Not In The Box
By Tom Lanham
D
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amian Kulash has a work schedule
so hummingbird-buzzing that he
can barely keep track of it. Mention
that – alongside a bevy of other recent and
upcoming appearances – he was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at this
summer's ICON8 illustration conference in
Portland, and he gasps “Oh shit! I am! And
I haven't really written my speech yet –
aaargh! But I've been doing a lot of conferences lately – I was at the EYEO Festival in
Minneapolis a week and a half ago, and
this last weekend I was at FOO Camp in
Sebasatapol, and I've been meeting a lot of
really talented, really smart people in a lot
of different fields.”
And that, insists the 38-year-old frontman for alt-rock outfit OK GO, is truly the
best part of his job these days. Sure, the
band has a new EP out, Upside Out, on its
own Paracadute imprint, with a full album
called Hungry Ghosts following this fall.
And naturally, the band that won a 2007
Grammy for its renowned treadmill video
for the track "Here It Goes Again" has just
released an even crazier, optical-illusioninspired clip for single “The Writing's On
The Wall," based on the work of artsts
Felice Varini and Georges Rousse. "But I'm
so happy that we don't have to live our life
by old industry rules," he says. "You make
a song, and it turns into an album, then
that turns into a bunch of videos, and then
it turns into a tour. All of these different
areas that we're able to chase our ideas in
are so gratifying to me."
First, of course, there's the music. And –
like "The Writing's" -- other introductory
EP tracks like "Turn Up the Radio" and
"The One Moment" are typically celebratory, musically effusive. But they mask some
harsh personal truths – outside of work,
Kulash hasn't been having an easy time of
it lately. "I've been going through a
breakup – I'm getting divorced," he states,
bluntly. The one up side? No children are
involved. "And I'm very thankful that I do
not have kids with the woman who doesn't
want to spend her life with me now. But
the timing – while there's never a good
time for it – was acceptable, because I have
a lot of work to think myself into right
now. And actually, I don't know if we
could have made this record or this video
as good as they are if I hadn't had the external pressure to just lose myself in the job."
Kulash even concedes that he's completed a maudlin, Leonard-Cohen-shadowy collection of dirges that were simply
too heartbreaking for "Hungry Ghosts."
They're piano driven, and he might release
them as a solo set some day. "But they're
the saddest songs I've ever written, and
they're such incredible downers that they
don't belong amongst these other songs.
"Happy New Year" is one of them, and you
can imagine that that's a very troubled sentiment. And another's chorus is too obvious – "You loved me/ And now you don't."
Period. So they're pretty direct, and they're
absolutely devoid of metaphor."
But that's what the auteur intended for
the new OK GO disc, too. A 'hungry ghost,'
he explains, is a Buddhist term for the gulf
between reality and desire. And it's also
the theme of the album – a magnum opus
about yearning and loss, built upon a
breakup-ballad bedrock. "I feel like it's my
most lyrically clear record – I tried to be
very simple and direct," he says. "But the
down side of expanding our wingspan to
encompass more types of creativity and
more types of expression means that there
are fewer hours in the day for making the
next album, and two and a half years of
nonstop touring (behind 2010's "Of The
Blue Colour of the Sky," OK GO's third) just
breaks your soul. So I didn't come out the
other side of that with a new record." He
sighs. "In fact, I came out the other side
with a great need to not listen to my own
voice for at least a few months."
Kulash was ahead of the curve on so
many things. Long before net neutrality
became a hot-button issue, he was writing
op-eds in its favor for the New York Times
and testifying about it before Congress. He
learned that great art can be made hand-inhand with corporate sponsorship, as in OK
GO's brilliant "Needing/Getting" video
teamup with Chevrolet, which premiered
during Super Bowl XLVI. And way ahead
of the music industry's major label implosion, the group had seized the creative
reins back from its imprint Capitol and
launched Paracadute, which now boasts a
stable of other artists like Pyyramids and
Lavender Diamond. The quartet also has a
new word game app, "Say the Same
Thing," that will soon be morphing into an
actual game show, hosted by OK GO.
Most of OK GO's most adventurous
projects were born out of crazy impulses,
Kulash says. And he's done his best not to
impose any self-critical rules on these hareContinued on page 47
26 illinoisentertainer.com august 2014