Interview with Tim Nordwind

Ok Go – Debra Wood interviews Tim Nordwind

10th January 2010

Debs:Hello, I’ve only got a few questions here so I’ll just start with these. Your new album ‘Off the Blue Colour of The Sky’ is out tomorrow. How long have you been working on this album?
Tim: Erm, I’m trying to think. We’ve been working on ‘Off the Blue Colour of The Sky’ for almost two years now. It took about a year to write because we were brain dead from touring for two and a half years on the last record. We got home and thought ‘wow man it’s been two and a half years and we must have all this awesome music stored up in us’ and we just didn’t and we needed to kind of, I think, relax a little bit and decompress from touring all over the place. So it took us like six months just to kind of like be home and be settled before we felt like we were in a good headspace to really start writing and we wrote most of the record in a period of six to eight months. Then we spent most of last year recording it in Fredonia, New York, which is outside of Buffalo almost in Canada.

Debs:Ok, I know Buffalo.
Tim: It’s almost in Canada not too far from Niagra Falls.

Debs:Yes I’ve been there, it’s not too far from Cleveland really.
Tim: Yeah it’s not, it’s not . . . and so we spent, I’m trying to think? We started in October of ‘08’ and finished in May of ‘09’ with mixing and everything like that but it wasn’t straight through, we’d take breaks. You know, we’d record for two or three weeks at a time and then take two or three weeks off.

Debs: Ok good. When was the last time you played in the UK?
Tim: We played in London not long ago, it was a one off show at Cargo. I think that was, I guess that was in the fall or Summer I can’t quite remember now, but not that long ago. We haven’t done a proper UK tour in about two years. It’s been a long time, it’s nice to be back. Actually this place we’re playing tonight, The Waterfront, is the very first place we played in the UK.

Debs: Is it?
Tim: Yeah we were in for a band called The D4 and I guess that was for our first record?

Debs: It’s a good venue here.
Tim: Yeah I like it, it brings back a lot of good memories.

Debs: Good. What was the first break you had that made you feel ‘wow, we’re on the verge of something big here’?
Tim: (laugh) I never feel like we’re on the verge of anything big.
(laughter fills the room from all)

Debs: Fair enough.
Tim: I remember, I mean I know when lots of people thought we were getting bigger, which was during when the video for ‘Here it Goes Again’ started making its rounds on youtube and the internet and everything like that and that was definitely a unique and surreal time for us.

Debs: That just took off didn’t it?
Tim: It just took off in a way that we never could have expected and I remember thinking at the time it seems like we’re doing well enough that we’ll get to make a third record.

Debs: It’s a classic video though.
Tim: Yeah, I like the video but I never actually thought it was, like I still don’t actually feel cemented in . . . I always feel like we’re working to keep our job but it’s certainly opened some doors for us, I think, as far as just keeping the band going and getting the attention of people we want to work with and things like that so it’s been nice in that respect, but for some reason it never feels like we’ve made it.

Debs: Ah, you’ve made it! Who is responsible for writing your music or is it a joint effort?
Tim: It’s become more and more collaborative as the years have gone on. This record was really collaborative. Most of us kind of write on our own and then at some point we bring it all in for kind of a band consensus, as far as what we want to work on and record and so this time we all spent alot of time at home just writing. Then there was a considerable amount of time just kind of dinging things out on the rehearsal room and sort of arranging songs and stuff like that. So yeah more so than ever it’s turned into a collaborative effort.

Debs: Ok, back to your famous video . . . probably your biggest successes in the UK so far have been ‘Get Over It’ reaching number 21 in the charts and the phenomenon of your treadmill video ‘Here it Goes Again’ which I read has had nearly 50 million views on YouTube since it was added in 2006. How does that feel?
Tim: How does that feel? Ah, it feels like we’re making forward progress (laughter from all in the room) Yeah I mean, all I really ever hope for at the beginning of an album cycle is that we’re a little bit better off than we were when we started, you know? And at the very worst I hope to not have gone further down . . . but how you kind of calculate that is pretty difficult because it’s weird the music world is really different these days and you can’t really look at album sales or number of singles sold, or even the amount of money you make as a clue for success. I don’t really know what success is anymore when it comes to being a band and everything like that?

Debs: But, you’re all enjoying what you’re doing?
Tim: Yeah, I know that somehow we’ve managed to make another record and we’ve been making videos and we’re out touring the world, so that feels like ‘well I’ve still got the job, that’s good, I feel good about that’ and still enjoy making things, that’s kind of the number one thing. I think that’s more or less how we view successes, like it’s based on the fact that we’re still getting to make things as a job and as a career which is all we’ve ever really done, it’s what we’re best at I think.

