Damian Kulash
Damian Kulash
Damian Joseph Kulash Jr.is the lead singer and guitarist for Los Angeles-based rock band OK Go. He is also a music video director...
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth7 October 1975
car challenge devil drove effort figure five job needed playing quit realized remembered riff seemed six sleazy songs sort tim time together took trying week
It's not like a challenge to the Stones, but more of a revision, ... Tim was playing this riff and he needed it to feel sleazy and dark, and I was trying to figure out what it was about. I remembered the time Tim and I first made a concerted effort to write songs together five or six years ago when we took a week off and drove to New Hampshire. I remember on this 18-hour car ride, being way over-caffeinated and buzzing, I realized that I was trying to figure out if you would know if you were the devil. I got Tim to quit his job for a week and go to this cabin, which seemed like the sort of thing the devil would do.
album bull cow farmer milk rock roll sad shadow smashing smiling sounds studio tells
We wanted to make an album that sounds like our band, and not a heady, self-conscious studio project. Everyone tells us rock and roll is a shadow of itself--a sad old milk cow smiling at the farmer every morning. We still see a bucking bull smashing around the stable.
dance dance-and-dancing rock songs
We have a lot of fun. We play a lot of rock songs and yes, we're going to dance for you.
band base best build community corporate dollars fan listens meet people requires running tour trying
We don't want to be the kind of band that requires a lot of massive, corporate dollars to keep us running and promoted. We're trying to build a fan base and community that listens to us and the best way to do that is to tour - we go out and we play and we play and we play and we meet the people that like us and we try to keep the whole thing organic.
backyard band basically dance director helped house involved practiced prove turns video
We basically practiced it at our house for a week. And my sister, who is a dancer, helped choreograph it for our live show, ... We taped us doing it in the backyard not to use as our own video, but because we wanted to show the dance to a video director for this other idea we had that involved choreography to prove to him we were the band to do it. It turns out the director never even got it.
album backing energetic guitars seems space unlike
To me this album seems more energetic and raw, with more space unlike the first one, which was about stacking up 50 guitars and 80 backing vocals on each track,
people video attention
There’s no hope of people paying attention to your music video if you don’t let others use it,
powerful real differences
If you have a lot of fans, you have a powerful soapbox, but you still have to have something to say when you're on that soapbox if you want to make a real difference.
thinking artist names
I think that artists and musicians can do as much harm as good for causes if they tie their names to lots of things, especially if they aren't really doing much to meaningfully push their causes forward.
support trying net-neutrality
I'm very active in pushing for net neutrality and an open Internet. There are countless other causes I support personally and privately, but I try to keep my public activism fairly focused.
stuff mystery surprise
What puts me in a vulnerable state? Beauty, wonder, surprise, mystery. Stuff like that.
self criticism vulnerable
I can have fairly crippling self-criticism. It doesn't really put me in a vulnerable state, I just get glum and intolerable, but it certainly is a vulnerability.
feels platitudes globes
If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed.
differences trying want
I can't imagine everyone on the planet would want to hear something from me. If I thought they'd listen, I'd probably ask them to try to be nicer to each other, to try to be less scared of their differences.