OK Go’s Tim Nordwind touts the creative importance of intense playfulness ahead of Truman show
OK Go. // Photo by Piper Ferguson
After a decade-long hiatus, the genre-defying band, not-strictly-indie, not-strictly-alternative pop-rock band OK Go has hit the road again and will stop in Kansas City to perform at The Truman on September 11. This tour run comes with the promotion of their most recent fifth studio album And the Adjacent Possible, which debuted in early April of this year.
Known for their inventive sound and visuals—from jumping on treadmills to puzzling optical illusions—OK Go is eager to perform their latest work with KC fans.
The Pitch caught up with bassist and founding member Tim Nordwind ahead of the show to talk about all things creativity, shifting understandings of love, and what listeners can expect from their most recent record.
The Pitch: OK Go had a fairly long hiatus. After 10 years since your last album, how did that gap in time shape And the Adjacent Possible?
Tim Nordwind: Well, it certainly gave us a lot of perspective. I would say. You know, a lot of life happened in that 10 years for us personally, and then also outside of us, including the pandemic. Because of that, I think on this record, especially thematically and lyrically, you sort of hear us struggling to understand what is happening globally, what was happening to us personally.
A lot of the guys in the band had kids and things like that, whether you have kids or not, growing up in a world that seems increasingly crazier and crazier, sometimes you find yourself struggling to understand how to hold some hope while also acknowledging the reality of what’s happening in the world. Just trying to understand it for one you know, but then trying to explain it to yourself and explain it to loved ones. I definitely feel like so much happened between the last time we made a record to this record, and you sort of hear us confusingly, trying to understand it or grapple with it.
You talked about a couple of the members having children and about family. I read that family, children, and a shifting understanding of love have played a role in the development of your most recent record. How did those experiences influence your creative priorities and songwriting?
I think because we were starting to understand new versions of love that was sort of deepening, it meant that our creative well was deeper to create from.
I’ve certainly heard Damian talk a lot about that, with regards to his children, and specifically to the song “Love.” Where he speaks about thinking he had an understanding of what love was until having children.
It is sort of like living in a one bedroom house with a door that you never went through, and then you open up that door and there’s just like a gigantic ballroom all of a sudden of feelings and emotions that was like part of you all along that somehow got unlocked. And so I feel like having those experiences to draw on was only helpful in being creative.
OK Go has always been known for a genre-blending, playful, and experimental sound. How did you approach the production of this new album?
Playfulness is a really big thing for us, both musically and visually. A lot of this record was, in some ways, a continuation of what we’ve been trying to do for the last several records, which was really experimenting with sound, essentially. Sometimes you put two chords together, and it’s like, “Alright, well that’s two chords together.” But you know if you put two chords together that are run through lots of delay and lots of distortion and a melody is applied to it, all of a sudden you’ve got some kind of magical confluence that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
We really, really tried to prioritize that style of creating where it’s just like hunting for magic in the dark. I’ve got one chord, I don’t know what the next two are, but let’s root this chord in some type of sonic universe and see where it wants to take us. It sounds a little bit woo-woo, but for us that was a very, and continues to be a very, fun way to create and stumble upon things, rather than just try to “think it, think it, think it,” you know, we’re trying to “feel it, feel it, feel it” the whole time.
I wanted to ask about one of your music videos. According to People Magazine, OK Go described the “Love” music video—featuring 29 robots and 60 mirrors—as your most complicated to date. You’ve also said “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” was complex as well. What are some of the biggest logistical challenges in creating such inventive and intricate visuals?
For “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill,” that’s on 64 iPhones, the big challenge there was the simplest idea is right at the top of the video—it’s just Damian walking from one phone into another phone into another phone. We purposely start very simple, so you can kind of learn what the idea is. Even testing that idea takes 45 minutes, just that one simple idea to be, “Do I like this or not? Is this cool or not? How does this make me feel? What can we tweak about this?”
Then you decide what you can tweak about it and that takes another 45 minutes to see if you liked what you tweaked about it. As the video exponentially grows into more and more phones, it was a very, very hard video to conceptualize and test for. It took a great deal of patience because by the end when we’re in all 64 phones, we’re doing things that are happening on the phone and happening in the room, then it kind of goes back and forth between the two. It’s just a real brain puzzle.
With the video for “Love,” which features robots and mirrors, we worked with such an incredible team, and our co-director, Aaron Duffy, helped us head it up. We had a great way of being able to see a pre-visualization—a 3D rendering—of what we were hoping to do. When we went into that video we could test things out very quickly, at least online. The challenge was going to be when we had to take these several ton robots and drill them into a floor in Hungary—controlling mirrors very precisely—it was getting it off of the 3D rendering and into reality that was a humongous challenge. Knowing that, we were really putting a lot of faith and trust in the ability of programmers, programming robots to do really precise mirror illusions, getting into the space and really starting to test that stuff out was incredibly challenging.