Debs: I did read that it was you and Damian that met when you were 11?
Tim: Yeah Damian and I met at summer camp in Northern Michigan and we’ve been friends ever since. I grew up in Michigan and he grew up in Washington DC and we kept in touch that entire time. A good portion of that was before the internet so we used snail mail to keep in touch.

Debs: And the old telephone?
Tim: Yeah and sending each other mix tapes.

Debs: And that was when telephone was very expensive as well wasn’t it?
Tim: Yeah we’d talk on the telephone a lot..

Debs: Well that’s great though that you managed to keep that friendship going.
Tim: Yeah we managed to keep in touch all this time and then eventually we moved to the same city together, after we finished university and we all started this band up with Dan and our friend Andy.

Debs: Ok, One thing I noticed when reading about ‘Ok Go’ was how often choreography is mentioned, which for a rock band is pretty out of the ordinary. How did this come about?
Tim: Originally we though to choreograph dances to our songs probably in like 1999 or 2000, there was a public access TV show in Chicago called Chic-a-go-go which if you look at it looks like Chicago, which is a play on words. Chic-a-go-go was like a very low budget public access TV show, they didn’t have a whole lot of money and they always wanted to have music guests on but they didn’t actually have the technology to actually have them play live so you had to lip synch and we didn’t really want to do . . . we watched a bunch of videos of Chic-a-go-go and we noticed that most bands came on and either pretended to play or they’d play on broomsticks and kind of make a joke of it and we didn’t really want to do any of that. This was kind of at the height of boy bands, like N-Synch and 98 Degrees and Backstreet Boys and stuff like that and we decided ‘hmm maybe we should pay homage to things like that and cheerleading’ and so it kind of seemed like it would be most fun to come up with a dance and then lip synch, coz it was something that hadn’t been done on the show before, as far as we could tell, and it was going to really kind of surprise the people that did the show, so that’s how it kind of started and then it turned into a thing that we did live. There’s a radio show in America called ‘This American Life’ which is hosted by a guy called Ira Glass and he actually took us on tour with him. He was doing live radio broadcast and he wanted a house band so we went on tour with him as the house band. We’d play in between people reading stories. And during one of those performances, he knew about the dancing, he said ‘you know you guys should really close the night with your dance’ and we were like ‘well no, that was just for Chic-a-go-go’ and he said ‘well if you remember how to do it, you should do it’ so we did and we got a standing ovation. This was on Broadway in New York actually, and we realised ‘wow people seem to really like this’ so we used to close our shows with it all the time.

Debs: Can we expect a dance tonight?
Tim: Nope

Debs: Ok (laugh)
Tim: The thing is what was so fun about it back then was that it was so completely unexpected, especially as were this indie rock band that no one had really ever heard of and only ever expected the normal sort of indie rock show from and then we put down our instruments at the end, listening to our own song. It was one of those things that after the first record our fans knew about it but nobody else did and when we made our second record we thought we should do another one and we were pretty sure we were only going to be playing to our fans anyways and they’ve already seen the old one so we made one for a song called ‘A Million Ways’ and we ended up taping a rehearsal of it, because we’d done all the choreography at Damian’s house and we didn’t do it in like a proper dance studio where there were mirrors.

Debs: His sister did the choreography for it doesn’t she?
Tim: Yeah right we did it with her and then we realised after the whole thing had been choreographed that we’d never actually seen what it looked like so we put up a camera to tape it and after we watched it we were like this is kind of compelling and my head gets chopped off at the end and we go in and out of frame but there was still something, like the spirit of it was really great. So we dubbed the music over and sent it out to just friends and stuff like that saying ‘hey check this out, this is what we’re going to be doing live’ and our friends started sending it around to people and all of a sudden it became this viral thing.

Debs: This is the one in the back garden?
Tim: Yeah this is the one in the back yard and again this was like a really kind of happy mistake as this was meant to be done live and this was not meant to be a video and our label didn’t know anything about it and we didn’t even really know that our friends were sending it to their friends and their friends were sending it to other friends, then all of a sudden a weekly magazine in The United States who do a top ten weekly thing of what’s fun to watch on the internet and we ended up on there at number 3 and we had no idea. We were like ‘how did we end up on this list?’ but that was what sort of inspired us to make another one but sort of ratched up a level of absurdity. Coz we just thought ‘wow this is cool’ and our fans really seem to like this and our friends seem to like this.

