My wife is the screenwriter, and both of us directed. So we had this opportunity to direct a film together and we were really excited about that — but that takes nearly three years of your life, to get a film from start to finish. I thought the band would be doing more at the same time, and realized how naive that [notion] was.
So by the time we were done with that film, it had been 8 or 9 years since we had a record out, and we had a bunch of stuff sort of half-written. As we settled into writing the album, it was so interesting to see what 10 years does to your perspective on everything — especially the career itself, like, music is such an unlikely career to be allowed to have for this long. You start to internalize this type of anxiety about it all disappearing tomorrow, because chances are it will. Everybody’s career is unlikely, whether it’s your first record or your tenth; so there’s this sort of, like, “Ahhh! What do I have to do to keep this alive?”
When you go away from it for a while and come back to it, there’s something very freeing about being, like, “Oh, right, we’re not going to be the 18 year-old hipsters of this summer’s craze. This is what we do.” And I feel like both the music, lyrically and texturally, really reflect a sort of comfort in our own skin that I think we couldn’t have had when we were younger — and I love [the new album] for that.
It feels like it’s a lot about the balance of trying to live in the present, as you look out at this insane world. I associate that with middle age, because I am middle-aged; but I think a lot of people are facing that right now, that there has never been a time where the future felt so demonstrably different from the past — at least in my lifetime, or my parents, who lived through the Vietnam War and the Summer of Love and everything. We don’t know what’s coming; we just know it’s a hell of a lot different than where we are right now, and it does kind of put a magnifying glass on the present — like, “You’ve got this now.” I feel like the music really reflects that.
IAN SAINT: I personally agree with you, and I’m in the generation after yours. I’m hearing that from a lot of people of various ages. It’s very interesting to juxtapose these feelings on And The Adjacent Possible with my earliest memories of OK Go music.
We mentioned “Here It Goes Again”… you’re etched in my memory as embodying this exciting new frontier of innovation and liberation for artists, via this incredible new YouTube platform — just a few years into this new millennium that there’d been so much fanfare about.
I’ve been revisiting Y2k a lot with recent interviews — like talking with Shirley Manson of Garbage, recalling all the futuristic themed music videos around the new millennium. It felt like the innovation was endless and exciting. But 25 years in that new millennium we all hyped, I feel like those sentiments have largely dissipated.
DAMIAN KULASH: And what’s crazy is that now the pace of technological is a million times what it was in the year 2000, but that’s no longer seen as a bright future — that’s seen now like it’s just a source of great terror. It is funny how futurism, with enough distance, seems rosy; and then when you’re facing it, it’s like, “maybe not.”
IAN SAINT: Agreed. The new album’s second track “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” was so jarring to me lyrically. Someday soon, you’ll look out from your hilltop perch / Your heart worn out from trying to make sense of the arc / Which only bends one way / And you rightly afraid / It don’t seem to be the way that we thought.
I recently interviewed Amy Grant — the queen of Christian pop, right? She’s in her 60s now, and she — someone reputed for her faith — has said she has more questions than ever before, but she finds beauty in that mystery.
I interviewed Wynonna Judd during The Judds’ Final Tour, when her mother died by suicide after the tour announcement, just days after Wynonna became a grandmother — which is still so hard to believe. She proceeded with the tour, and women like Trisha Yearwood and Faith Hill filled in for her mom. Wynonna told me about being amazed by the incredible “mystery” of feeling a wide range of emotions simultaneously — feeling a surge of despair and confusion over her mom’s suicide, and then also feeling incredibly lifted by her granddaughter and how her fans and contemporaries showed up for her to carry on with bringing The Judds’ music to a communal end.
“A Stone Only Rolls Down Hill” reminds me of Amy and Wynonna, because it comes across to me like you feel peace with not knowing answers as many answers as you might’ve hoped you’d have at this stage of your life. Is that right?
DAMIAN KULASH: Yeah. I had kids — twins — and they’re seven years old now. They are such a huge source of both anxiety and optimism. The state of the world is so much more important, because we have to prepare it for them. I’m not as personally worried about what the next 40 years will bring to my life — the changes that are coming, I will deal, but it’s much harder to look at your kids and feel that way.
