JustArts had the chance to sit down with lead singer of OK Go, Damien Kulash, to discuss the group's formation, influences and creative process two Saturdays ago when the group came to headline Student Event's fall concert. JustArts: How did you guys meet, and when did you form OK Go?

Damien Kulash: Tim and I met at summer camp when we were very young; I think it was 1986 or '87. And then our original guitarist and I met, actually at the same summer camp, but several years later. Then Tim and Andy, that original guitarist, went to college in Chicago, both at different schools, but because they were both old friends of mine, they introduced themselves [and] started a band there with the drummer Dan Konopka. When I got done with college, I moved to Chicago; that band had broken up, and we started a new one, but with obviously many of the same members, and then Andy left a few years ago and we got the new Andy, Andy Ross. So the formation was November 1998. First practice, first show I think, sometime in spring '99.

JA: Who are your primary influences?

DK: That's so hard to answer. On this record, obviously there's a lot, you can hear a lot of Prince. Growing up, I think the thing that convinced me that rock and roll was doable by real humans was the D.C. punk-rock scene, and I grew up listening to a lot of Fugazi and Shudder to Think and Jawbox and Minor Threat and that kind of stuff. . The Pixies were a huge influence. . The Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets and Happy Mondays and stuff. . We listen to a lot of 60s and 70s soul music . and a lot of Elvis Costello.

JA: So what is your songwriting process?

DK: The way I would write then [when the band started] would be sort of how you might write a sentence; you sort of envision this endpoint you want to get to, you kind of have a thought and then you have to figure out how to get there. You know, you pick your words, and you have to deal with grammar and structure and tone, but you know where you're going, or you hope you know where you're going, and you sort of figure out what tools you need to get there. So, like the song "Get Over It," off of our first record was-you know, I was listening to a lot of Cheap Trick and Queen and Joan Jett and I was like, "How come our generation doesn't have stadium rock anthems?" And, "So let's write one." And so you wind up with something that's sort of like our version of a stadium-rock anthem. And by this most recent album, I think that process had sort of collapsed on itself for us, partially because I think, you know, you sort of just get bored with working one way, but also the endpoints that we could write towards started to be too self-referential, you know. . So I started writing a different way, which was, or which is more sort of just like playing around with the kind of primordial soup of music, just basic sounds, just drumbeats or chord progressions, or sometimes just like timbres or intervals or something, and look for combinations that kind of produce something more than the sum of their parts, you know. . And it wound up bringing us to a very different place musically than we had been before, because instead of it being like, "Here's all the things we can sort of imagine beforehand," you get a much more evolutionary process where you have no idea what you're going to wind up with in the end, but you just make decisions along the way and you're like, "Wow, well, who knew? A duck."

JA: So how do you keep the videos so creative and unique and fresh?

DK: Uh, we're just really awesome. No, I think the best way to answer this is that we don't think about music videos the way most people do. Most people are still thinking about music videos as the thing that they were in the '80s or '90s, which is an advertisement, . and so we tend to make videos . not as advertisements but rather as creative endpoints, things that you do if you just want to make a 3-minute film with this music as a soundtrack. It's a very different kind of project than that advertising and promotional one. So when you view music videos in that light, the things we do don't seem so shocking or crazy, it's just a particular way of making short films.

JA: Does being on your own label now help you become more free in your ideas and your creative process?

DK: Yes, very much so. . The music industry, the recording industry has existed for 80ish years, maybe. How long has it been since the '20s or '30s? So I guess more like 90 years now, but somewhere just shy of a century, and music obviously has been with us for millennia. And within that century, we have come to understand music as recordings of music-you know, that a song is the recording of that song. And everything else is sort of either background work or promotional work around that song or that recording of that song, . and from the perspective of someone who just wakes up in the morning wanting to make things, that's totally arbitrary and not particularly useful. It's like the music video form: There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not the only way to make things. . We don't need that [form], and if we run our own label, or our own company, . we have the freedom to do with the things we make, whatever we like, which is really nice. And it means we can make other things. We don't have to worry about making things fit into those particular categories. And so there are a lot of collaborations we're working on now that sort of don't have any kind of pre-existing category, which is a lot of fun.