Interview with Damian Kulash

I've been a firm fan of OK Go for several months now. During this time, I have often wondered what the band thinks about music, their rock 'n' roll lifestyles, and life in general. So, I decided that I'd find all of this out and more, for the readers of Highpoint and of course for myself. And what better way to do it than through an interview with the lead singer?

Fast forward to December 18, 2002: It's a cold winter evening, and I'm waiting impatiently by the phone while attempting to do physics homework. Finally the wretched thing rings: it's Damian Kulash, friendly lead singer and guitarist extraordinaire for the charming pop/rock/punk band OK Go. Happily putting down my physics book and picking up the phone, I greet my interviewee.

After some preliminary chitchat, I compliment their last show in Boston at the WBCN X-mas Rave with Coldplay and Zwan, which I had attended. "Thank you," Damian replies politely. "We enjoyed ourselves. It was a weird one because everybody was outside drinking."

I send him my sympathy.

"Yeah, well, it's alright, we had fun," he says. "And Coldplay was incredible...I didn't think I would be as impressed with them as I was. They really played really well..."

Next I ask him to describe OK Go for those who have never heard of his band. "How would you describe OK Go?" he shoots back quickly.

"Fantastic," I admit, laughing.

Damian chuckles. "Thank you. Um, I mean, after all, I'm not going to write your article for you- No, I'm just kidding." He thinks for a moment. "I would describe it like a snow day, that's what it's like."

I ask him whether he agrees with the Boston Globe's recent description of him as being "ridiculously brainy and charismatic." Damian chuckles and is remarkably modest in his replies: "Well, I love for people to keep writing things that generous. I mean, I think there are a lot of musicians who aren't the brightest, so maybe by comparison I'm alright, but...I'm probably in the middle of mediocre, you know?"

"How does it feel to be a rock star?" I ask.

"It feels pretty awesome," says Damian. "I mean I'm still not entirely sure I deserve the term, but it's a great job. What feels awesome is to be able to travel around the country playing rock shows every night, you know? I think the sort of term rock star comes with a lot of extra baggage that I'm not sure really applies yet, but yeah. I love doing what we're doing. It's great."

I ask how it's been on the road.

"It's been fantastic," he says, "...It's a little tiring, but it's what we've always dreamed of doing, so... I'm happy - today's the first day off in eight months or so, so the idea of cooking for myself or being able to do my laundry is surprisingly seductive. You'd think that you'd love the idea of always eating at restaurants but it's not as good as you think, you know? ...In the course of being on the road we were able to catch other people's shows here and there, and that Coldplay show was fantastic, we saw Soundtrack of Our Lives play and they were incredible, saw Beck and it was the Flaming Lips in Los Angeles, I saw Louis Lobos, and the White Stripes and the Hives and you know, saw a lot of really good rock shows in the last few months. It was really fun to be on TV; we were on both Conan O'Brien Show and Jay Leno Show...We just had great shows. We went on tour with Phantom Planet, who were incredible to watch just every night; I was blown away. We put our record out a couple months ago and it's a pretty incredible feeling to walk into a store and see your record or a big poster of yourself or something."

"Do you still get nervous before shows?" I inquire.

"Not usually, although I did last night, and... for some reason I was really kind of nervous for that one, but I don't usually get that nervous before shows. Things that make me nervous are things that are still new to me. You know what Second City is? It's like a comedy group in Chicago; most of the people who are on Saturday Night Live come from there, or a lot of them - so they invited us to do a thing with them today, a charity benefit, and like getting up on stage to tell stories as opposed to playing music, that made me nervous, in a way that playing shows does not, you know?"

I ask if he's always wanted to be a musician.