The oncoming changes, I tend to see them with a negative slant; it’s not necessarily going to be negative, I just fear that it will be. The bad stuff coming, the climate change — which is what I was largely writing about when I started writing that — and now social shifts towards a type of governance I know we don’t want. Of course, then, economic shifts towards a world in which human labor may not be valued because there are machines that can do it better than us — all of that is utterly, crazily horrifying.
But you can’t turn to your seven-year-old kids and just give them fear. What you need to do is prepare them for this. And then you watch in their eyes, instincts, and general ebullience that they will be fine — in fact, this will all be normal to them. They’re a wildly adaptable species who will do amazing things.
The horrors of the future, the horrors of the past, all of that is fictional — your understanding of the past is completely clouded by your own human biases. Your memory of the past is an invention; I mean, yes, you lived through it, but you’ve already invented a whole new story of it. And your predictions of the future are even farther off.
It nails home that this is the only moment that’s actually real. And it’s an incredibly beautiful moment, right? Especially when you are sitting there facing your twin toddlers, there’s nothing in the world but beauty. But also when you look out from that hilltop perch, there’s nothing in the world but horror. What are you going to do?
In some ways, that’s how a feral cat lives; there is threat and there is safety, you have some of both all the time — and there is a real poetry to it. Being able to touch that — going past your logical mind, into the deep waters of just feeling — is what art is for. If you can actually just feel that thing, with a sense of comfort — rather than having to know it or understand it — then all right.
IAN SAINT: That’s profound. On that note, I was blown away by how vinyl one finishes with “This Is How It Ends,” and then vinyl two picks up with “Take Me With You” — as this is a two-vinyl album. Did you sequence this album’s running order with vinyl in mind?
Can you talk more about the pivot between the two songs, too? Because it’s so interesting, going from “This is How It Ends” sort of… (pause) melancholy acceptance — I apologize if I characterized that poorly — and “Take Me With You” radiates with exuberance, but not in the same way you experience exuberance in youth.
DAMIAN KULASH: I mean, you’ve said it so well, I fear I will only make it worse. Yeah. “This Is How It Ends” is about losing someone, and realizing that meaning is within ourselves. None of this inherently means something; this isn’t a giant lesson written from above — whatever it means to me, is all it means.
Yes, we sequenced the record for vinyl. That felt like a good end to the side. And then [you wonder], how do you start again? What comes next? “Take Me With You.” To me, the feel of that song is very late-era David Bowie — like “Let’s Dance” kind of vibe. What I like about that is it’s a bunch of youthful sentiments, sung by a voice that is somehow too old for them. I always felt that about “China Girl” or “Let’s Dance,” it was almost like this crooner who decided to make disco. And there’s something kind of like Psychedelic Furs-ian about it.
The character in “Take Me With You” is singing from… (pause) the first time you are disabused of your childish naïveté. Like right after college — “oh, so just going to school for art doesn’t mean I’m going to become a professional artist, and I have to go do things with my life.” You suddenly start taking responsibility for your own actions, and longing for the angels to take you with them. I really like the way those two songs [“This Is How It Ends” and “Take Me With You”] flow together, because it does feel like you’ve gone back in time a litte bit and reset.
IAN SAINT: To bring it home, I want to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Oh No — because I think that album was such a watershed moment for rock music history, and pop culture in general.
DAMIAN KULASH: Thank you.
IAN SAINT: I remember “Here It Goes Again” as foundational towards YouTube’s potential — but I hadn’t realized until preparing for our interview, that it was the *fifth* single from Oh No, released a year after the album was. You remind me of Shania Twain with Come On Over; it’s hard to believe “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” was that album’s eighth single, because it was such a blockbuster hit.
Looking back, what do you make of that phenomenon? Because it’s rare that a fifth single becomes a massive hit; but to me, that’s a testament to your creativity — certainly with the video, and its being a great song anyway — and also your persistence in making the most of that album.
DAMIAN KULASH: Yeah. I grew up in Washington, DC with this sort of DIY punk scene; and it never really occurred to me, even after we’d signed to a major label that the industrial limits of an album were set by how often radio or MTV would play the single. [The label’s perspective] is so obvious; you have a single, it either does or does not sell the record, and they move on.
