The phone rings. I answer.
“Hey, you know how there’s the OK Go Track Pack coming to Guitar Hero and Band Hero on Thursday? Well, do you want to interview Tim Nordwind, bassist and backing vocalist for OK Go, like, now?”
My love for power-pop masters OK Go is well-established, and everybody knows Tim as “the one with the glasses from that treadmill video.” I dusted off my old music-journalist hat and, without aid of any sort of recorder (and without knowing that the band was about to split with its label and form its own — sorry, no juicy info on that here), grabbed the phone for this interview.
DAN: It’s the question everybody asks any band whose music is used in a game: You guys are gamers, right?
TIM: I think we’re gamers by convenience. If there’s a game to play and it’s set up and we’re around it, we’ll play it. Personally, I grew up with Intellivision. When I was little we had Intellivision in my house – I wish we had Atari, because all my friends did – and to be honest to you, that’s about where the gaming experience ends (laughs). But there was one game that we all kind of got into, which was SSX – that video game was almost the demise of our second record. We were in Sweden recording and there were a couple games in the studio, and SSX was one of them. “We have to do vocals.” “Well, just one game of SSX.” And then three hours later, “Okay, we really have to do the vocals now…”
DAN: How involved is the band in the process of choosing songs that go into DLC?
TIM: The songs that are on video games all come from requests. As far as we’re concerned we’d like to have every song we’ve ever written in the game! In this day and age with labels kind of dying and MTV doesn’t play videos and radio is not what it once was, videogames …I think more people know our songs from videogames than anywhere else at this point. With the traditional formats dying, games have become an alternate format for getting music out there.
I remember my nephew saying “Uncle Timmy, have you ever heard of this band Guns ‘n Roses?” And I’m like, oh my god, “Yes, I have heard of Guns ‘n Roses.” “Have you heard of a song called ‘Paradise City’?” and I’m like, “Of course. But where did you hear about Guns ‘n Roses?” And he said “Guitar Hero” and named all these other bands — and they were all from music games.
DAN: You have your own fan club – not just the band, but you personally. How creepy is that?
TIM: I don’t find it creepy. We are very lucky to have incredibly creative and productive fans, and we have a nice creative dialogue with our fans. We make something, then we often get video responses to the things we made. Like a little conversation. There’s an inspired community of people out there being creative and making things. We’re not the typical band that should have a fan club.
DAN: The new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, really sounds different from the previous two albums – this feels a lot more dense, with a lot more reverb on the vocals, whereas the first two were sort of light and airy. Was this more a result of the production approach this time, or the material you’d written for the record?
TIM: I think the material inspired the production. We worked with Dave Fridmann, who has a specific sound – he’s known for his work with the Flaming Lips and MGMT – a sort of three-dimensional psychedelic spacious sound. We had been writing more toward something that sounded like that and we’d been trying to work with him for a long time. I think we were sort of, without knowing it, writing toward his sound. And when we realized we could work with him, we consciously started writing toward that sound.
It’s probably my favorite of the three records and it is a little more melancholic, but I think some of the most epic songs we’ve written were on this record. I would venture to say it’s an album of extremes –maybe some of the happiest songs we’ve ever done, but definitely some of the saddest.
DAN: You lived in Chicago for many years but now you live in Los Angeles. I just moved here myself and I’m worried. Has LA stolen your soul?
TIM: Not really — I don’t live on the westside. I found a neighborhood in LA that reminds me of where I used to live in Chicago. LA has not stolen my soul at all; if anything it’s enriched it. It’s a very eclectic city and there are an awful lot of people doing a lot of amazing things here. And I don’t think you could pick a better city to eat in – the restaurants are amazing.
DAN: Final obsessive fan question: OK Go, Oh No, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky…why do all your albums start with the letter O?
TIM: Someone just brought that up to us the other week. We thought, “We’re really going to get away from having all our albums just be four letters,” but we didn’t think about the fact that they started with O. We thought we were going way off course with a long title! The title is actually part of a title of a really long book from 1876, The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky . Originally the album was going to be the full title, and basically everybody said, “You just can’t have an album name that long.” (laughs) So we went with just that, because we thought it was poetic.
The OK Go Track Pack hits Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and the Wii Shop Channel today, and it contains Guitar Hero and Band Hero versions of three vicious earworms: “Here It Goes Again,” “Do What You Want,” and “Get Over It.” I recommend them all.
