YOU’RE ABOUT TO GO ON A SONIC ODYSSEY
A CONVERSATION WITH TIM NORDWIND OF OK GO
It has been a long time since we OK Go has released an album. And The Adjacent Possible is their first album in over a decade, with their last being 2014’s Hungry Ghosts. The long wait was well worth it as they delivered an exceptional record full of exhilarating tunes and immaculate music videos.
“I think we’re a lot more comfortable in our skin now when it comes to songwriting,” says bassist Tim Nordwind. “It’s embarrassing to say, but I think when we were younger, we paid more attention to trends and things like that musically, and I think as we have grown up have felt much less concerned with that. I think the goal has become to really take extra care to feel like we have made things that only could come from us and that are uniquely us. We made a much higher bar on this record for what that was and what that might sound like. As a result, I feel like there’s a lot of genre-hopping happening. We did not feel like we needed to stick to one sound ever. I would say song to song sounds like a mixtape of sorts, but sometimes, even within the songs we’re taking pretty hard left turns musically. I hear a lot of like Phil Spector’s ‘Wall Of Sound’ mixed with Nile Rodgers mixed with some early new wave New Order… This feels like an arrival to me of like this is actually the record we’ve always wanted to make.”
One of the best examples of OK Go genre-hopping and making a song that sounds their own is “Impulse Purchase”. Frontman Damian Kulash came up with the initial idea for the song. “Damian had this electronic stompy bluesy riff/bass line that we didn’t know what to do with for the longest time,” recalls Nordwind. “We ended up thinking, ‘Maybe we go in a Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles-like direction with it? Let’s see if we can write a section that goes from this big electronic thing to a proper band playing like psychedelic and sort of ‘60s pop.’ I’ve never really quite heard anything like it. Like I was saying, that sounded like only something we would do… It just felt like this would be a great way to kick off the whole record like this is going to signal to people that you’re about to go on a sonic odyssey and that you can’t really expect anything.”
OK Go’s highly original and inventive music videos are just as spectacular as their music. Some of their best known include the treadmill music video for “Here It Goes Again”, the zero-gravity music video for “Upside Down & Inside Out”, and the Rude Goldberg Machine music video for “This Too Shall Pass”. As expected, OK Go delivers more unique music videos. One of them was for “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill”. “The video for ‘A Stone Only Rolls Downhill’ is 64 cellphones, and we made a unique video for each one that then makes a larger mosaic by the end of the video,” comments Nordwind. “There’s a bunch of different tricks that we do with the phone screens to get to this final grand moment. The song is about how life sort of feels like a split screen. You look at the news and the world, and it all feels pretty heavy and scary. On the other side of things, we’re of the mindset that you have to at least try to find hope somewhere. But the struggle between what you see and what you feel feels like you are living in two different dimensions. The idea of using phones as split screens seemed to match that concept.”
AND THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE ALBUM REVIEW
Another unique music video was created for “Love.”. “We filmed it in Budapest in an old train station, and it uses around 29 robots and a lot of mirrors, and the robots help make these kaleidoscopic mirror illusions,” states Nordwind. “It’s an obstacle course basically of mirrors that we go through. We did it all as one take. You’re watching us move through it like a live event that you don’t know if we’re going to get through or not… It was like four months of pre-planning and two and a half weeks in Budapest, and we almost didn’t get it. What you see in the video is the very last take. So that was a little scary, but with all these videos, we always try to present an event that you can be along for the ride… Damian wrote it after he had his kids, and he talks about finding a type of love that he didn’t know existed and didn’t realize that love could be that expansive. The idea of wanting to play with mirrors and infinite reflections and how simple things can lead to such awe-inspiring visuals felt connected to this concept of ‘Love’.”
“Take Me With You” is a catchy, funky disco rock tune reminiscent of an ’80s-era David Bowie song. “We were listening to a lot of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ so those are the two biggest ones that I felt we were trying to channel,” reflects Nordwind. “The verses are a little bit more Psychedelic Furs and New Order. The bassline feels very New Order to me. Damian’s performance feels like The Psychedelic Furs or even Pulp. He’s singing in a lower register, which we’ve never really played with before on our records, which is nice.”
“Better Than This” is an overwhelmingly joyful song guaranteed to brighten your day. “Damian wrote the lyrics for it, and when we were discussing it, I think he wanted to write a song about how the good stuff in life is really ‘A glow in the margins’, which is a line he says in the song,” states Nordwind. “It’s the moments when you’re just living regular life. It’s important to stop and recognize that from time to time. I think we as humans are always trying to make these big plans or do these big things, and I think of New Year’s Eve of being the perfect example. We all think it’s going to be the best night ever, and so we end up ignoring the days before it, the days after it, the little things, the quiet moments, and the morning of, and that’s actually what makes life great and celebrating that fact.”
“A Good, Good Day At Last” features Ben Harper, Shalyah Fearing, and BEGINNERS. “That song has a sort of ‘70s funk feeling where there’s just like a million people in the room singing the chorus,” comments Nordwind. “We decided we wanted to reach out to friends and people we admire… It was like, ‘This is such a stone-cold awesome pack here.’ We couldn’t have gotten cooler voices on the song. It was nice to be able to have an excuse to collaborate like that.”
“Don’t Give Up Now” is a beautiful, cathartic closing statement for the record. “The thing about it that really spoke to us was that it really sounds like a good message in our times,” comments Nordwind. “It felt like the right way to close it. I do think the record definitely flips a lot between prayers of hopefulness and anxiety about life, so this felt like the right message to end it all with. We’re living in crazy, uncertain times, it feels like, and the struggle to stay afloat and hopeful is real. A good message to leave anybody who got that far in the record was ‘Don’t give up.’”
And The Adjacent Possible dropped on April 11. “It’s such a weird experience to release a record, especially the way we’ve done it where we’ve been working on a lot of these songs for years now, and some of how I feel about the record is we made it to share it,” states Nordwind. “I’m still kind of learning what speaks to people and how it’s being interpreted that way. I do feel like it’s still right now in this moment my favourite record that we’ve made. It feels like the one we’ve been trying to make all along.”
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Photo Credit: Piper Ferguson