It was not shocking that you guys pulled it off because OK Go has a long documented history of doing innovative and well-thought out videos. I’m curious, where does OK Go’s seemingly endless creativity and iconic visual experimentation come from?
It’s funny because I actually think it’s rooted in the fact that we started as a live band performing in front of people. Being in the room with people is always what we kind of want to try to do. The earliest videos of us dancing in Damien’s backyard, or us dancing on treadmills, things like that where if we could have done that with an audience, we would have. We bent this rule a lot, especially in the beginning, but it was very important to us that it was, one take, no edits, and the camera doesn’t move. This was as close as we could get to creating an experience that we’d prefer to do in front of people in a room but, for whatever reasons, we were not able to do it. This is the next best thing to try to bring you into the room with us.
I think a lot of our visual language stems from the fact that we are a group of people who have always enjoyed creating for people in a room. And when we can’t be in a room with you, then we try to do the next best thing to create that experience. I still feel community, to me, is the most important thing and because at some point we decided to grow our language into video from just music, we’ve still tried to keep that ethos as close to us as possible, I think.
Ahead of your performance at The Truman, how is the team thinking about bringing the album’s visual and emotional energy into the live show? What should Kansas City fans expect?
We’ve created a very gorgeous lighting situation around us. We are sort of engulfed in our lights. But we’ve purposefully left video out of it this time, because we’ve done a lot of production with video before, and sometimes you find that people just watch the video and they’re kind of not there with us.
We usually try to think of our shows as a party that we’ve invited people to. We don’t want to just turn on the TV once people come in, we want to engage with people as much as possible. And so, we’ve tried to frame ourselves in a way that feels really inviting and really warm and exciting. It’s just you and us. That’s what we’re hoping to do.
And then there’s just a lot of confetti. We basically create our own weather system of confetti. That to us is the most inviting environment we can think of, essentially. It’s like “Welcome to our land. It’s going to rain confetti tonight.”
You touched on this idea of connection with the audience. OK Go said “To listen to And the Adjacent Possible is to be taken on an emotional rollercoaster… in the best way possible. While the music is largely upbeat, the lyrics can be dark.” Can you talk a bit about what went into the album’s emotional arc from track to track?
I think this is maybe the most genre blending record we’ve ever made. It’s got real mixtape vibes to it in a way that I think we’ve tried to avoid on our other records. This time, we were like, “You know what? We all grew up in the sort of mid to late 80s, early 90s, making mix tapes for each other, listening to pop radio at the time,” which was really a very wide spectrum of music. You had everything from DEVO and The Go-Go’s to Lionel Richie and Tina Turner. Cyndi Lauper was somewhere in the middle of that, Madonna and Prince, you had all these different genres.
I think because of the way streaming works now and stuff like that, you really can go from Ella Fitzgerald to like Duran Duran with the click of a button. I feel like that’s how certain people listen to music now, and that was very much how we were writing songs over the course of And the Adjacent Possible.
I’d come in and be like, “Man, I wrote this song. I really like it. It sounds like Frank Sinatra, and I don’t know if we can work with that.” And it’s just like, “Well, why not? We like this.” Another song would come in, and it’d be like, “Oh, this sounds like 80s-era David Bowie, which doesn’t sound like Sinatra. Is that a problem?” We just decided, no it’s not a problem—we’re just going to embrace that. And that in and of itself began to create somewhat of an emotional arc, kind of going from flavor to flavor.
To me, the arc is energetic more than it is narrative. It starts out bold and bombastic and sort of dips into attempts to be joyful and hopeful. Every once in a while, it then dips again into, “Oh God, what is happening in the world?” And ends on, “Please don’t give up. Let’s all not give up. Let’s keep trying.” The narrative is pinned to the energy of it all at the end of the day.
OK Go. // Photo by Piper Ferguson
Do you plan to perform “Shooting the Moon?” (It’s my favorite OK Go song.)
We now perform that song on hand bells. We used to perform it, as I guess you would know it on the record via that arrangement, when it first came out for several years. I really loved that original arrangement, but the hand bell arrangement is very beautiful. And I guess, after all the years of playing it the way it was recorded, it feels kind of nice to sort of rearrange it for a new decade.
Is there anything I haven’t asked that you’d wanna make sure I mention?
We put out a new visualizer for the first song on our record called “Impulse Purchase.” We made it with our friends, an animator named Will Anderson and an artist named Lucas Zanotto. They used face capture on Damien’s face so he can control Lucas’s character that rolls through this 3D virtual world. It’s really fun. We made it with Blender Studio, using their open source, free software. So, if people want to play with our video, they can.
That’s sick!
