Paul: Can you start by introducing yourself?
Damian: My name is Damian and I sing for OK Go.
Paul: Your new album, Oh No, comes out in a few days.
Damian: Right, on Tuesday.
Paul: Why don't you tell me a little about it?
Damian: Well, it's more raw and energetic than our first record. It's a more organic record. We recorded all of it basically live in Sweden with producer Tore Johansson. And we went and cut tracks and everything. It's very strange, it's times like that, a sort of push and pull feel to it. It's just a lot more organic than the first record.
Paul: What was it like working with Tore? I know that he worked on Franz Ferdinand's record and another big band which I can't think of right now.
Damian: He did all of the records for the Cardigans.
Paul: Oh right.
Damian: He was fantastic. A super, super smart guy and basically, he is very focused. The reason we chose him because we thought he would help us sort of bring our disparate demos and construct them into a central place with some continuity and it would sort of feel like an actual album. He's a very sarcastic guy, basically always joking around and he likes to so sort of play the mean producer kind of guy. He would make like gruff comments and stuff like that.
Paul: Did you guys choose to record in Sweden because of him?
Damian: Yes, yes.
Paul: What was it like there?
Damian: It was great. It was really wonderful to get into a certain work bubble and have sort of a place where I could work on the music everyday. I've never had that. Sweden was about as good of a place as we could have asked for, it was very laid back.
Paul: How was it different creating this album than creating your first one?
Damian: Well, the first record, we worked on for months on end. We worked on it for like six months, I think. And just for the first album, we wanted to stick every available space with bells and whistles and we were trying to get everything perfect and exact. With this record, it's a lot more rock and roll, it's just a band playing. It's much more honest than the first one, I think.
Paul: Who writes the songs in the band?
Damian: Mostly me and there's some collaborations with Tim as well. We'll put our brains together sometimes.
Paul: I know that the first album came out in 2002 and I was wondering why the long wait between the albums.
Damian: Well, it sort of is because we toured for almost two years for the first record. We learned that it was sort of hard to write well on the road. We didn't write very well. Some of it was just that after 18 or 20 months of straight touring, we were so burned, that we really couldn't doing anything. I write songs for six months and I hated every single one of them. So I wasted six months there.
Paul: Did any of those songs make it onto this album?
Damian: No, there's some stuff that we wrote on the road, there was a few little snippets things from the road that made it into songs, but none of those, after we got back, there was a rash of songs that I wrote, probably 30 or 40, and I didn't like a single one.
Paul: If the new album were a type of animal, what would it be and why?
Damian: It would be, I think it would be like a dog living in a state park. It was born to lost dogs in the park and then it would have reverted to wolf-ness but it would still be like a dog.
Paul: I know you guys shot a video for “A Million Ways†a while ago and I absolutely love the dance number in it. Where did that come from?
Damian: Well, basically, we got tired of always closing our shows with encores. When we started headlining, you know, a few years ago, you're sort of obliged to do an encore. Encores, to me, something about them, where the band starts to leave stage, they have to come back, you know. Something about it just seems so fraudulent. It's like, “Hey, we're gonna leave stage for five minutes, you guys keep clapping the whole time, okay?†So we wanted to make up something that would completely confuse them, so we actually had a different choreographed dance that we were doing as an encore for the last year of our tour. When we got done, we were sitting around for this year, we were like “Well, we can't do the same thing, we should make a different dance.†We got my sister, who is a professional ballroom dancer, to visit for a week and she helped us choreograph it and stuff. The video wasn't intended to be a video. We had just taped it in our backyard and we were going to send it to like friends and stuff. Then we realized that it would be sort of cool as a video.
Paul: How many takes did that, well, take?
Damian: The video is all one take, and we only filmed like four takes of it. We worked on learning it for about four days.
Paul: I know it's in a Yahoo! contest right now, and it's beating Moby and Taking Back Sunday, which has got to feel pretty cool.
Damian: Yeah, it's doing pretty good for us.
Paul: You guys are touring for the next few months, right?
Damian: Yes.
Paul: You will be in the UK after this?
Damian: We're going to the UK in the beginning of October for two or three weeks, then some East Coast dates. We know there's some vague plans for Canada but we don't know the details for that yet.
Paul: Your future right now is just touring, touring, touring for now?
Damian: Seeing as how long it took us from record one to record two, I'm trying to make a conscientious effort to try and write well on the road. So, I don't know. We'll tour as much as we can for the next six months or a year.
Paul: Do you know who will be opening or will you be supporting any big acts?
Damian: Well, we'd like to support some good bands, but it's sort of hard to find good support slots. The music industry is so entirely folded in on itself that the only mode of promotion, I mean, you can't count on the radio anymore, because no one listens to the radio anyways. They don't know how to get to people on the internet and they don't know how to make people buy records and all that kind of stuff. But there's still no “Well, we should put this band out with that band.†So opening slots for big bands have become ridiculously competitive. We're headlining now just because we can and we want to be playing our shows, but if we could find good opening slots, we'd take them.
Paul: What's your favorite curse word?
Damian: I think probably cunt. Just because it's actually still sort of offensive. Like, if you say cunt, under most circumstances, people still wince when you say cunt. Like, shit and fuck go straight past them and nobody pays attention, and sometimes, for more humorous effect, I really like douche bag, but you don't really offend anyone, you just make them laugh.
Paul: Coke or Pepsi?
Damian: Coke. I just like it more, it's a little less sweet. I'm not really much of a cola drinker, but when I like cola—well, my favorite cola is Moxie. Have you heard of Moxie?
Paul: No, I haven't.
Damian: I think it's probably owned by Coke or Pepsi by now, but it was a local Northeast soda for a while, you could only get it in the New England area. It's really bitter, it's not very sweet. It's kind of like a black coffee version of Coke. Other than that, if I drink Cola, I really like fountain cola. And back to just a second, I think I saw, the reason I think someone bought Moxie is because I saw a Moxie energy drink and so I think someone bought the name so they could use the logo and whatever.
Paul: Boxers or briefs?
Damian: Briefs.
Paul: I think that's about it.
Damian: Thanks.
