Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to The Bob left Set's podcast.

My guest today is Damian Kulash.

Okay, go Damien, how do you feel about your BM being more famous for its videos than its music.

I think it's just a it's crazy, Like I my feeling is, it's what it is.

Like, I'm just I feel very lucky that I get to keep making art.

You know.

Okay, but you know you look on Spotify and some of your early material has been streamed more.

What do you think it can do to get people to listen and pay attention more to the music than the videos.

Let's keep making it.

I mean, there's there We get this question all the time, and that as if the videos are somehow cannibalizing the music, like it's the other way around, Like I you know, we make great songs.

We make really great songs.

Lots of bands make really great songs.

We also make really great videos.

Not lots of bands make really great video you know, So we'll sort of like in a category of one with respective the videos, whereas we're in a category of lots when it comes to the songs.

And I'm glad that that the videos bring more listeners I'm glad that we keep get to keep making the stuff we get to keep making.

I mean, do I understand the difference between my eyes and my ears.

Absolutely, But from my perspective, like what I want to spend my days doing is chasing art ideas, you know, chasing chasing the muse, and I get to keep doing it.

That's what matters to me.

Okay, let's talk about the upcoming year, twenty twenty six.

I look at your website and I see one gig listed in February.

So what are the plans for twenty twenty six?

We have We have some during plans that have yet to we haven't announced them yet where we have a uh, we're looking at some summer festivals right now and possibly a tour of the summer.

We're starting up some work on new videos right now.

You know, we had our first album in years come out last you know, last April.

So this has been a big year of shows and promo and videos and we're happy to be back at it.

Other than video, how do you promote the new album?

I mean, we do all those standards stuff like there, you know, we've we have indie radio promoters and we do we you know, we we are active on social media, and you know, we have we're we're we're published through Warner Chapel, and we are We're distributed through Symphonics, so we have like and both of those have their own promotional arms as well.

So like, I think we do all the standard stuff, but to be honest, I don't.

I don't really know what the music industry standards are anymore, and and I'm not you know, a big part of it for us just keeping it keeping in direct contact with our existing fan base, you know, Like since the earliest days of our band, we would go out after shows with a with a spiral notebook and just get people to you know, give us their email addresses because we didn't want to be you know, we didn't we didn't want the label to be stuck in between us and our fans.

We would, of course loved the label to help us find more fans and connecting more people out there in the world.

But the the you know what, the real sort of transaction for us is make the stuff find the people.

You know, Like, we make the stuff and we want to give it right to the people.

That's sort of the whole game.

To what degree are you personally active on social media promoting both yourself and the band?

It kind of comes and goes.

I I personally hate social media, like just because I'm a father.

I see what it can do to young kids.

I'm a human.

I see what it does to my own brain, like that sort of like that suck of that attention suck where you go down the rabbit hole and you can't get out.

It's just a gross feeling.

But I also know it's how culture moves these days.

So especially with a record coming out, I'd made an effort to be present, to to like pay attention to my own social media and to the band social media it is a hard thing for me to do without losing myself in it.

So I am kind of always walking a balance, you know.

So if one were to subscribe to your feeds, what would they see?

My personal feed is mostly like stuff I'm interested in personally, and I try I try to I when I do podcasts, I try to, like, you know, I try to put a link on there.

The band's feed is the band's feed.

We try to be more regular with the band's feed, make sure that we have something every couple of days, and make sure you know, we have things specif the shows we've just done, specific to the awards that were up for, specific to the the things we think the fans would care about.

We do our best to try to make material that fits the the format, which is an ever evolving thing.

You know, It's like it.

I think there are people who grew up more native to it, who actually want to take out a phone and film themselves doing their daily routines.

That just doesn't interest me.

I'm sure if that were native to me, we would be better at it.

But you know, okay, so there's a line between your art and your personal life.

You don't have a need or don't want to get your personal life out to many people.

Oh god, no, I mean I remember early on in our career a person at a major label telling me, like, you really should just like, you know, live stream your life.

You know, you should have a blog going all the time, you should have all this stuff.

And I remember thinking, because I remember that the example in my head was the Pixies, that I grew up a massive Pixies fan, and if I had actually like part of what I loved was that they were godlike to me, and and imagining who and what that person was, and that if I actually had to watch, you know, Frank Black eat breakfast cereal in the morning, I probably would feel pretty differently about him.

And I was just wrong, you know, like I was wrong in terms of the way culture moved.

I'm I'm not wrong for me, like I just that's not I want my private life.

I want my time with my kids to be my time with my kids.

I don't want them online, you know.

I want my time with my family to be my time with my family.

I want my time sitting alone in a studio trying to figure out what cords should come next.

That's like a nearly religious experience for me that I don't The last thing I want to be thinking about at that time is like the camera angle, you know, or or letting somebody into the process.

I know, it's I know, that's how marketing has done.

I know that's like that people half my age feel differently about that than I do.

But I it's just that's me.

You know.

Have you met Frank Black Black Francis, Yeah, yeah, I have.

Actually, our mutual friend Jamie Kitman introduced me to him early on, and he gave me some very great advice about my career.

I'm still I'm still a mega fan, but you know, still at a distance.

Well, I guess what I'm asking is, you had an illusion of the man after meeting him.

How did you feel?

I have a different illusion to the man.

It's still a good one.

I it's you know, we're not We're not like best friends.

