Interview: OK Go Vocalist Damian Kulash On The Band's New Label, New Direction and Yes, Its Videos

You guys recently left EMI and started your own record label. What does starting your own label allow you to do that you wouldn't be able to do with them, aside from posting embeddable videos? Everything. Especially for a band like us, we don't particularly subscribe to the set of definitions that people want to use for music, much less the music industry. Like I said, what we want to do is have the opportunity to keep chasing down our creative ideas, and it doesn't really matter to us where the rent check comes from as long as it's coming from somewhere. So whether or not we sell records or we sell the concepts from the videos or we sell the books we've written essays for or we sell the tickets to our concerts or any one of a million other things, we don't need a record company, what we need is a way to pay the rent. And that could come from any of the creative things we do.

The record business is just very limited by the fact that its only revenue stream was for years the sales of copies of recordings of your music. We make those recordings, we also write the music that is embodied in those recordings, we also play concerts, we also write things, we also design things, we also make films, we also do performances... There's a whole world of stuff that we do creatively and starting our own company allows us to make a living off of all of that instead of trying to just eke a living out of one tiny corner of it.

Are there any other goals that you have for the label besides pursuing your creative ideas, or is that mainly just a way to support that? Right now, it's just a way to support that. If our model of thinking about music and creativity and the business necessities behind that works out for us, then it's conceivable we will try to expand that to other people as well. But for now, it may be a little selfish but we're not in this to make a lot of money or to try revolutionize the music industry, we just want to be able to make the things we want to make. If this company can stay small and flexible and nimble and let us just do whatever it takes to stay afloat creatively, then that's all we need to do.

With your new musical direction, how hard is it to reconcile your old material with your new songs? I thought that would be difficult, that it would seem like night and day between the two bodies of music. But it turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. I think when you listen to the recordings back-to-back that you're listening very purely just to the composition and the recording. But in a live show it's much more about the kind of collective energy of the room. A successful live show I think has more to do with everybody being on the same emotional wave than it does with specifically the particular composition. I don't know if that really makes sense. What differentiates a live show from listening to a recording is that connection between us onstage and the audience. And regardless of which songs we're playing, that connection stays pretty constant. And so where I thought we would find these big, weird sort of phase shifts in the show from one type of music to another, it feels actually pretty continuous. The show feels a lot more consistent than it does if you listen to the music just the recordings back-to-back.