Austinist Interviews OK Go

So you guys went all the way to Malmö, Sweden, to record your new album.  What brought you all the way out there?

Tore Johansen, our producer.  We really wanted to work with him, and he only wanted to work out there.  Frankly, we didn’t put up a fight.

This is the guy who produced Franz Ferdinand’s debut album?

Yeah, the work I know of the most is actually The Cardigans in the 90’s, I think he did 3 or 4 with them. They’re these sort of pop masterpieces, so well produced.  When we thought about him initially, we thought about those records, but we also thought they might be a little too syrupy, a little too saccharine, and then we heard the Franz Ferdinand record, which was completely the opposite.  I mean, it’s still pop dance music, but it’s really angular and aggressive. So we called him up, and he wanted to do the record. And he is [hesitates], crazy - I mean, he’s awesome, but he’s totally crazy.

This guy has kind of a reputation for being somewhat of a hard-ass, no?

I think he projects that, so people believe it from him.  Like every other producer we talked to before was like, [affects an Ozzy Osbourne accent] “Oh man! These demos are amazing! It’s great! Best record!” All these strings of superlatives that are, well, smoke up the ass. 

But [Tore] was just like - and I won’t even try his comical Swedish accent, he’s like [does it anyways], “Is okay. Is good. Good songs. I like these songs”,  and I could hear the ellipsis coming, “They’re very ... competent.  But they’re not, well ... they need more ... dangerousness...ness” 

I thought, “is dangerousness-ness a word?” and realized that this guy was perfect. He seemed to understand our focus on this record.

And what was that?

Well, we write sort of all over the place.  We’re not the type of band that sits down and churns out songs.  They’re pretty over-thought, and they come from a wide variety of influences.  Our demo sounded like a ridiculous mix tape - you could hear some Prince here and some Stones there ... We knew that the record had to be more continuous, it needed to be more cohesive.  And he picked up on that right away.  A lot of the producers we talked to were just all technical - “we’re gonna do this really dry”, or “we’re gonna make this really ... shiny” or whatever. Tore understood that what we needed most was someone to bounce ideas off it, someone to center it all. 

So he didn’t really change your sound?

No, in fact, what we did was record almost everything live.  We didn’t use any click tracks for the most part, because he really wants thing sort of the push and pull, to sound human, you know?  It’s a pretty messy, pretty organic record. And I think that offsets our melodic pop-ness well.  A lot of our songs are very singable, melodic rock songs. 

Our first record was the exact opposite.  We made this super, very clean, perfect, almost monstrous pop ... slab.  We stuffed bells and whistles into every corner, it was like we had ten or fifteen guitars piled up on a single line, and six-part harmonies.  That first record we spent six months in the studio, it was like a big science project.  For this one, we just wanted to go and play it and sound like we ... sound.

It’s certainly more refined.  You guys seem to have figured out what works, and -

Yes, it was definitely easier, but a different sort of challenge.  Our first album was the self-indulgent, kid-in-a-candy-store kind of thing. It was like, “can we rent one of these? can we really use that? Let’s try this, and try that!” [laughs] This was more of an artistic challenge, making sure that everything we wanted to get in there was there and nothing else.  The [songs] are pretty simple, they’re really about the rhythm section - more about groove and feeling and less about, “Hey, look, a Glockenspiel!”

So what’d you do in your off time in Sweden?

Well, there wasn’t much off time.  We were there about two and a half months, and we did six day weeks - 14, 16 hours a day usually.  There wasn’t terribly much downtime, but usually we’d take Sunday or Monday off and we’d just be wasted, tired, and sleep all  the time.  Towards the end of it we took a break for about ten days.  In fact, it was right over Thanksgiving.  So we made a big Thanksgiving dinner for all of our Swedish pals.  It’s really hard to find a turkey in Malmö. 

Do you think you guys will go back to record the third album?

I would totally love to.  The thing is, when our first record came out, I thought it was great - I thought we’d always want to work like that.  And of course, now I can’t stand the first record, and I think the second one’s great.  By the time the third one comes out, who knows, maybe we’ll want do to a hip-hop record. 

Were all the songs written on the road?

About half of them had roots from something on the road.  But we toured for almost two years on the first record, and when we got back home we were so spent and dislocated.  Everybody had broken up with girlfriends, everyone’s apartment was three inches deep in dust and with all of our dirty laundry still piled up from when we were last at home.  We all actually moved out of Chicago because it was just too crazy.  Tim and I moved to Los Angeles, Dan moved to New York - after a stay in Tampa, strangely - and our guitarist, Andy, actually quit the band and stayed in Chicago.  But we got a new guitarist, also named Andy [waves to New Andy, slouched over on a nearby couch surfing the net on his PowerBook]. 

It took a few months to write anything we liked - I’d started to freak out on the road and tried to write as much as I could, but it wasn’t particularly productive.  We wrote everyday, for hours and hours, and it was just crap for the longest time - it was so bad.  We had written like 40 or 50 songs, and I don’t think I liked any one of them.  And then something snapped, they just all started coming -

What was it that changed?