But I I, I was already an adult with enough with and what I was asking was, you know, I mean, the big question I had for him when I was a twenty two year old with just getting my first major label deal, was I want to learn to sing better.

And he gave me.

He gave me his vocal coach, you know, like and I still do that.

I still do the warm up his vocal coach gave me every day, you know, And I remember, I remember his His publishing advice was very very draconian, don't don't give a cent to anyone kind of thing.

And I mean, I just he it was already an adult getting an advice from getting advice from another adult, Very different from a fourteen year old getting get you know, getting your way in the world by hearing raw rage on vinyl.

You know, Okay, but the privilege of stardom, if we want to call it a privilege, is that you get to meet a lot of household names, and needless to say, they're very different from one's impression in most cases not all.

So what has been your experience meeting the famous people?

They're humans, They're all humans, you know, like it.

It is remarkable how how pedestrian and human every human is, and and there there are.

I mean, I've gotten the chance to meet some extraordinarily talented famous and and uh well healed ones and it doesn't you know that it's it's always the same human stuff.

I mean, I find that very reassuring in some way that it's not there isn't an us and in them there isn't a way that the other half lived that's different.

You know, they might have a lot more money or more access, but there's the.

The people I know who are really really big celebrity have a really big celebrity face are are unfailingly nothing like it.

On the other side, it's just there's no we as as consumers of the world around us.

I think we just need things to be more black and white, broad stroke stories than is real.

So we so we decide that a certain celebrity is vapid or another one is incredibly you know, dark and mysterious or whatever it is.

We write the stories about these people and they sort of snowball, but the people themselves just aren't.

Like there are always multidimensional humans with everything going on, They're not anything like that, you know.

Okay, to what degree do you personally know your hardcore.

Fans depends which ones.

There's a few of them I know really well.

I mean like, we literally have a fan who we just played some shows last week and she went to her seventy third show.

I think this on this last run.

She's seen every show we played this year, including ones that weren't announced.

You know, like, I know her really well, and she's great, She's awesome.

And there's a handful of fans who come to so many shows that I do know them really well.

I suspect they actually distort my opinion, my perspect on what the rest of the sort of megafandom is like.

Because no matter how insanely into a band you are, what are the chances you're going to travel to see you know, twenty twenty five shows in a year Like that's puts you in a very very very small category, and the people who really keep our career alive are much broader set than that and yet still really really engage.

So and I think I know I know them by again in broad strokes, you know, like I can promise you like I do a lot of questions and answer at our shows.

I asked that the audience just I'm like, who's got a question?

And we just do.

We just have discussions at the shows, and you get a pretty good sense of how engaged and nerdy and arty our fans are, you know, and that I just that I love that, Like, couldn't be more thank Back to your question about the videos, it's sort of like they they filter for a self selecting group of very curious and very sort of prone to wonder nerds, and those are people I like hanging out like it's a it's a good feeling.

Well, have you had any bad experiences with fans?

I was talking trying to get too close.

Uh, that has happened.

It's been a while, but there was there was a there was a time in Florida when there was a there was some sort of scary moments with it with somebody who had who had not taken her meds and was out of the institution she was supposed to be in and so forth.

So how did you handle that?

Uh?

Distance, Like you just be really when you're in that city, you're just really careful to watch keep your wits about you.

I don't know that there's much you can do without without letting it affect your entire life, you know.

And I don't know, maybe I'm maybe maybe this is naive, but it feels to me like we're a pretty small like we're a big deal to a few people, but it's a it's a small category, you know, Like I would, I think there are much bigger, bigger fish out there for the craziest to go for.

Okay, but just talking about this woman in Florida, did you have to get the authorities involved?

Came close?

It didn't.

I think this one did not.

I think we had.

I can't remember.

It was like fifteen years ago now, but I do remember having to like alert everybody at the at the show, and you know, our tour manager had to be the hotel had to be notified and all that kind of stuff.

Because there was there were some close calls and some threatening emails.

I guess it was at that point as opposed to Dam's or whatever.

But I honestly don't remember the specifics I remember it being.

I remember what I needed to do was like, stay calm.

Are you recognized out in public?

Generally not much, or at least not You know, it happens every every once in a while, but it's not like a certainly not a constant thing.

Sometimes my kids will be wearing okay go T shirts and and and like somebody will be like, oh you like that dand and not realize that I'm standing right there with them.

Okay, how old are your kids?

I have seven year old twins.

Okay, usually maybe they're a little young.

The kids have contempt for the father's work or the mother.

It could it may I'm sure we're headed there eventually.

We'll get there.

Right now.

My daughter says her plan is to join my men and and perhaps replace me, which I'm excited about.

So what have you learned having kids?

Everything?

I mean?

I I I love being the father, and I love the the way that it has opened up my heart, and I think I think a lot of people.

The thing I had always heard is that like you see the world anew through the eyes of your kids, and I had some of that experience, but it's more that I like parts of myself that had ossified or I hadn't that I thought I understood already, even my relationship to love, like I'm a romantic who has chased love my whole life long and thought I knew all my relationships to it, And all of a sudden, you have a kid, and it's just like God, there's a whole new wing.

There's a whole new wing to this castle, and it's it's bigger and more amazing than anything I've been in before.

I love it.

To what degree you talked about not being enamored of social media?

To what degree do you direct and restrict your children.

I'm very our kids.

I mean, at this age they have they don't have devices, will keep that that way for a long time, and they have very limited screen time on any you know, for anything.

