Not Running in Place

Ok Go is about a lot more than treadmills.

It was a perfect storm. That’s how OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind explains the explosion of the band’s video for “Here it Goes Again.” You know the one — where the band members perform a hilarious, amazingly synchronized dance on treadmills.

The video for the song, from the band’s 2005 album Oh No, became an instant hit, scoring more than 2 million views in its first two days on YouTube and turning the band into a cultural phenomenon.  Soon, OK Go was invited to perform the treadmill dance live on the MTV Video Music Awards. The video was even parodied on an episode of “The Simpsons” (arguably still one of the most reliable measurements of pop culture relevance).

Years later, Nordwind still can’t believe the hoopla over “Here it Goes Again” — particularly since another video the band released previous to that one (for “A Million Ways”) didn’t cause nearly the stir that those treadmills did.  “We were shocked,” Nordwind said during a recent phone interview. “It surpassed what we thought it would ever do.”

The band got its start when Nordwind was just 11 years old, growing up in Kalamazoo, Mich. A theater enthusiast, Nordwind met future OK Go guitarist/singer Damian Kulash (then 12) at the Michigan-based arts camp Interlochen.  Though Kulash was studying visual arts and Nordwind focused on theater, the two boys shared a love of music.

“It was always a pipe dream of ours to have a band,” Nordwind said.

Years later, they met drummer Dan Konopka in college. In 1999, they formed OK Go, but the last piece of the band — guitarist/keyboardist Andy Ross — didn’t join until 2005.

The rest, as they say, is history. Treadmill-hopping, viral video history.  Of course, once you’ve caught lightning in a bottle the way OK Go did with “Here it Goes Again,” there is a pressure to do it again. But, weeks before the release of Of the Blue Colour of the Sky — the band’s first album since Oh No — Nordwind didn’t sound pressured.

The album takes its name from an 1876 book, which promoted the theory (later proven false) that blue light cures all ills. Nordwind said it seemed like a good title for an album about “trying to find hope in situations that seem pretty hopeless.”

Colour, he said, “feels very different from the previous album,” but is a powerful piece of work in itself. “There’s a lot of extremes in every direction on this album,” Nordwind said. “There’s a lot of extreme highs; a lot of extreme lows. There’s a lot of extreme happiness; a lot of extreme sadness.”

The band enjoys experimenting with its sound and style, Nordwind said, and audiences seem to like that about them. “Everybody expects we’re going to do something different,” he said. “I think we’re going to continue to try to do the unexpected.”

After all, doing the unexpected is what launched the band in the first place — though Nordwind argues that the success of the “Here it Goes” video was largely a matter of timing. After all, it came out just as YouTube was hitting its stride as a place to watch wacky web videos. Nordwind also admits that the video must have just struck a chord with people.

“I’ve gotten so many comments like ‘My brother and I used to make videos like that when we were little,’” he laughed.

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