OK Go
OK Go is an American rock band originally from Chicago, Illinois, now based in Los Angeles, California. The band is composed of Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, and Andy Ross, who joined them in 2005, replacing original guitarist Andy Duncan.
The band is known for its quirky music videos which are often elaborately choreographed to be filmed in a single long take and make extensive use of practical effects and optical illusions.
The original members formed as OK Go in 1998 and released two studio albums before Duncan's departure. The band's video for "Here It Goes Again" won a Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2007.
History
Formation and early years (1998–2000)
The band's lead singer, Damian Kulash, met bassist Tim Nordwind at Interlochen Arts Camp near Traverse City, Michigan, when they were 11. The band name comes from an inside joke developed at Interlochen; their art teacher had an often high assistant who would repeatedly say, "OK... Go!" while they were drawing. They kept in touch after camp, often exchanging mixtapes which influenced each other's musical tastes and the band's future sound. They met the band's future guitarist and keyboardist Andy Duncan in high school. Nordwind and Duncan moved to Chicago for college, and, with drummer Dan Konopka, formed the band Stanley's Joyful Noise. After graduating from Brown University, Kulash moved to Chicago. The quartet formed OK Go with the name being "an obvious choice for us" according to Nordwind.The band marketed themselves aggressively, putting up posters all around Chicago and touring heavily. Within a year the group had shared the stage with international artists such as Elliott Smith, the Promise Ring, the Olivia Tremor Control and Sloan. At the end of 2000, the band was invited by radio host Ira Glass to serve as the house band for live performances of This American Life. Glass also helped the band creatively after asking Kulash the question, "Do you see yourselves as being earnest or clever?" Kulash struggled with the question before deciding that the answer was earnest. "I wanted to write a full-on rock song, one that made me feel like Queen songs made me feel", after which he wrote "Get Over It".
The band self-released two EPs, titled Brown EP and Pink EP, which were culled from an album's worth of songs recorded in February 2000 with producer Dave Trumfio, to serve as demos. The demos did not land the band a label deal, but got them the attention of booking agent Frank Riley, who booked them as the opening act for a few shows by They Might Be Giants. OK Go eventually opened for They Might Be Giants on five tours; singer John Flansburgh briefly sought to co-manage them.
In 2001 the group moved to Los Angeles, although they considered their Chicago roots important even a decade later.
''OK Go'' (2001–2004)
In April 2001, the band signed with Capitol Records, forgoing offers from bigger labels because they believed that, as the first signing by newly hired label president Andy Slater, they would get more attention and support.The band recorded its self-titled debut album at the Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. OK Go's original plan was to do minor tweaks to its original demo recordings; instead, the band rerecorded everything and added five new songs, including the first single "Get Over It", which later appeared in the video games Triple Play Baseball, ''Madden NFL 2003, and Guitar Hero 5.
The label delayed the album's release from its original June 2002 date to September 17. To promote the album, the label sent out miniature ping pong tables to press outlets, a reference to the "Get Over It" video directed by Francis Lawrence, while the band toured with acts including the Vines, Phantom Planet, Superdrag, the Donnas, Fountains of Wayne, and Mew, and played festival shows including Leeds in 2002 and 2003, and NoisePop, Reading, Witnness, and T in the Park in 2003.
In the United States, the album reached #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart and #107 on the Billboard 200 Chart. In the United Kingdom, the first single "Get Over It" debuted at no. 27, in the UK singles chart on March 16, 2003, and the band performed it on that week's edition of Top of the Pops. Also that week, the single's video was named video of the week by Q magazine''.
''Oh No'' and ''You're Not Alone'' (2005–2008)
The band's second album, Oh No, was recorded in Malmö, Sweden, in the fall of 2004 and was produced by Tore Johansson and mixed by Dave Sardy. In February 2005, Andy Duncan left the band, citing creative differences, major label pressures, and the band's rigorous touring schedule. Duncan was replaced by Andy Ross, who beat out 34 other guitarists who auditioned for the role, in a process that ended with each candidate being asked about their willingness to do a choreographed dance on stage. Ross introduced himself to the band's fans by writing a blog post entitled "The Will To Rock", in which he detailed life on the road, beginning with his first show with the band on February 18, 2005.Released in August 2005, Oh No gained popularity for its first single, "A Million Ways". Ross programmed a web application, hosted at a1000000ways.com, that allowed people to hear the single and to share it with their friends in exchange for free downloads from the iTunes music store. The video for "A Million Ways" featured the band in a backyard performing a dance choreographed by lead singer Kulash's sister, Trish Sie. By August 2006, the video had become the most downloaded music video ever, with over 9 million downloads. The band performed the dance live on British TV show Soccer AM, as well as on the late-night American comedy show Mad TV. The US version of the album includes "9027 km", a 35-minute track of lead singer Damian Kulash's girlfriend sleeping that is not listed on the album art. Fans speculated that the track's name is derived from the distance between Los Angeles, California, and Malmö, Sweden, where the album was recorded and that the track was included to prevent the band's label from using the extra space for digital rights management software. On December 6, 2005, Kulash published an op-ed piece in The New York Times advocating against record labels' use of DRM.