And I I mean, I hope social media is a different universe by the time that they're you know, I don't know, but thirteen fourteen years old, it's changed so much in the last five years that I hope, I hope, I hope it can change again.

I just think about what I was like as a teenager, and whether or not social media would have like it would have ruined.

It would have been terrible for me.

I would have been got out and awful.

And from everything I understand, it is basically really horrible for teens now, so I will keep my kids as far from it as I can.

Why would it have been awful for you?

Because I was experimenting with personalities?

You know, because I was like, because I think at that age, you're trying to figure out who you are and taking you know, big swings, and it's and I'm just glad that's not that's not all on record somewhere, know, But also because like the number when when I got home from high school to what I thought about all night was that girl right like if I if?

And and what she thought of me?

And vice versa and what and that other guy who liked that?

And what are all the stuff that you that goes through your head as a kid.

Uh?

If that if I could still be gaming that all night long?

I mean, you know, like I already spent hours on the on the phone as a teenager.

I think if if that could have been a sort of gamified and broadcast system of social hierarchy.

Got it was been off for me.

So what kind of kid were you?

I was a nerdy art kid.

I I went, you know, like, I spent all my time painting and with my headphones on listening to rock and roll like it.

I I went to a school where there was like really heavy on jocks, and and I got along well with him.

I wasn't like, I wasn't in the sort of classic battle of the arty kids against the jocks.

I just like they liked different things than I did.

We didn't.

We didn't even like the same girl.

So it was fine.

Okay, let's start from the beginning.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Washington, DC.

And were your parents involved with the government.

They were not.

My dad is a well so sort of tangentiy, I should say.

My dad is a civil engineer whose work was not funded by the government but was used by the government law and my uh my mom is a was in uh basically worked for a consulting firm interpreting what the government's rules were at any given time for pensions and benefits.

So they both they both had a lot of government overlap, but were not employed by the government.

Okay, it would sound like to do her job, your mother would be somewhat of a news junkie.

Are you a news junkie?

Not currently, I am susceptible to it, but I a special I found during the first Trump administration that I I there's a certain chadenfreuda I was looking for in the news every night, and and I just would go diving deep down these holes looking for that, you know, trying to find the moment that this that this would all crack and and and sanity would would come bubbling up through the the truth somewhere, and seeing one piece of news after another, going God, this is ridiculous, Oh my god, oh God, And like that that I realized after a while it was I was not staying informed.

I was just I was.

It was just rage scrolling, you know.

Well, needless to say, we're in the second Trump administration.

What's your outlook today?

Not good?

I you know, I'm I'm I'm obviously left of center politically, and and and I I I can say just the same.

I don't.

I don't.

I think it's very hard to look at what's happening right now and think there's any sanity to it.

And I am worried that that I'm just another one of the sort of head in the sand, Like it's so that the flood the zone offense of of the of the Trump administration and MAGA in general.

The sort of like let's just pour, you know, just just sort of set everything on fire, and and if it's all burning at the same time, nobody will know what to do has been relatively effective with me because I'm just I'm overwhelmed.

I'm sort of like God, I don't know what to do about any of it.

It doesn't leave a great doesn't leave me with a very positive outlook.

So how do you think it's going to play out?

Well, I'm a I'm I I am a cynic and also like this sort of a sort of hopeful, optimistic, romantic on the to sort of counterbalance that I I guess my rational side thinks it's only going to get worse.

My the other side of me is sort of like it just can't.

There has to be a breaking point.

And I'm and I don't know, I mean, like I I I wish I could give.

I wish I had anything other than than songs to give, you know what I mean, Like we have a song on her most recent album called A Stone Only Rolls Downhill and the whole it's I wish I could say this that I'll be all right, Like if that's the song written specifically to my kids, like I don't have any you can't lie to them, But you also can't raise your kids going like, well, the world is going to hell in a hand basket and you're going with it, you know, I don't know, what do you think?

Oh wow, Well, let me ask your question first.

In the sixties they fought or said both actually that music could change the world.

What power does music have in today's world?

I think you would be able to answer that way better than I, because I think you look at music across like in its in its aggregate form.

I look at music one song at a time, you know.

But like I will say that my life has been changed by songs, and my relationship to the world changes dramatically when those songs are on, when something changes my soul.

And I know that our fan like I get letters all the time from you know.

The most recent one that really moved me was a a an activist, an Israeli activist in Palestine trying to bring the war to an end, saying that she just needed like that that after a day of hell all around her, she needed something to escape too, and our songs we're doing that for her, and like that that those are the types of things that booy my soul.

Because I'm I.

I can feel very navel gazing and and sort of self serving to sit in my in my safe bubble writing songs.

But you know when we hear from people all the time for whom our songs are getting them through the death of a parent or the death of a child, or uh, you know, the realization that the world around them is going to ship like them.

I know these individual stories are I don't know if they're if they have any if they move any globe, you know, huge cosmic needle.

All I can do is do do do my part in my little world, and and I I know it has been done for me.

I know it.

You know I know that that music keeps me alive, and I hope, I hope it's doing that for us.

Let's say that I said financial considerations were taken off the table, but no one would ever hear your music.

You could make it, but no one could hear it.

Would you still make.

It, probably not.

I don't know.

I mean I would, what I would make would change a lot like I think I would be.

I would I'd spend a lot more time practicing piano just to play it, and a lot less time trying to figure out but how does this become a song?

