OK Go was made famous by their series of creative and far out there music videos.  Most notably, their video for “Here It Goes Again”, also known as the “treadmill music video.”  The band produces a variety of sounds, ranging from techno to rock.  OK Go will be performing at The Social in downtown Orlando on April 15.  The Bite chatted with the band before what promises to be a performance filled with funky dances and catchy songs.

After watching your music videos, many of your fans see you not as just a band, but true artists.  How do you translate this artistry on stage during performances?

The live show is really the perfect sandbox for us to play with all the different (stuff) that we love; it’s where all the stuff we make overlaps in one place.  There’s the music in its most immediate and direct, personal version.  And there are the visuals: we’ve got kabuki screens that allow us to have projections both in front of us and behind, and we’ve collaborated with some amazing programmers to develop visual effects that I don’t think anyone’s seen before.  We also get to have real face-to-face interaction with people, which is so different from connecting online or over earbuds.  We’ve been doing question and answer sessions with the audience, which has been really fun.  We also build a song out of samples of the audience, and I’ve been going into the crowd to sing an acoustic song.  Overall, we try to approach the live show by thinking about what the most fun a thousand people can have, rather than coming at it from the perspective of what four guys can do with four instruments on stage.

Speaking of your music videos, many people might say they are quite random.  How do you come up with these original ideas?

We come up with our ideas by playing.  Usually people make films (videos, commercials, features, whatever) by sitting at a desk and planning very carefully — coming up with a storyboard and shot list and thinking out every detail in advance.  But you’d never write a rock song that way.  You’d never sit and think, first the bass will play a C, then a G, and then the guitar will come in and play an F.  To write rock songs, you pick up your instruments and play around until you discover something exciting, emotional and surprising.  So we try that process with filmmaking.  We start with a very general idea (we’ll choreograph dogs, we’ll build a Rube Goldberg Machine, we’ll play with optical illusions), and then we start playing with those ideas, testing, trying things out, changing direction and trying something else.  By the time we are done with the playing phase, we have a very different idea than we started with, and usually one we never could have come up with just trying to think the whole thing through at a desk.

Do you feel your songs and videos correlate?

As for the relationship to the songs, it’s important that the videos work as whole pieces, so the music has to work emotionally with whatever we are filming and vice versa.  The emotional arc of the whole thing has to work and be satisfying and take you somewhere and feel complete —  the music is very much a part of that.  But i’m not particularly interested in literally illustrating the lyrics in the video.  I want the videos to bring a new dimension to the songs, not just spell out what’s already there.

The music video for your song “This Too Shall Pass” features a large rube goldberg machine, what goes into the making of a video on that large of a scale?

  A lot of playing and trial and error and collaboration.  We started that video with 12 engineers helping plan the whole thing, and by the end we had two or three times that many coming by to play around and try things and see what we could make.  It was the fruit of many many minds working together.

How did you come up with the title of your most recent album, Hungry Ghosts?

  In some Buddhist traditions, the gulf between what you yearn for and what you get in reality is referred to as the place where the hungry ghosts live.  Though I’m not a practicing Buddhist, I love that image, and I think that’s a lot of what our album is about — desire and the delicate balance between fulfillment and disappointment.

If you could describe your sound in three words, what would they be?

I’m terrible at describing our sound, but a reviewer recently coined a genre for us that I think is pretty fitting: arty party.  But that’s only two words….