The band toured extensively to support Oh No, sharing dates with Death Cab For Cutie, Panic! at the Disco, Kaiser Chiefs, and Snow Patrol. They did special performances, including free shows on New Year's Eve in New York City's Times Square and in the parking lot before the University of Michigan-vs.-Michigan State University football game They played festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Bennicassim in Spain, Formoz Festival in Taiwan, Summer Sonic in Japan, and Incheon Pentaport in South Korea.
On November 7, 2006, after the success of the "Here It Goes Again" video, the band released a deluxe DVD version of the album. The DVD contains a documentary on the making of the album, the four official Capitol Records videos, a video of the band's appearance on Chic-a-Go-Go, a "super cut" of the hundreds of fan versions of the "A Million Ways" dance, a behind-the-scenes video of the making of "Here It Goes Again", rehearsals for the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards, an acoustic performance of "What to Do", a video for "There's A Fire" featuring video game characters, a dance booth version of "Don't Ask Me”, and live versions of "Do What You Want" and "You're So Damn Hot".
After visiting New Orleans in 2007, the band returned to record an EP with New Orleans funk rock band Bonerama and producer Mark Nevers, to raise money for musicians who were still displaced by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. The EP, entitled You're Not Alone, was released on Mardi Gras, February 5, 2008. The title is taken from a line in David Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", a cover of which appears on the EP, along with renditions of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" and three songs from Oh No. The EP was sold through iTunes and raised over $40,000, which helped buy a new home for New Orleans musician Al "Carnival Time" Johnson in the Musicians Village. Johnson, who sings on "I Will Be Released", the final song on the EP, moved into his new home in December 2008. In support of the EP, OK Go and Bonearama played benefit shows on January 11, 2008, at Tipitina's in New Orleans, and on February 2, 2008, at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. The D.C. show was streamed live by NPR and featured on a subsequent NPR podcast.
''Of the Blue Colour of the Sky'' (2008–2012)
On October 12, 2008, OK Go announced that the members had finished writing new songs for its third album and were in the studios in upstate New York with producer Dave Fridmann. The band previewed its third album, titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, with several dates on the US East Coast, starting in Philadelphia on March 6, 2009, at the TLA Theatre. The name of the album comes from a pseudo-scientific book written by Augustus Pleasonton in 1876 entitled The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky. The members of the band have said that these songs are the "danciest, most anthemic, most heartbroken, and honest songs" of their career, and the album itself takes a much more funky, dance-prone, yet melancholy sound to it, drawing influence from Prince. On May 7, 2009, a song from the album, titled "Skyscrapers", was released for streaming online. The first single, "WTF?", was released on November 17, 2009. On January 8, 2010, OK Go appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien and performed a song from the album, "This Too Shall Pass". Of the Blue Colour of the Sky was released on January 12, 2010.After the first two videos for Of the Blue Colour of the Sky were posted to YouTube in 2009, the band was quickly met with complaints from fans who were only able to view them on YouTube. In response, Kulash posted a long letter on the band's website explaining the record label's policies. The letter itself went viral, after being reprinted in Gizmodo, cited as "required reading" on BoingBoing, and excerpted on many other websites. At the end of the letter, Kulash included embed codes for the band's most recent video in direct opposition to the desires of the label. On February 20, 2010, the New York Times printed an op-ed in which Kulash furthered the arguments he made in his open letter.
On March 9, 2010, the band uploaded a video to YouTube entitled "OK Go Announces new label", in which Kulash, accompanied by two dogs in neckties, announced the creation of Paracadute. On March 10, 2010, the band announced it had cut ties with EMI and Capitol and formed the independent label Paracadute. The split became official on April 1, 2010. Paracadute then assumed ownership of the album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, though the band's first two albums, OK Go and Oh No remained catalog items of EMI. That night, OK Go performed a single from its newly independent record on Late Night with Jimmy Kimmel. Now charting its own destiny as an independent entity, the band has attempted to plot a new course for itself, as Kulash puts it: "We're trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world."
The first wholly new release on the band's label Paracadute Recordings was 180/365, a live album recorded over several shows in 2010, mixed by producer Fridmann, and released on June 21, 2011. The album title refers to the number of concerts the band played in the course of one year. A stream of the album premiered on the technology website Mashable before its official street date. To celebrate the release, the band printed and sold 200 signed copies of 180/365: The Book, a limited-edition book of tour photographs by Nathaniel Wood that was made available only to purchasers of the album. The album was sold digitally and on CD in six-panel eco-friendly "Tron Pack" packaging from Norway.
In July 2012, the band partnered with the Humble Bundle for a pay-what-you-will release of the remix collection Twelve Remixes Of Four Songs, alongside titles from MC Frontalot, They Might Be Giants, Christopher Tin, Hitoshi Sakimoto, and Jonathan Coulton.
The band's most successful example of its new business model was taking money from State Farm Insurance, which was looking to tap into a younger audience by creating a piece of interesting digital content. The band created a music video for "This Too Shall Pass", in which a toy truck with State Farm branding was used to start a large Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse. Released on March 1, 2010, the video quickly went viral, with 1.4 million YouTube views in the first 48 hours and over 50 million total views as of 2016. Since that video, OK Go has employed a similar model in projects funded by Range Rover, Yahoo, Cisco, Samsung, Google Chrome, Jose Cuervo, and Chevrolet.