And I don't know, And my answer to that would have changed dramatically over the years, because I like as a as a kid.

When I first started making music, it was a compulsion to be able to like the thing.

When I heard Rocket by Herbie Hancott, a certain scratch itch in my brain was scratched deep inside my skull in a place that nothing else had ever gotten to it.

And I don't know.

Ten years later than that, the first time I had a four track sitting in front of me and I could start layering things up and go, oh my god, I think I just wrote a song that did something in my brain in a whole different way too.

They're related but not the same, you know.

And I spent I spent years just trying to find that thing, either with other musicians in the room or multi tracking something in a studio, whatever, trying to it.

It's this other itch in my brain.

I think I would have done that regardless of who was listening at this point in my life.

I I make the songs for like I am the audio.

I'm the only test audience.

Like, if it's not moving me, there's no point in making it.

But if there were, if there were no if there were no audience outside of that.

Ever, again, I'm not sure it ever finished them.

I'd probably be playing with them all the time, but I would I don't think it would ever goes to the part of where I go like, no, these lyrics aren't good enough.

Try again.

Okay, you have a band, long tenure, you have an audience.

How important is it for you to have more people hear your music?

It's a it's a it's a totally like what is it?

What's the name of the thing?

Or OBErs, it's a it's a snake eating its tail question?

You know, like I it.

I watch my kids, for instance, want to get stuff for uh the holidays, right, They're like, I want to get this, and I want to get that.

I know, I know the things that will be fun for them to open versus the things that will be fun for them to have.

I know how little each individual toil will matter in the course of a year or in the course of their lives.

And it's I think that people look at when I look at my own career and when I look around the musicians I know an artist that I know in their careers, it's the same basic thing.

There's this sort of compulsion towards towards UH can act with more people, you know, towards feedback from those people out there that it's like, oh, yes, this thing landed.

You know that the thing I made mattered to somebody.

But it's all relative, like ten more tomorrow is better than ten less tomorrow.

But I don't But does it really matter?

Like I don't actually know.

I'm not there for these interactions.

When somebody puts our song on somewhere, I'm not there to feel it.

And I wouldn't know if ten more people did it tomorrow or less?

Is this too abstract?

Like I don't.

I like the idea of continuing to do this.

I like the feeling of continuing to do this, and and I need people to keep showing up at shows and keep streaming our songs and keep watching our videos and stuff for me for that to be an operational career.

But it's not the abstraction of more and more and more is I'm aware of that as an abstraction.

Does that answer the question absolutely?

How are the economics fine?

I mean, it's we entered the music industry right at the end, like just as CDs were dying, and we never had a time where where we got you know, got fat off of off of master side sales.

You know, we we we didn't live in there of of of big, big hits.

You know.

There there was there was a lot more licensing.

Like I I think that it was a lot easier to to to get from album to album without worrying about people paying their rent or their mortgage or whatever.

When when licenses from TV shows and movies and stuff were significantly bigger than they are now and more frequent than they are now.

And I gather that's not just our band aging, that's that's the industry as a whole.

I mean, we we have this weird thing where we get to make these expensive videos because we find sponsors for them generally, and those that is this is such a weird little cul de sac off of the rest of the music industry and affects our finances so much that it's a little bit hard to know what are what are what our bottom line would look like without that.

But you know, we tour profitably, We make a lot on merch Things are pretty good in general.

So how was it financially during COVID during the shutdown?

Uh, it we happened to be between albums.

Then it was like a pretty good time for it to happen.

My kids were eighteen months old when it started.

I was not going to go touring with toddlers at home anyways.

And uh, and my wife and I directed a film together.

We directed a movie for Apple, and so I had sort of briefly pivoted out of out of the music industry.

Right then, how did you get a deal to make it movie for Apple?

Well, my band makes these videos.

You might have heard it where so yeah, so for your for any listeners who don't already know this about our band, we're the band with the ridiculous videos and they were they are well respected in the film and ad communities.

And so when we pitched a movie to Apple to co direct, my wife is a screenwriter and she's written some very wait.

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, let's start at a base level.

You're at home, your wife says, I have an idea.

There's a long process between creation and actually having a deal in making the movie was like a big plan.

I mean, how did you get did you get an age?

And how did this all come to be?

When when my wife and I knew each other in high school years and years and years ago, and we didn't see each other for twenty years after that we both had totally separate lives and then ran into each other on Staten Island of all one of the places, and uh, and we're friends again.

And when when it when it first got romantic?

We I remember us, I mean we It was sort of a specific thing.

It was like, you're in film and I'm in music.

The more successful I am, especially these days, that the more the more that means being away from home.

The more successful you are means being off on sets being away from home too.

So it doesn't really seem like the type of relationship we want to build.

Why don't we make stuff together?

And we so we, Yeah, we decided we would we would try directing directing stuff together.

Because I'm we that was sort of an obvious next stept for both of us, she as a as a narrative film writer and me as a video director, and so yeah, we we knew it would be a long game type of thing, because you don't get that that opportunity very often.

And we started to develop some ideas just you know, when we'd be out on a hike or something like that.

We just passed back and forth ideas.

This one came up because of a she got the opportunity to to write a book about I'm sorry to write the script based on a book about the economics of the beanie baby bubble.

And we were both teenagers when that happened and completely immune to its charms, Like we had that it was the type of thing that we were both like, who fucking want a small stuffed animal and think it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, And so we had like exactly the right distance from it to sort of look as scans at it and it and it turns out to be such a weird story of sort of what America is about that we just both kind of fell in love with it.