Debs: Well its good fun to watch isn’t it.
Tim: So yeah we thought let’s make another one. So when we made the treadmill one we thought this is going to be a really good gift to our fans because our fans have kind of come to expect us dancing now but I don’t think they’ll expect us to dance on like moving treadmills or stuff like that. So we thought well this will be a good gift to give at the end of the record when we’re all done and when we’re going to make our third video so we sort of put it out at the end thinking that the same amount of people that watched ‘A Million Ways’, which at the time was about 600-700 thousand which was a lot to us and in the first day the video for ‘Here it Goes Again’ got like a million views and then next day was another million. We just were completely aghast, we just had no idea that this thing was going to go and we were supposed to be at the end of our record cycle. We were supposed to go and make another record at that point but we ended up touring for another year at that point because it sort of took off.

Debs: How do you feel about that video being parodied on The Simpsons?
Tim: I feel great about it being parodied on The Simpsons. I mean that, if there was ever a time where I thought maybe we had made it was when that video got parodied on The Simpsons
(laughing)

Debs: Oh right. Well my next question is . . . do you know what wohomusic is? That’s who we’re from, you might not do?
Tim: I saw a poster for it today.

Debs: What we are.. a combination of a site, a social networking site for music lovers, fans, bands . . . if you combine the good things about facebook without all the silly apps and the good things about myspace and put them together that’s generally what we are.
Tim: Nice. Is it just in the UK?

Debs: It’s worldwide. We’ve just launched and half of our members are bands. We try to really help unsigned bands and we also try to get out to as many gigs as we can to write up features and pretty much keep our members interested. So we do have a lot of fans on there that we provide a place for them to promote themselves more or less.
Tim: That’s great!

Debs: And we have a live streaming radio where we highlight their music and they can upload their music. It can’t be downloaded, it’s just for streaming. Generally what our aim is, is to just provide that platform for musicians and bands to just get heard and also to network with other bands as that doesn’t always happen on myspace as much.
Tim: Well that’s great. It’s nice to have sites like that as it sort of cuts out any sort of middle man action.

Debs: And it’s all free, we won’t ever make money off of our members.
Tim: Yeah that’s really nice, I think it’s nice when you’re on the making side of things it’s really nice to make something and very quickly put it out there and it’s exciting to like share. That’s the excitement of doing the stuff that you get to share.

Debs: Yeah and we’ll push it out on our twitter and myspace and send out press releases and stuff so we are just getting ourselves established but the main aim is to provide that support for the bands. So my next question which is why I gave you that little history is ‘What advice can you give our wohomusic musicians. The bands that are on there’?
Tim: Erm, my advice is kind of primitive and basic. I mean before even getting into being a band and dealing with the business of being in a band and the creativity of being in a band, I think it’s really important that you like each other. Like make sure that you’re actually friends and that you can actually get through good and bad times, because you’re going to have both. It’s really tough kind of doing it, it’s especially tough as a sort of DIY band like doing it yourself because it’s . . . I mean I understand now why so many bands are young. Like, you don’t see too many people starting bands at 40 and there’s a really good reason for that because when you’re a young band no one wants to pay you and if you’re lucky enough to get a show you’re staying out of town and your sleeping on floors or you’re sleeping in the car and there’s no money for like food and you know you’ve really got to kind of watch out for each other and help each other out and if you’re starting with ego clashes and all the rest of it it’s going to be really hard to keep it going I think. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to make a career out of it, it really only gets more difficult as time goes on. You’d think like making a little bit of money or having a manager or a label or something like that would sort of like relieve some tension, but it actually for the most part puts more on because now you’re dealing with more egos and more people and more ideas are coming and more cooks are in the kitchen and it’s tough so make sure you like each other.

Debs:Yeah, that is important.
Tim: Yeah, it’s huge. I think it’s even bigger than like ‘get a good lawyer’ or ‘get a good manager’ or something like that. You know what I mean?

Debs:It’s very American isn’t it?
Tim: Yeah. Make sure you like each other!

Debs: So this Norwich gig is part of a big European tour for you. Is there any place in particular that you are really looking forward to playing?
Tim: Erm, I’m trying to think. Well we’re going to Paris, which I think for obvious reasons, you know because Paris is beautiful and I’m excited to go to Paris.

Debs: Have you been there before?
Tim: I have been there before but I usually, the way I decipher a good town from a bad town or like a great town from an ok town is by the food you can get there. Like, I’ve always eaten really well in Paris so I’m looking forward to eating well again there. But Glasgow I’m also really excited to go to, we always have really good shows in Glasgow. I like the people there, they’re very friendly and a little bit crazy which makes for a good show. And you can get fried Mars bars there, which again, that’s how I rate things.

