If you're an OK Go fan, you're probably feeling particularly blessed, as the power pop purveyors released their long-awaited 5th album, And The Adjacent Possible, one week ago. And because they are a gift that keeps on giving, they also released their most ambitious and dazzling music video to date, for "Love." There is so much OK Go to soak up, but before we march into a new era with them, we were fortunate enough to have Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind in our Setlist.fm studio to talk about the past. We dug into their setlist data which included very specific fan notes, garbage instruments, handbells, covers and which of the new songs might a bit more tweaking for the live set. Enjoy this deep dive, then check out their music video for "Love" and grab tickets to their upcoming tour here.
Audience Participation
Damian: This appears to be a set we played in 2014, so that would've been Hungry Ghosts. "There's a Fire" with audience participation. My memory of that is that we had a looper pedal. I recorded the audience doing a kick sound. Everyone'd go "boom" and "krr.” It with snaps, too? Then I think I sang the baseline into it. I'll tell you this, you cannot rely on an audience to keep time. They always speed up. You can get them looping on the looper pedal and then playing along with it, but don't get them looping by themselves.
Tim Nordwind's Adventure
Damian: Oh, "Tim Nordwind's Adventure."
Tim: I leave stage to go on a safari that everyone can watch on screen.
Damian: Don't dinosaurs eat you in the end or something?
Tim: I escape something on a rocket.
Damian: It was basically just a reason to get a good golden outfit change for the rest of the set. Which by the way needs to start happening again.
The Live Video Tour
Damian: For years, because we're known for our videos, we struggled with whether or not to show them on stage. You go to a rock concert, the last thing you want to do is have people staring at a screen. Eventually we were like, "You know what? It's time, we're gonna do an all-video tour. Watch the screen. This is a movie screening. We'll just live score it." Families would come. There was an intermission. As you see here on our setlist, we're playing something that insiders know as "garbage instruments." They are instruments made out of garbage.
Tim: Glasses with water.
Damian: Bass made out of a 50 gallon oil barrel...
Handbells origin story
Damian: We were in the studio making our third album, and I believe it was the song, "Back From Kathmandu." We needed a solo sound. I just had this "light bulb" moment that it had to be handbells. “We'll be able to get those on eBay for like, nothing.” Not true. A lot of people play them, and they're very, very expensive. They sounded terrible in that song, we didn't use 'em in that song at all, but it did lead us to fall in love with handbells again and realize that it's a really fun group instrument, 'cause everybody can only play basically one bell per hand. There are amazing handbell players out there we've seen do three bells per hand where they can do like, that's one, that's another, and they can play chords and stuff. We're not there yet.
Bringing old songs into the setlist
Damian: The breakdown of the albums we've played. So there's at least one or two songs per album that never happened, mostly because once you pick the five or seven that fit into your set, there's no reason to figure it out for live. We haven't played "Hello My Treacherous Friends" in 20 years, and then this last summer we decided to start playing it again. We actually did poll our fans, say like,"What do you want to hear?
Tim: We brought back "Bye Bye Baby."
Damian: We wrote that before the existence of OK Go. You came to visit me in college spring break and we recorded it in one night. Man, can you imagine if we could write and record a song in one night now?
Tim: We'd have 30 albums.
Covers
Damian: The most played cover on Setlist.fm, Led Zeppelin. We played "Black Dog" a lot. It can shred your throat quite a lot, but it's very fun. Blur, "Song 2." We’d find a total shredder in the audience and then give him a guitar with only one string because all through that song it's just..."ding-a-ding-a-ding," there's just a one note thing going so that way we get best of both worlds. They can't really screw it up.
Tim: They can focus on their performance.
Damian: Exactly. That's what I meant to say.
Tim: We once covered "I Want You to Want Me" by Cheap Trick for Cheap Trick.
Damian: For Cheap Trick. We were at Electrical Audio, Steve Albini's studio in Chicago. Cheap Trick were recording in the other studio, and they heard that we did a Cheap Trick cover, and they came in and were like, "We'll hear it now." It was a three-story room, like giant cavernous space and then the control room is up. It was actually like Robin Zander as God, looking down on us as we played. We did all right.
Damian: We used to always try to cover the band we were opening for, a way to sort of pay homage to them, and we played "Clementine" when opening for Elliot Smith. His tour manager thought we were like, taking the piss.
Tim: It's a peace offering.
Damian: Opening bands are in a tough spot. OK Go once opened for our other band, Nightshift. Because it was New Year's Eve and we were like, "Half the people are gonna come because they like OK Go.” The other half of the people are their boyfriends and girlfriends who were like, “Do we really have to do this on New Year's Eve?” So we were like, after the OK Go set, we're just gonna play covers of songs that everybody has to love, and so we came back as "Nightshift." Because that's clearly the type of band name you should have from the '80s. Which is when most of the great songs of our childhood happened. That show, that would've been New Year's Eve maybe 2001, 2002, something like that? Going down to the bottom, Toto, "Hold the Line." It's only on one setlist. We played that thousands of times. Listen, people out there in the world, if you went to see us play before 2005, put the setlist online.
New songs
Damian: "Level Up" is interesting because that's a demo for a song that's on our new record. We changed the lyrics.
Tim: We did.
Damian: We changed the whole song, but there is no longer "Level Up."
Tim: We played that once.
Damian: "Love," live debut. That's my favorite song on our new record, I think. That or "This Is How It Ends," my two favorites. There's a new video for that song, which I think is the best video we've made.
Tim: I think so too.
Damian: However, I saw YouTube clips of us playing the song, and it didn't rock as much as it should yet. I think live, the verse could be more rockin' because I think we tried to bring it too mechanical.
Damian: "This Is How It Ends," I was doing in the audience, which was terrifying for me because it's a hard song to sing, and I'm not the world's greatest finger picker.
Tim: But he did great.
Damian: But it came out okay.
Recipe for a setlist
Damian: What is the recipe for a setlist, Tim?
Tim: It's important to have kind of a big opening and a big closing. Some sort of emotional arc, sort of bring it down so that we can bring it back up again.
Damian: Tim's really good at that.
Tim: Whatever we come up with for a set, I would like for people in the audience to be like, "Oh right, I didn't even know I knew that one. I didn't even know I knew that one."
Damian: Then you need to be in the band, Chicago.
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OK Go kick off their (mostly sold out) tour next week in South Bend, Indiana - get a full list of dates and details here.
And, behold the magic of "Love" -