She had written she had written one draft of the script already, and we just sort of we thought, okay, if this were an okay Go video.

If this narrative were a video, how would we how would we do it wrong?

And the way that okay Go always gets the music industry wrong, how would we do this movie wrong?

And we pitched it to Zach Gallifacus, who is who would make the perfect tie Warner?

Oh wait wait wait wait wait how did you know?

How did you connect with Zach galifanaka?

He was our he was our landlord.

We were he we he We were renting an apartment that he owns in in uh in Venice, California.

Just for the record, sideways, where do you live now?

I live in Santa Barbara?

Now?

Okay, So you pitch it to Zach?

He was into it and uh and so we took it to we we uh, we took it to various different I mean, Imagine Entertainment signed on pretty early to produce it.

And and at that point.

Wait wait wait wait who connected you with Imagine?

My wife she'd written several scripts for Imagine at that point.

Okay, she already know and uh And it was at Amazon for almost two years and eventually they were just on the fence about it for too long.

And actually, I hope it's legal to say.

At this point, Zach Zach got so upset about the business practices of Amazon that he was like, I'm not making this if it's an Amazon anymore.

And that pushed them off the fence and we get it.

And Apple was just starting their film division and we got to be one of the things they made.

So are you happy with the result?

I love that.

Yeah, the film is great.

Film is great.

The process of making the film is less fun than I had hoped.

It is deeply creative, but also more more management than it is.

Uh muse chasing that makes sense.

I longed to get back to, like the the chasing of the of the emotional part of it, that sitting down in a piano or a guitar.

Uh and and and finding that moment where one plus one equals five hundred.

You know, film is a collaborative art, which music is more about the individual.

Was that where you notice a difference.

Yes, But you know our videos are incredibly collaborative.

We obviously the Okay Go videos are very you know, they can have giant crews sometimes that there's I think the love video, the one that is Grammy nominated right now is up.

It was one hundred and thirty six people on the crew, and you know that's that's almost narrative film size, but it is a very different You're basically it's a sprint up to one three minute shot.

A film is a you know, a forty day shoot, fifty day shoot.

It's a you're it's your all your pre production sits in an office for several months, and and yes it is.

It is a collaboration on a grant much bigger scale.

I think more of it.

I mean, it was a steep learning curve for me.

I really enjoyed it, but there was a lot of it that it was that you're what you're doing is you're describing a vision, and people with even more experience than you will go make that vision.

You know, like your your art department will now go produce the thing you have described.

I'm used to actually describing the vision and then going and producing it myself.

Okay, let's go back to the music side of it.

Okay, go as a band.

To what the degree is the creation collaborative.

I'm not talking about the recording, I'm talking about the writing.

To what degree is it really just you?

Or to what degree is it collaborative.

It's very collaborative.

Tim the Basis and I have known each other since we were eleven years old, and I would say, I mean we both sort of write demos ourselves and then bring them to the other, but they invariably change a lot after that.

I tend to be the pretty soul lyricist.

The other guys will definitely weigh in on the lyrics, and I value their feedback a lot.

I'm sure you've dealt with this with other musicians before, but it's a very like It's unlike any other business or or art form that I know of in terms of it's the balance of of sort of democratic decision making and and you know, autocratic decision making.

Because there's this there's an illusion and sometimes it's the truth that it that it's more a family than it is a business.

You're, you're, you're, you've got one foot in each camp, and so having everybody's blessing on something is not just a matter of decision making, it's also a matter of your own self feeling okay, Like it's it's steamrolling the people you've been in a band with for thirty years because you feel like you're right about something.

Doesn't feel good.

You would eat like it's not operable to be like I won this one good, you know what I mean?

Like you eat it.

So we've you we've sort of spent decades doing this in a way where we need each other's approval on things, but we also need to have you also need someone who's where, you know, like I'm where the buck stops generally, and so there are lots of times when I just have to make a decision and I don't feel like making it, but I just have to, you know.

And how do you split up the publishing we have?

We split up the publishing half goes to the people who wrote the song, and we try to break that down fairly, and the other half goes to the band, anyone who has participated in the entire promotion cycle for the album, because we figured that there's no value to those songs if they are if they haven't gotten a good lift off into the world.

Okay, so what is your process?

Are you writing when you know you have to record or want to record an album?

Are you coming up with songs all the time?

Are you waiting for inspiration?

How does it work for you?

Closest to the first one You've said, like, mostly I go into long periods of writing when it's like I, when I've checked off all the other stuff that has to be done.

I like.

The thing I love doing the most is sitting here, playing with sounds and trying to discover moments where you put two sounds together and out the other side comes in emotion, and that's that has never stopped being magical to me.

I'm also so thrilled by the opportunity to go make this ridiculous film, right like, can we make this art project?

Do I get to go play with robots in a train station in Budapest?

That is like, I'll never say no to that, and I want that opportunity, So I will face that video until we get it made.

And as long as we have things we sort of need to be doing, that's generally what I'm doing.

And when we run out of those things, I'm like, good, now I get to write another album.

And by then I'm generally so exhausted of working in large groups of people and and and chasing down these big logistics that I'm really excited to just sit home and write for months straight.

When I was younger, I remember feeling a lot of pressure to write while we were on the road, to get to write faster than I do, or to always be writing.

