Interview with Tim Nordwind of OK Go

OK Go has long been a favorite of mine, so I was excited to get on a video call with Tim Nordwind, bassist for this innovative and fun band. Their new album And the Adjacent Possible is very eclectic, yet “glued together” by the distinctive mixing of the band’s longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann. Tim talks about the new album, their perceived hiatus, and the projects that all the OK Go members have been doing over the past decade since their last full length album.

OK Go will be in Denver on September 13th for the Indie 102.3 INDIEVERSE festival with support from Dehd, Bartees Strange, Dead Pioneers, and Pink Fuzz (the last two being Denver locals). I will be there, covered in confetti and dancing my ass off – I hope you will join us too!

INDIEVERSE with OK GO
Saturday, September 13th
Levitt Pavillion
Doors 4:00pm, All Ages
GET TICKETS

Band photos by Piper Ferguson // www.piperferguson.com

OK Go Interview

Aimee:
I know that you’re putting out your first album in a while, and I would just love to hear about why you took a little bit of a hiatus and what’s the new album about – just tell me all those good things.

Tim:
Yeah, I guess the hiatus was… Well, from our perspective, it wasn’t a hiatus. We had sort of been working together that whole time, but we all recognized that, I guess-

Aimee:
It seemed like it?

Tim:
… to the public it probably seemed like we were doing a hiatus.

Aimee:
I mean, there was COVID in the middle of that too.

Tim:
Yeah, there was COVID, but yeah, just a lot of life sort of happened. Several guys in the band had kids, we all had different other projects we were doing. Some film projects, some producing projects, and we had been working on the record in fits and spurts for that entire time, really. I remember sitting down to really start working on this record in earnest kind of late 2019, I think.

Aimee:
Oh, wow.

Tim:
Yeah, but I do think had it not been for the pandemic, we probably would have been done sooner. But that kind of put the kibosh on things for a while, and the next thing we knew it was like 2023. We’re like, “You guys still want to finish this record?” And then we were ready.

Aimee:
Sure. And then I love what I’ve heard, speaking of “Love,” the song, but then also tell me what is this album’s about, what’s your favorite parts of it, that kind of thing.

Tim:
Yeah, I mean, because there was so time during the making of this record, our life both personally and then globally was just unfolding in front of us in really crazy ways for several years and still continues to. But to me, what I hear is us struggling to understand the world happening around us and grappling for the understanding of truth and how do you explain to yourself and to the people you care about and to strangers, what is happening? How do you hold on to hope while still kind of acknowledging at least that –

Aimee:
The world is crazy?

Tim:
Exactly… the world is crazy and technology is crazy and everything seems to be happening at a faster rate. And so to me, when I hear this record, I hear us sort of struggling to understand and to still try to find hope in the world.

Aimee:
Right. And that’s a really important thing. I feel like you guys are always a band that makes me happy, so I feel like that’s a really important thing during a time where everything doesn’t seem as happy, that people like yourselves are there for us. So I appreciate that.

Tim:
That’s awesome. I’m glad you feel that way. I mean, sometimes I think we think we are… Sometimes we make happy music with somewhat cynical lyrics.

Aimee:
Right. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.

Tim:
That is kind of how we feel, we feel that push and pull and that tug in real life. In our lives we feel that struggle. We feel the struggle, but we hope for the other. So yeah.

Aimee:
I feel like that’s my entire life right there.

Tim:
I think that’s a lot of people’s lives. And on top of that, beyond all of that, I think one thing that happened and was our experience on this record is that I think it’s the first time where we really weren’t looking super outside of ourselves for inspiration and references as far as the music was concerned. I think we were really were just like, I don’t care what’s trending. I don’t care what’s happening. In that sense, creatively, it was just kind of really and truly we just feel like making.

Aimee:
Because you’re older or just as a reflection of… ?

Tim:
Yeah, I feel like maybe we’ve, for once in our lives felt like we’ve planted some kind of flag for ourselves. It’s a weird flag of course, but I think for the first time it just felt like we don’t really have to prove ourselves on any front here anymore. We’ve been around long enough, we’ve tried a lot of different things.

Aimee:
Yeah, I was going to ask, I wondered if you felt pressure to keep topping yourself with videos and things like that, and I’m sure at some point you’re like, we’ve done enough to now do what we want to do.