"I guess so. I mean there are a lot of different things I wanted to do. When I was little, I wanted to be the guy who designs Lego sets. Like, I was a really huge Lego fiend...and I actually spent most of my youth wanting to be an artist, and I drew and painted all the time, so I figured that whoever it was that gets to build the sets probably also gets to draw the diagrams, you know? So I was like, this is perfect, I would get to do art half the time and play with Legos the other half of the time. So that's what I wanted to do for a long time, and eventually that faded into just wanting to be a painter, or a sculptor... Actually I went to art school for a little while; I just didn't like the whole art world very much... I started playing music I guess in high school and ran a little independent label out of my room. I just put out like six or seven records for friends' bands and stuff; it wasn't anything very serious... So I was sort of already in the music scene by the time I got into college and that's when I really took it more seriously, so I started recording stuff on my own and putting out records and stuff."

I ask what his family thinks of his career as a musician.

"They think it's really funny...Someone told my mom that there was an article on us in Stuff magazine, which is like one of those sort of soft-porn kind of like boy magazines...So my mom went to buy this magazine, was all embarrassed...and so she goes up to the register and I think was kind of sheepish, and the woman at the register made some kind of joke about, like, you know, 'so, you uh, you looking for a new bra?' or something like that. And my mom was like, 'no, my son's in it,' and of course all the ladies at the grocery store were like, 'your son's in there?' They all got everyone out and made her show them the article and everything; it's really funny."

"How were your high school years?" I ask.

"I actually had a pretty good time in high school," responds Damian. "I went to a sort of like really conservative boys' school, and I was not particularly conservative, so I was kind of an outsider in high school, but the friends I had I was really close to. And I got along really well with girls in high school, which was nice - I think I had always rather get along with the girls than the boys anyway. I sort of had my own art studio at school. The people I went to school with were really into sports and I was really into art, so I basically had the art room to myself, and I just spent all my time sculpting, mostly."

I ask what his influences are.

"Caffeine is a big influence," he replies. "Yeah, I drink a lot of coffee. And the band The Pixies? [I'm a] really big Pixies fan. Have you seen the movie Babe: Pig in the City?" He is perfectly serious, and I answer in the affirmative. "Yeah, that's a really big influence on me; I love that movie. I kind of like the vaguely surreal movies of that type, like I really like City of Lost Children... Sometimes my dog is a really big influence on me. The other members of the band influence me a great deal because I spend a lot of time with them, and... Let me see what their influences are right now..." He calls over to Tim Nordwind, OK Go bassist, for help. "Ping-pong, mini-golf. The color red really influences Tim, and Tim in turn influences me a great deal. Ah, Carol Kaye, the bassist for a lot of Motown recordings, the Stenberg Brothers... Oh yeah, those little movies on PBS with the talking monkeys? Jesus, those things influence me a lot... Oh! Yeah, recently I was quite influenced by a can of spray paint... I take a good deal of influence from Stephen Pinker, a cognitive science writer. Recently I was quite influenced by a book, called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I think that's enough influences, isn't it?" Again, I answer in the affirmative.

Probably the most visually apparent thing about OK Go's self-titled CD is the amount of brightly colored flowers littered all over the cover. "Why the flowers?" I inquire.

"Ah, do you like them?" Damian is quick to ask.

"I love them," I reply, and it's true.

"Yeah, me too," says Damian. "You know, the honest and relatively short answer - I mean, there are longer answers - is that having done a lot of graphic design, I have really strong ideas about what makes for a good design...My own personal aesthetics, which has nothing to do necessarily with how I think design should work, but they're things...that are sort of surreally pure? ...But, however, a lot of times those things are also aesthetically really cold and still. And, in fact, most of the design that I have done is really sort of like graphic and angular and not at all organic or sort of friendly. And it wouldn't have fit with our music. I think it seems more like drum-and-bass somehow, you know? So I wanted something that was both very graphic and very warm and organic and so this was both. It was just like we really didn't want to do anything that had that kind of like hipster, rock 'n' roll cool about it, you know? And not that I have any problem with people who are hipster rock 'n roll cool, but I think if we tried to come off with that kind of Strokes-Hives kind of quality, no one would've believed us anyways, so we wanted something that was as friendly and sort of as brashly excited as we are."

As for OK Go's plans for the next year or two, they're fairly simple: "Tour-tour-tour-tour-tour-tour, make another album, tour-tour-tour-tour-tour."