And I honestly I'm jealous of the of the musicians I know who keep themselves to a really militaristic schedule, who just like every day put in five or six hours or whatever it is.

And every every year, I promise myself, I'm gonna I'm gonna develop that kind of habit that I have yet too, so we'll see.

Okay, do you know when you write an eleven now, so you working, you know you've been doing it so long you're not going to write something that's complete shit.

But every once in a while and you can't do it that off, you go, wait a second, this is great.

Well to me, they all start with a hint of that, and it's more about not losing it right, Like, this is the model that operates in my brain, and I think it's true.

Ish.

I'm just like playing around with sounds, and for the most part, when you put two sounds together, you get another sound on the other side.

Every once in a while you get an emotion like something happens, and that's unbelievable to get that to flow into another set of sounds that also have an emotion that and those two emotions counterbalance each other in such a way that there's some actual arc and feeling and spread and journey to it all that's even more rare.

So you can get a wildly hooky or a wildly punchy or wildly evocative single chord progression or groove or whatever, and it just doesn't go anywhere.

Like you can get thousands of those and they still don't turn into a song.

And even once you have that arc of a song, how not to kill it by describing it lyrically?

Like what are the actual things you're saying now?

Now you're crossing over from the sort of murky space of magical emotions into the specific space of things you've actually said a poem, you're actually singing along with this, How not to get that to flatten it into just a description of the sad song you've just written, or of the enthusiastic song written, whatever it is.

And so it's more like it's whittling down the whole time.

You're going from this thing that is full of promise, and at every stage it has the opportunity to just turn back into a bunch of sounds, and it's so rare that everyone's every once in a while you get all the way to the end of it and it's stayed full of promise.

Okay, there are some people have a bolt of inspiration write a song in fifteen minutes.

It sounds like you build a song over a long period of time.

Usually, Yeah, every once in a while, something will start lyrics first, and then maybe that'll like sort of drag along the song behind it, and that does happen faster and they're more succinct, and sometimes they're really good, But there's not usually how they write.

Let's go back to the videos.

You have a concept, you nail it down as much as possible, You get sponsors, You have a shoot those who are uninitiated.

There's a lot of money involved.

There's a lot of people and equipment involved.

You have a set period of time to film the video.

The nature of making a film is even with the best intentions, the best script, the best actors, the best directors, it can go sideways.

It doesn't necessarily end up what you wanted to be.

So have you had that experience with these videos where you're looking at the footage you have and say it's just not there, and what do you do when you have that feeling?

Well, because our videos, like the reason we wound up making videos like this is because ages ago we set up a camera on a tripod in my backyard and filmed us doing a rehearsal of a ridiculous dance.

It was sort of a thing we would do on stage to fuck with the hipsters.

You know.

It's like it was the era of the Strokes and everybody was shuffling their feet and smoking and it was and we just we wanted to we wanted we wanted to feel like cheap trick.

We wanted to feel like Jon Jet.

We wanted we wanted like, we wanted a smile in the room.

So we would do this ridiculous boy band dance, taking the piss out of ourselves just to kind of to because it was the punkest thing we could do at the time.

And a we taped us a rehearsal tape of that in my backyard and it went sort of proto viral before YouTube was ever a thing, right, And that taught us something about just being like, wait, there is this type of if we our instincts as a band.

We're not like, how do we make a film?

It was what do we do in front of a crowd of people to get them to smile, to get them to feel, to get them to emote, to get them to connect with us?

And so our filmmaking has always been sort of a just a reflection of that, is sort of like, what what thing can we do that we can put a camera in front of and and bring people to And more and more over the years, I have found that it's basically that is the closest facsimile I can digitally make to what a concert feels like.

Like when you're at a good show, there's just, you know, as I'm sure you know, people's you know, physically align with the singer, like you're actually your heartbeats actually line up with other people in the audience with the singer, and your saline levels all adjusted, and it's all this like crazy stuff that's happening sort of under the surface, and you feel it right like it's such It's why we're all drawn to those experiences.

And that's not something that happens when you're looking at TikTok, you know what I mean, That's not something that happens when you're looking at this little screen, no matter how good the musical performance is.

But the videos that we make do have this sort of sense of wonder to them, this kind of like this discovery, this magical feeling that is about the closest thing I can come to that that feeling on stage.

And we've gotten there not through the standard process of filmmaking where you script something out and you plan it all in advance and then try to put together in the edit, but rather by coming up with these performances that we the band actually do that we can then film in basically one take usually like it's usually one take thing.

Sometimes we're doing multiple takes, but it's still a single event or whatever it is.

But it means that at the end of the shoot, we know we have it for the for the Love video that the Grammy nominated one right now.

It that I didn't even I knew when we'd done the last take that we had it, And I didn't even watch it for several days after that because we didn't.

We were at we're out of money, there's we couldn't do another take anyways.

But I knew we'd gotten to the end, and I knew what it felt like to perform it, and so if the camera sees if like if it didn't look quite the same through the camera, it wouldn't really matter.

The spirit was there.

You know, how many takes were there and how many days was the shoot?

Thirty nine takes?

The official shoot like the you know in film world, the shoot starts when you when the lights, when when the expensive lighting package gets turned on.

Basically that it was officially a three day shoot, but we were on the ground in Budapest for three weeks prepping that, and many months of prep you know, stateside before that.

So and that was and there was a Sunday off, like I think our last day was a Monday or Tuesday, and there was a Sunday off right before that that we had to wasn't off anymore.

