OK Go never pretended not to care about being popular. For many of their earliest gigs they plastered the city with big, sharply designed posters–I remember seeing one in mid-1999 and thinking, Am I supposed to know who that is? Within a year they’d finagled their way onto bills with the likes of Elliott Smith, the Promise Ring, and Sloan, and at the end of 2000, though they’d yet to make a record, This American Life host Ira Glass had personally invited them to play at live productions of the radio show in Boston and New York as well as Chicago.
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It was Glass who–indirectly–prompted Kulash to clarify his goals. “Do you see yourselves as being earnest or clever?” the radio host asked him in late 2000. “I was completely stuck,” Kulash says. “Clever is the last thing you want to describe yourself as–this annoying, quirky thing–and earnest has this connotation of drippy faux sincerity. I tried to answer ‘neither.’” But the question got him thinking, and the conclusion he came to is evident on the band’s debut, OK Go, out September 17 on Capitol Records.
With the Trumfio sessions in hand, the group started touring ambitiously, using every connection they could think of to get the recordings to people who might be able to help them. In June 2000 they made what they thought was a disastrous trip to LA to open for Weezer side project the Special Goodness: the shows were sparsely attended and OK Go got stiffed on their guarantees.
It does seem like Capitol is behind the record at the moment: the band spent most of July on tour with hot labelmates the Vines, the video for “Get Over It” has been added to MTV2, and they showed up on Late Night With Conan O’Brien on September 4. The single, released three weeks ago, had reached number 30 on Billboard’s modern rock chart at press time. OK Go plays an all-ages record-release show at Metro on Thursday, September 19.