In the music video for OK Go's current radio single, "Get Over It," there is a short break in the middle of the guitar solo during which the band members play ping-pong in slow motion. On their official website (www.okgo.net), there is also a hilarious ping-pong instructional video and a charming little ping-pong flash game where you go head-to-head against the members of the band. I ask why ping-pong has become such a big part of their lives.

"Ah, well Tim and I met while we were playing ping-pong... And it's just been a sort of on-going joke between us," answers Damian. "It's just fun, you know, there's something that's just like shamelessly fun about ping-pong...Neither of us are actually that good, and the other guys in the band are even worse, and it's like completely satisfying and entertaining in a way that I wish more music was instead of so serious and dour."

My next question is how he has changed since the start of OK Go. After discussing the question with Tim, Damian answers, "I've gotten a little bit calmer, apparently...probably because I have somewhere to get my aggression out every night. I've gotten four years older, which has something to do with that as well. My hair's gotten a lot longer. I broke my foot... We've started to listen to a lot more music 'cause we can get it for free a lot of times. I'm a better guitarist than I was four years ago. I think I hit Tim less than I used to hit him, although I still hit him a great deal."

"Oh no!" I exclaim, laughing.

"Everyone likes to hit Tim."

"Poor Tim," I say sympathetically.

Damian is not so sympathetic: "Well, he's, you know, he's kind of the charming little bald one and you just want to hit him."

"If you had a voice in your head, who would it be?" I ask.

"Julianne Moore would be the voice in my head," Damian replies frankly, after asking Tim for the actress's name. "I mean I wish - I really like Julianne Moore." He yells over to Tim again to give him the name of the actor in Sixteen Candles whom he apparently looked like as a kid. Tim gives him the name, and Damian continues: "I think actually in my head would be Anthony Michael Hall."

I ask Damian for the meaning of life. He asks Tim, who answers him, and then turns back to me. "Oooh, you like that? He said to have a lot of love and to share it. That's good. I'll go with that one." Tim interrupts to say that the maxim is not his own creation. "Yeah, we'll credit that one to Peter Glance," Damian continues, "a filmmaker friend of mine who does have quite a lot of love in him and more than his due share of intelligence as well...Apparently he said 'that's what it's all about' and he could've been referring to some specific incident that was about that but...we'll go ahead and use that as a life motto."

"Would you consider yourself more of a dog person or a cat person?" I inquire.

"Dog," he says promptly. I ask why. He elaborates: "Well now I'm allergic to cats, so that part hurts. I like the share of consciousness that you can have with a dog, you know? Like I can speak to my dog in English and it will respond. When I tell my dog to play piano she will play piano, when I tell my dog to sit she will sit down, when I tell her to jump over things she will jump over things. It's not specifically the control factor, but like we're on the same team trying to get the same things done, you know? I mean occasionally she really wants to go outside when I don't want to and that kind of thing, but when we walk around outside she wants to be near where I am, because we're on the same team and we're going to do the same things together. Whereas cats are willfully on the other team, and while they may like you because you feed them and sort of like to sit on your lap and sleep with you sometimes, they also are so willfully independent that it's hard to have the same share of emotional space."

Finally I ask if he has any advice for highschoolers.

"Yeah, it gets better," Damian says with a chuckle. "Hang in there. You will see the light one day, you know, like the light is at the end of the tunnel, even if it looks incredibly dark. High school generally kind of sucks. Like I said, I had a relatively good time in high school, but I also got through it by listening to a lot of very angry music, so I guess in a lot of ways we make a terrible band for high schoolers 'cause I don't think we're all that angry."

Here I protest - they do not make a terrible band for highschoolers, and I listen to them, after all.

"There you go!" he says kindly, and continues. "Just say no to velvet cloaks, no velvet cloaks, and don't get into the whole Renaissance Festival thing; it's not going to make you seem smart to other people, you know what I'm saying? And substance abuse does not equate with maturity. Let me see if Tim's got any good ones..." Damian yells over to Tim, who yells back something incomprehensible. Damian clarifies: "Floss."