We were running too far behind schedule and we had to buy an extra day on the ground.

You know, like we we often have sponsors.

We usually have sponsors, but we also pay for them.

So like we're the clients so to speak.

So when when things aren't going well enough and we know we need, like, well, just put in the extra money if we have to.

It's it's much more important, Like a B plus video does nothing for us.

You know, if we if we spent this much money on something that people didn't think was spectacular, it would be a real waste of money.

So you know, it also puts uh, you did this is not quite the question you asked.

But when I'm working with film people in the film world, it's a it's a real blessing to be doing such an absurd art project as one of our videos is because nobody gets into film because because they thought it was like, eh, an okay way to make a living, and they just wanted to put in the hours.

Like everybody is is in love with the art, but the way you make a living is to make toothpaste commercials and you know, bitcoin exchange commercials or whatever.

Like you know, people, most of the time, people are working on things they don't love, and most of the time they're working on a very strict schedule and never get to do never get to be very creative.

And like in our videos, we don't usually have the same budgets as everyone else.

We don't usually like you're not gonna get paid quite as much as you did on the Crest commercial, but you're gonna be really proud of the thing you made, Andre, and we really need you to be creative.

And people usually usually really for the fences on them and and really want like it's the rare time on set when you're getting to make something where like h ah, where where the client so to speak, will go to the mat to make it perfect, you know, and so and and that is a that is an addictive feeling.

It's something that like every filmmaker I've worked with, whether it is a grip or the guy cleaning off the dance floor that we are dancing on, it's super infectious.

Like that feeling that this matters and you and then and and that you're going to be proud of it.

It goes a long long way.

So what was the budget for this clip.

For the for the Love video?

Yes, I am contractually not allowed to say, but it is high six.

Figures okay, So as originally planned?

Was the amount of money covered by sponsors?

No?

What percentage of the money was sponsors in the end in the beginning.

Zero in the end ninety.

Okay, how do you get the sponsors?

Uh?

We we make it.

We have a lot of friends in the ad world.

At the point we've been doing it for years and years.

You know, they used to come to us all the time, right right, like when when when being viral on YouTube was the thing that was threatening terrestrial TV, we were a first call, you know.

And and it's still the case people in the ad world when they when they have to pitch their deck to the client the mood board, there's an okay go video still on that mood board, you know, twenty percent of the time, fifty percent of the time, Like we're we are a touchstone for for those people in terms of like we wanted to have this feeling.

We wanted to feel genuine we wanted to feel homemade, we wanted to feel inventive, we wanted to feel resourceful.

And you know, I think what I to me, the thing is like when you're watching something that that feeling of a as a viewer, feeling the filmmakers on the other side of it, going like, oh I get what they put into this, and knowing having that relationshipstem It's very very similar to me as it is to listen to a singer, right Like, it's like that connection between you and them.

That's not the case generally and narrative film, like when you're watching you know, the best of Scorsese's films.

Hopefully you are in the you're in the scene, you're watching the Gangsters.

You're not watching the filmmaker, right, but in an okay go video.

The whole point is we never you're where there's no suspension of disbelief.

You're never asked to leave, like we want you to see how it was made, and we want you to have that connection to us as we made it.

And I think that's that is something that that brands in particular are really they want that they want you when you watch this to go like, I love this.

I love that this was made for me by these people, and who are these people?

And I want to know about this right like that that connection again to me, it feels just like music.

It's sort of like when I hear ROBERTA.

Flack singing do what you Gotta do, I'm like, I want to have dinner, Like I need to know the rest of the story.

I want to I want to know how her heart was broken like this, I need to sing it to me again, like it's a personal connection between me and her all of a sudden, And that's how it feels with our videos, I hope, and and so getting sponsors on board is generally a matter of them.

They're just looking for ways to connect with people, and all we have to do is sort of prove to them we're not here.

We're not here to steal your money.

We're like, we're here because we want to make this thing that connects with people.

Do you want to connect with people?

And generally if they believe that we will, they want to.

Okay, you have the idea, you know what cost X?

How do you find the sponsors?

Literally, it has been different with every video we've done.

I mean we we we do a lot of outreach.

It almost never works like going going out to ad agencies or you know, the chief marketing officer of some brand.

We have an almost zero percent hit rate of going I've got this great idea and you make the thing right.

But they frequently come to me asking for me to direct a direct a TV commercial for them, and then I could go, well, I'd love to do that, or you could make the next Okay go video and that has often worked.

There's there if if the if the production company we're working with already has lots of clients that they're making commercials.

For as long as it comes from somebody they trust in the marketing world that this is a good marketing maneuver, then they might consider it.

And so for this last one, it was it was the it was a combination of both of those Meta was working with.

Are the producers who are making the video with us already worked with Meta on other projects and they were like, would you consider working on this?

And that was a multi month process and they paid for about half of it, and uh and the the project Management Institute was had already worked with us on a different video and we were let and we were like, the next one's going to be bigger.

We be interested in working.

So it was like two existing relationships.

Okay, what does a sponsor want for their money?

Engagement attention?

I mean they're like, and that's measured differently every time, and there's I think think that it used to be at least I remember it being much more metrics driven five ten years ago, when it was sort of like how many hits or how many shares or how many of this?

And I think people have started to realize that it's so much more about a continuing relationship that like the sort of zeitgeisty feeling of something has more to do with being popping up on three different platforms than it does with you know this many YouTube hits that generally it is when we've gotten the feedback from the brand partners at the end, it's all about overall feeling they're getting and not look.