Tim:
I think we always feel an excitement around keeping ourselves challenged and not feeling like we’re repeating ourselves. Another way to say that is that we feel do pressured to one up ourselves or something like that. But really and truly, I think if we looked at it from the perspective, if we were the type of people that looked at it as pressure and Oh God, we got to do this thing, we wouldn’t be very happy doing what we’re doing. I think luckily we happen to be the type of people that just get excited by new challenges and try to make things that are beyond our imagination if we can.

Aimee:
Is it all of you thinking about it and coming up with these things? I mean, I was reading your bio and it seems like you’ve got a lot of awesome collaborators. Do they bring ideas? The Love video is insane, another terrific effort. How does that come about?

Tim:
It comes about through play really. It sounds so simple, I guess, and childish in a way, but in fact that is what we’re trying to tap into. It’s like a childlike curiosity about things, that we’ll have the seed of an idea usually, but it’s never the thing you end up watching. It’s like, there’s a seed and then there’s a sandbox that we play in, we plant the seed in there and we play with all the different ideas, oftentimes with collaborators. And those play periods are anywhere between two and six weeks long, so we really invest a lot of time in the play portion of the idea. The filming portion of the idea is really the last couple days of a somewhere between two and six month process.

Aimee:
I bet that feels fulfilling.

Tim:
Yeah. Where we’ve really played and experimented and tried every avenue before landing on the thing that you see. And even the thing you see, there’s a certain amount of looseness that we try to still maintain. For instance, the Love video. I mean, it’s essentially like a gauntlet of robots and mirrors that we’re running through and there’s really no guarantee at the top that we’re going to make it to the bottom of it.

Aimee:
How many takes did that take?

Tim:
Oh gosh. I think because of so many different variables, we really only started filming that video about 1:00 PM on the last day. We were supposed to have started the day before, but kept on having to fix things and revise. I think we ran through it 29 times, and what you’re watching is the 29th time.

Aimee:
Yeah, I saw the comment at the end. “That’s the one” or whatever.

Tim:
Thank God. We almost didn’t get it. We truly almost didn’t get that one. [laughs]

Aimee:
Let’s talk about your Denver show, which  is helping support our public radio, Indie 102.3. It’s the “IndieVerse” concert and there’s some local bands playing with you as well. So I wanted to thank you for that and tall about that show. I hope you know that it’s an outdoor show, so I wondered how different that’s going to be for you guys. Does that make a difference to you? How do you play those shows differently than the ones you can control a little bit better?

Tim:
Yeah, that’s a good question. We’ve been a band long enough that we’ve had some great outdoor shows and we’ve had a million wonderful indoor shows. I mean, yes, you can control things a little easier indoors, but there is a magic to being outside in the elements. I mean, I’m actually not sure what time we play. I mean, if we play once the sun has gone down, then –

Aimee:
You should be, right around then, yeah.

Tim:
Then really there shouldn’t be too much difference. We bring a lot of confetti. [laughs]

Aimee:
I know that very well.

Tim:
So depending on the winds, that can make a big difference, but our hope is to put on a party and invite everybody to come.

Aimee:
I’m excited. I would love to hear if you have any other hobbies, any non-music, crazy hobbies or things that you do for fun outside of music?

Tim:
We all do stuff outside of music. Damien and his wife Kristen (Gore, as in Al’s daughter) directed a film called the Beanie Bubble for Apple.

Aimee:
That was a great film.

Tim:
… which is really cool. I just starred in a film acting my first film, which is an indie feature. I don’t think I’m allowed to say the title of it yet.

Aimee:
Okay. Can we put that in the interview, or?

Tim:
You can say that much in the interview, and it’ll hopefully be coming out in 2026. Dan, our drummer produces and mixes a million songs and records and is a session drummer and plays on a lot of other people’s records. Andy, our guitarist, is a computer programmer, so he is always making apps and things like that. Yeah, so we do have a lot of things that we enjoy doing outside of the band that maybe sometimes dovetail into the band as well.

Aimee:
I feel like lots of the things I do loop around each other.

Tim:
Exactly. We just had a video collaboration visualizer come out today for our song “Impulse Purchase that we did with Blender Studio, which is like a open source software for creating 3D projects basically. We did that with an animator named Will Anderson and an artist named Lucas Zanotto. That literally just came out an hour ago.

Aimee:
My kid just graduated with an experimental animation degree, so I’ll be going there right as I hang up. Thank you so much for your time and I’ll see you in Denver!

Tim:
Awesome. We’re really looking forward to it.

Check out our other interviews!

INDIEVERSE with OK GO
Saturday, September 13th
Levitt Pavillion
Doors 4:00pm, All Ages
GET TICKETS