“In mostly good ways, we’re in a state of arrested development of about 12 years old,” said Tim Nordwind, a founding member of the alt-rock/pop band OK Go. Its youthful sense of whimsy shows in its playful and amusing videos, beginning with its wildly popular choreographed treadmill dance in 2007’s “Here It Goes Again.” It was so inventive, OK Go won a Grammy Award for it. Since then, the group — which also includes Damian Kulash, Dan Konopka, and Andy Ross — has been creating catchy tunes and captivating videos and a catalog that includes four albums. I recently spoke with Nordwind over the phone about OK Go’s music, muses, and upcoming show in Santa Barbara.
It looks like the show is a little bit different than usual. This is definitely a different type of show for us. We are live-scoring our videos, which means that we will be playing live and in sync to our videos while they play above us [on a screen]. The idea came to us a couple years ago. I had gone to see a live scoring of the silent film Dracula — the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi. … Philip Glass had been commissioned to write a new score for the film. He was there conducting the Kronos Quartet as they played his score…. I started thinking, “We make a lot of short films. We play all that music. We could totally go and do this.”… Most people experience our videos on their phone. Maybe the computer. I just started thinking, “It’d be pretty cool to create an experience for us and for an audience to come and see these videos in a larger-than-life kind of way.” …We did our first two trial runs last month. It worked really, really well. …We do other things besides playing live to the videos. We break out from that a bit and do question-and-answer sessions with the audience. We take a break from it completely and play a song with the audience. We do a little bit of recreating of the videos live at a couple different points …. It’s turning into a fairly immersive performance.
I was reading that you and Damian met at Interlochen Arts Camp. What programs were you studying? Yeah, we met at Interlochen Arts Camp in ’89, I think it was. We were 11. I was there for musical theater. … Damian was there for visual arts, but he was a sculptor/painter type…. That’s where we became friends. I grew up in Michigan. Damian grew up in Washington, D.C. We spent summers together at Interlochen.