Jon (woho): You’re never going to see that in Denny’s are you?
Tim: You’re never going to see that in The United States. I mean people like fried food in The United States but they don’t think to fry, what in my mind is obvious, a candy bar. Like, of course you fry a candy bar! That’s awesome!

Debs: Do they coat it in something?
Tim: What the candy bar?

Debs: The Mars bars?
Jon & Tim: Yeah in batter.

Debs: Like a battered sausage but a Mars bar?
Tim: Yeah right, it’s awesome.

Debs: Oh (sounding unsure?)
(room fills with laughter)
Tim: It’s not good for you but it’s awesome.

Debs: No I bet it is, it’s like the custard cream donuts, they’re not good for you but, actually I don’t really like them but Jon really likes them. American donuts are quite nice.
Tim: Yeah like Krispy Kremes . . .

Debs: Yes. Right if you had to pick a non-music related career what would it be?
Tim: The theatre and films. It’s not too far off. I went to university, I went to like a theatre conservatory, I grew up doing theatre and acting and then in college I switched to writing actually. So I majored in playwriting if you can believe there is such a thing. That’s what I studied in college for four years. I think I can almost guarantee I would have gone sort of towards theatre and film but it’s not a very imaginative answer, it’s kind of in the same thing. I grew up doing theatre and also playing music and it’s all I ever thought I would do and in some ways it almost scares me because I don’t think I can actually do anything else and I don’t actually think I would be good at anything else. You know what I mean? But, yeah, I don’t know? As I get older though sometimes I long to have a job where it’s more in one place, which is not what you want to hear out of a touring musician but as the years go on sometimes . . . like I wish we could have a Vegas act now, where the people come to us. You know? (laugh) I have delusions where I’ve got this whole like Vegas show in my mind and it’s like huge with lasers and explosions and it’s like worth travelling for, and so we spend like six months in Los Angeles, six months in Chicago, another year in New York, London, Paris and then come home.

Debs: Not sitting on a tour bus?
Tim: I really think it’s just because I’m getting older. It’s like I long for a more consistent lifestyle when it comes to just sleeping in a bed – I wish I could sleep in my bed every night – and like sort of be with my girlfriend every night. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen though.

Debs: It might do . . .
Tim: Well it might do. It’s like 'The Secret', maybe if you put it out there in the Universe maybe it’ll come back to you . . .

Debs: Yes, maybe.
Tim: That’s really American. Do you guys have The Secret here? Do you have that book? It’s a really hippy dippy , it’s more or less like if you put the energy out there into the world the Universe will give it back to you. So if you say like, you know, I want to be a dog, I really want to be a dog then the Universe will turn me into a dog, yeah.

Debs: ‘Ok Go’ have done a lot of great work, such us getting their fans to hand out burritos to the homeless and also raising funds to buy Al Johnson a house in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Do you have any more projects like this planned?
Tim: We will. The Burrito Project is something that we would like to do, especially in The United States. We would like to implement it on tour in most cities we play in. It’s kind of a big undertaking, but one we think we can do and we’ve tested it out in a few cities. We’ve done it in San Francisco and then Chicago and it worked well there. Now the trick is to see if we can have a system that’s easy and sort of that can kind of run itself as long as there’s a point person in every city. So we’d like to continue helping people that have been effected by homelessness and the Burrito project is a nice one, because not only is it a nice thing to do but it also allows you to be face to face and meet the people you’re helping a bit and have some nice human interaction. Usually alot of times we get approached by people who are like ‘hey, there’s this cause are you guys interested?’ and then sometimes there are causes that we have always been interested in that we try to look further into. Right now we’re into such a heavy kind of promotion stage coz the records coming out tomorrow that you know that we did a lot of that stuff last year and the year before so I think for the next couple of months we need to be sort of selfish arseholes and just concentrate on getting the record out, but once that’s kind of up and running then I imagine we will get back to more of those projects, what those projects are I’m actually not sure right now. We usually have a brainstorming session and are like ‘right, what do we care about right now?’ – what is it that needs help, who seems to need help?

Debs:I think the homelessness is a good one as it’s so often over looked.
Tim: It is often overlooked, yeah. That’s why it’s great to actually meet . . .well I shouldn’t say great, but such an eye opening experience to meet people who are homeless and talk to them and you know one of the overwhelming people you hear from most people who are homeless is like that they feel invisible to the rest of the world. People just walk right by and you do, I’ve been guilty of it that’s for sure, but when you hear it and you have a conservation and you hear someone say that that’s how they feel, you know you understand a little bit more. You feel like ‘ok I want to do something to help’ so yeah that’s a good project, I’m glad we do it.