But I had always seen it from the perspective of a band — you make songs, and you wanna show them to people. You understand that the world can’t digest the whole album at once — at least, only a tip of the iceberg of mega fans are going to go in that way — so you’re gonna say, “here’s one song, now check out this next one, now check out this next one.”
It never even occurred to me that when somebody else [like the record label] pulls the plug, *you* have to pull the plug. So we just started making our own little videos for things. And it wasn’t really promotional — looking back, of course, that stuff is promotional — but for us, it was more like, “Well, a song doesn’t go out in the world on the back half of a CD and then die. We live in this digital era, where you make something of it.”
So we’re making things, and we sort of stumbled into having made a video in my backyard, that we didn’t think of as a video — it was like a rehearsal tape for a ridiculous dance we were doing. That went viral before YouTube. [Kulash is referring to a video for Oh No lead single, “A Million Ways,” choreographed by his sister Trish Sie.] We were like, “Oh, I think we just made a music video by accident. So if we can do that by accident, let’s do it on purpose.” And that’s what the treadmill video was.
We did not think it would be wildly successful. We actually thought, “Okay, this album cycle is kind of done. We’ll put out this one last thing for our fans, to have something new while we’re working on the new record.” Then the next day, it was bigger than our first single [“Do What You Want”] had been. And it was like, “Oh, okay, I guess we’re starting this all over again. 18 months of touring.” We got a Grammy, we were on the VMAs [MTV’s Video Music Awards], and suddenly the world is big again.
It’s funny, because it so relates to that thing we were talking about — your own guesses about the past and the future. Our lives changed so dramatically in that moment; but *at* the moment it was just like, “Oh, great, this weird thing’s happening with this song and this video.” Within a month, it was like, “Oh my gosh, now we are a one-hit wonder whose one hit is a weird viral video. What do we do with that? We get to be a band that makes things differently than other bands.”
And it opened a door in our career, which was making these crazy art projects as (impersonates quotation marks) “music videos.” I’m so glad the form exists, because there’s no other way I could go like, “Here’s what I’d like to do for a job. I’d like to do ridiculous art projects that we film in single takes, and get to write the music for them.” Now we get to do visual art, film, and music all at the same time — and there isn’t even any MTV to figure out whether or not these are (impersonates quotation marks) “successful.” All we have to do is put them out, our fans love them, and then we get to keep going.
IAN SAINT: And the success of that speaks to the themes of your new album, And the Adjacent Possible, in a way — you went against conventional wisdom, the answer may not have been what you’d expected, your openness catapulted your career, and here we are 20 years later.
DAMIAN KULASH: Yeah, and I’m hoping… (pause) I feel like we spent most of this interview talking about how scary the future is. I would like to believe that when you listen to our music, broadly, it’s very upbeat. We’re not a super dour band. Some of the lyrics are a little dark, but that’s just the push and pull of reality.
What I’m hoping is that this great gulf of the future that we are facing — that seems deeper, wider, and more unknowable than ever before — is just another one of these things, where all it’s proving to us is that your best laid plans are ridiculous. That there’s no way of planning your way around this. What you can do is do the things you believe in, and hope that the world pivots to them or allows for them.
The more AI slop there is in the world, the more valuable it will become to actually do things by hand. Whether or not you can still get paid enough for that is a different question; whether or not there’s still an industry to support it, or there’s jobs out there for everybody, totally different question. But I know for me, it doesn’t make me want to go investigate AI as an art tool — it makes me want to just double down on making things the way I want to make them.
IAN SAINT: Yeah. I think your objective came across very well, and I am so impressed by the new album. We’re very excited for OK Go to perform three shows in Texas this week. I know you played my neighborhood, Deep Ellum, many times in the early OK Go days. What memories does Texas conjure for you?
DAMIAN KULASH: We have always had such good shows in Texas. The cities of Texas are such oases of pop culture, in such a weird way. The bigger and broader the country you get to, the more the dots of urbanity shine with people really needing some rock ’n roll, and I love that. The passion and sweatiness of the rock shows we’ve had in Texas have been so, so satisfying to me; and I’m really glad that we get to come back.
OK Go plays Dallas’ House of Blues, Houston’s House of Blues, Austin’s Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, and Oklahoma City’s Tower Theatre consecutively across Thursday through Sunday, November 6 to 9.
For OK Go tour dates and tickets, visit https://okgo.net/.