I think part of what it was that at the end of our last tour, it really kinda just petered out in a sorta depressing way.  We never really knew when it was time to stop [touring] and start a new record.  It just was just an ebb-and-flow kind of thing, we were all in a bad way.  So it took a while to get going, but once we did things sort of came together.  We went to Sweden with 31 songs, only started about 18 of them, and cut that down to 14 in the first week. 

How’d you decide what got cut?

It was pretty communal, sort of like a Venn diagram - there was some stuff that Tore just didn’t want to work on, he was like “great song. I have no interest in it”  For instance, Tore just doesn’t like swing beats - thoomp-bah bah-thoomp-bah - that kind of adamantine bah-thoomp-bah.  We got one of them on the record, but he’s really into the sort of angular, one-two-one-two kind of beats.  A couple of other songs we just amongst ourselves didn’t entirely agree on.  But there were six or seven that we knew we wanted, so we started from that. 

You guys have quite a following in Japan.  How’d that happen?

I think they look more kindly upon melody in Japan.  Like what’s cool there doesn’t require the same jeans-t-shirt faux swagger - like Americans have gotta believe that there’s a little bit of a farmer in you, you know? 

How’d you guys manage to stay sane after two years of touring?  Being on the road must’ve driven you nuts.

Coffee, lots of coffee. [Laughs]  I’m not entirely sure we did stay sane.  We’re not the type of people who get violent with one another.  Not with frequency, at least.  We’re all very close friends.  Like when we lost our guitarist, the primary aim was to find someone we’d get along with.  There are a million great guitarists in the world, but there aren’t many you’d want to sit elbow-to-elbow with, nine hours a day, for nine months at a time.  [Our] band isn’t a bunch of virtuosic musicians who met at Berklee - I met Tim when I was twelve years old, and we’re very close friends.  So a lot can be forgiven, and  we have a lot more leeway and flexibility with each other than I think a lot of bands do. 

When we got off tour, I had a kind of spin-out.  Being on tour, you really stop being able to relate to normal social situations.  Like, when you’re playing a show every single day, no matter how big or little your band is, you’re always “the dude from the band”. You’re always meeting people - one, who are wasted, and two, who think that you’re different from them.  You take on this aura of being somebody from someplace else, and you’re often the kinda fantasy escape for these guys.  You’re playing in a small town, and the people are like, [affects a Hungarian accent, oddly enough] “You people come in! You play rock and roll!” 

It’s like you just don’t have normal interactions.  You don’t have the back and forth, where it’s like, “I want to learn about you, you want to learn about me.”  It’s all very lopsided, like “You want to learn about me. You want to learn about me.”  It happens slowly enough where I didn’t realize it until I got off the tour. 

You get off the tour for a week, and you don’t go to rock shows and you don’t go to bars.  You fucking sit at home and you read or you watch the TV or you go out with your family somewhere.  But when you go out to bars or shows again, the normal equity between people is lost - you just don’t know how to do it again.  I remember going to parties and I didn’t know how to make small talk.  I was like, what do I say when someone doesn’t start with “Hey man, what kinda guitar was that you were playing?” 

You lose any diachronic perspective in your life. Like my girlfriend complains that she’s had this big idea for three months - people have these big arcs, like “what I am going to be doing in a year?”  On a rock tour, you’re thinking about what you’re gonna do tonight.  It’s like, “can I replicate what I did last night?”  You’re basically trying to figure out how to get to the club, how to get a decent sound check, and fighting with a broken monitor or you need to find a pack of strings.  And it repeats, and it repeats, and it repeats.  And you get home two years later, and, literally, your dishes are in the same place from when you left.  You’ve been around the world five times, but you couldn’t see any of it because you were moving so fast that you couldn’t do any of it. 

And how long before you guys were itching to get back on the road?

Well, at first that’s what you want immediately.  Like you don’t know how to handle real life, so you’re like, “Let’s just get back on the bus and go back on tour!” But then it took us a full year to get the new record done, with the recuperating and writing and re-writing.  But basically after the record was done we wanted to get back, because we had new songs - there’s something about recording that sorta resets you, like “Oh wait, now I have new shit to show people, I really want to go show them!”

So what’s the deal with the candy sculptures?

Tim leaves these audio blogs - he has these telephone system where he can call in and send his voice messages to an email list.  There are all these people who have signed up, and they’ll get them in their email. He sends them his instructions on what to bring to shows.  At first it he was like, “Bring us pairs of sunglasses!” and then a hundred kids would bring sunglasses to the show and you’d be like, “Oh, Jesus, all these kids went out and spent ten, fifteen bucks on sunglasses”, and we didn’t want them to waste all their money.  So he started asking for things that people could make - candy sculptures, family trees, fantasy sketches of our webmaster.

What do you guys do on your off-time?

Andy and I actually have a sort of pop-science reading club.  And we get together and uhh -

What? [Laughs]

Well, Andy’s a total nerd.  If you think I’m a nerd, Andy’s a huge-o nerd.  Andy was a professional computer programmer when we met him.  And guess what? 

He didn’t quit his job - he still does it from the road.

How can you possibly find time to do it?

[Andy] A lot of car-sitting.