Debs: Ok, how do you think the web has helped your success? We touched on that a bit with the videos but . . .
Tim: Well it’s obviously helped alot, we’re not really marketers. I know that comes with the territory but we’re not professional marketers. But that said we are well aware of the fact that there is the internet and we’re well aware of what it’s done for us, you know like. First and foremost the creative side of things is what we focus on the most you, but it is really great to have the web as a tool, you know I was kind of talking about this earlier, it helps to cut out the middle man. It means like we don’t have to do something and then turn it in to the label and the label holds onto it for six months and then they decide what sort of promotional route it goes down, but the nice thing about the internet is that you can just click and put it up there and everyone can enjoy it, there’s the immediacy about doing things online that I love.

Debs: Are any of you the technical ones or geeky ones that like to go onto these pages and play?
Tim: Well we all have some technical savvy. Andy Ross our guitarist is the most savvy, he was actually a computer programmer before he got into rock and roll and so he’s kind of a whizz kid.

Debs: Ok, well maybe we can get you or Andy to join us then?
Tim: Yeah call Andy. Andy’s currently working on our website but, so when he’s done with us then he can have a crack.

Debs:Well we can link to you.
Tim: Oh I see what you’re saying. I thought you meant you need a designer or something?

Debs: Oh no I do all that stuff on our site.
Tim: Oh yeah definitely, for sure and we can link up.

Debs: And then we can obviously help promote anything you’ve got coming up as well.
Tim: Yeah, yeah cool.

Debs: Even some of the things like with the charities and the good causes we’d be more than happy to push that out.
Tim: That’d be fantastic.

Debs: Because we want to look at doing things like that as well so . . . .
Tim: Cool, very good.

Debs: Lastly, who’s behind the quirky wardrobes?
Tim: The wardrobes?

Debs: Yes (laughing)
Tim: Erm, I mean it’s, basically we all sort of have our own sort of senses of fashion and style and we’ve all sort of enjoyed kind of, we’ve always enjoyed shopping and thrifting and what not, you know?

Debs: It’s not a bad thing shopping.
Tim: No, I mean we sort of grew up in that era where it was like so cool to go to a thrift store and buy all of your clothes and outfits and it was like a type of shopping we as kids could afford because everything was like a dollar, five dollars and we all kind of come from that era where we just enjoyed it, it was a social thing. You went with your friends and you dug in boxes at the thrift store.

Debs: The thrift stores in America are so much larger than like the charity stores in Britain. I don’t know if you’ve been to any of them? They tend to be smaller based on individual charities. They have them on all the high streets.
Tim: I guess I have been to some yeah, in the UK it’s better to go in the smaller towns I feel because the ones in London are all picked over, you know and they’re more expensive too. But you know it’s just sort of part of our culture and all of us, we’re all sort of like minded kids growing up, we listened to the same type of music and we were just like little indie punk-rock kids and that was part of the culture and being social and we were like ‘hey let’s just go to the thrift store – lets go buy clothes and 25 cent records and all the rest of it’. So it’s always just kind of been a fun thing for us and as we’ve gone on as a band and certainly when we get on stage and we play on stage there’s always a certain level of drama and theatricality we always want to bring to it. I mean what we were doing last record was pretty crazy and that’s the craziest we’ve ever gotten.

Debs: Was that with the broaches?
Tim: Yeah it was sort of like early twentieth century dandyism, like where everything clashed and it was all suits and that was really fun for a while. We did that for about two and a half years and like anything else you’ve just got to like after a while decide you’re never going to wear a paisley tie again. But it was fun to do at the time and again it was really born out of the same tradition of it’s just fun and it’s something you like to do together to sort of think about clothes and fashion and all that, yeah.

Debs: Alright, brilliant. Well thank you so much for your time. I know things are running behind and you probably want a bit of a break.
Tim: No, thanks for waiting. Somebody took off and I felt bad. Someone that was meant to do an interview just got fed up and left, but things run behind.

Debs: They do and thank you so much for your time.

... later in the evening after the gig, we had another quick chat with Tim and Damian. Tim was talking a bit more about the 'Las Vegas scene', so I decided to throw in a more off-the-wall question at him that Sean from wohomusic likes to ask people from time to time.
Debs: If you could go back in time to that moment just before Elvis took that burger into the loo, what piece of advice would you offer him?
Tim: 'Are you really gonna eat that?'

Thanks Tim and all at OK Go, it was a pleasure to have met you all!