At this number, look at this number, look at this number, and you've made a number of these.

What satisfies a client a sponsor.

They want to be able to be seen in the video, they want to presents by credit what.

Yeah, ours generally have there's usually a thanks at the end, like there's just like this, you know thanks at the end.

Sometimes there's something right at the beginning.

A lot of times there's behind the scenes pieces that are very focused on on their relationship to it because it's all it's like if when you click on one of our videos, we hope you go down the rabbit hole, right like it's like how do they do this?

And then you're and then you're in the universe of how it was all made and that stuff is you know a lot of ways more meaningful to the clients because they're like what they want is a a a a value connection with the people who are watching.

It's not just a sort of impression, you know.

So what's your view on directing commercials?

I you know, I have done it before, it and it's a it can be a fun way to sort of practice a technique or learn a filmmaking thing.

I'm less into it.

I'd rather be writing in songs, you know.

And right now, like commercial directing is a horrible isn't it.

I mean it's just like, you know, the music industry, as you know, turned into something like a service industry in the last ten years, fifteen twenty years, and that is that has happened much more to directors in the last five ten years than they had thought was going to happen.

I think, you know, like I think a lot was learned from the from the digital makeover of music from the films.

I'd learned a lot from watching that happen, but there's a lot that was still a big shock.

And watching my friends who are commercial directors struggle for work, it's like, I don't, you know, I don't have any great desire to be fighting tooth and nail to get to get a film job that I don't really want to do.

In the first place, you know.

But it is lucrative if you do the work.

It has been it was in the past, it is getting less and less.

So from what I understand, I mean, I'm not Look, I'm not a a a student of any of these industries like you are, so I don't want to stick my foot in my mouth.

But it used to be that that, you know, multiple day shoots with big budgets were pretty common for commercial shoots.

That's that is the margins have come way down and there's and they know now that a lot of what they have to produce is all this ancillary stuff for social media.

So so what you have to make is, you know, there's ten times more stuff you have to make, and the budgets have come out.

So to what degree do you feel pressure to top yourself with the next video?

The The true answer to that is very complicated because I'm aware that they're the like that it's an attention economy, you know.

But you would never write a song to try to top the last song, you know, And it's sort of the same with the videos.

It's like, what I want to do is make is make the thing that best serves this idea.

I want to make the thing that's most evocative, that's most emotional, that is most connected to me, and that I will be proudest of for the longest, And those aren't always It's not a I mean sort of back to your earlier question about like always finding new fans, like you're not You're not always trying to grow things.

You just want to make it the best you can, you know.

So I don't know, I feel like I've sort of dodged your question, but that well, let me you know, I no, no.

I don't think you are.

But let me ask you this, are you thinking of video ideas all the time or after you write music?

I have a have a sort of running list of things that I think would be fun to try, and they line up with songs I have written generally.

Sometimes every once in a while, a song something lyrically will actually inspire the video idea itself, but usually it's it is a Venn diagram where it's sort of like I remain surprised that these two things really line up so well, but I shouldn't be.

They just they both came from this, like it's the same part of me.

It's the same reflection of what I think is exciting and full of wonder in the world.

Like of course they line up.

You know, let's go back to the beginning.

You say you grew up in Washington and DC.

Most people don't grow up in the district.

They grew up in suburbs, but some do.

Where did you literally live the district in the northwest side of the district.

I grew up just south of Chevy Chase Circle off of Connecticut Avenue, and it was I really lucked out in terms of the timing I was.

I was born in seventy five and so nineteen ninety I went into high school and it was like Fugazi was just coming out with their second album, and I was treated to the like one of the greatest DIY indie punk scenes that has ever existed.

Like that the discord that heyday at the Discord of Discord Records or what was did a lot for me.

Fugazi and Shudder to Think and Jawbox and all these incredible bands and most of all the feeling that anybody could just do this right.

There was a record label there called called Simple Machines, and they put out a pamphlet I think it was a dollar fifty and it was how to make your own seven inch and it was like, here are the three pressing plants that still exist in the United States.

Here are their phone numbers.

Here's you asked for when you call, you know, here's what here's here's what your budget will actually look like.

So you like, don't think you can do this for a less And I think it was seven hundred fifty bucks or something like that.

It's like, for seven hundred and fifty bucks, you can make a pressing of five hundred records.

And and that was and I and I ordered that pamphlet for a dollar fifty and I started a quote unquote record label for my you know, my friend's bands.

And that was normal.

That was like, that's what That's what the scene in d C said.

Was normal to a fifteen year you know.

And honestly it's why, like, you know, our other the other thing we're up for a Grammy for this year is our the album cover.

The packaging for our album, which is this like it's a three D sculpture that pops out of the album when you open it up.

And my love of that, of the packaging and of the sort of the opportunities around the art that you make all come from that era, that DC era.

That it was sort of like the that making music was a community activity, right, like that the shows were a community activity.

That were pasting your posters on the mailbox was a community activity.

It was sort of like joining this community to make the because you get to make the stuff, you know.

It was like just it was like there were endless opportunities for making things.

And I love that that chase of the of the muse.

Did you go to public school or private school?

Private school?

Was it one of the famous DC private schools?

Which one was Saint Albans is pretty famous.

I mean it's not I think these days did well as the one everyone knows about pop.

Yeah, it was a it was a I had an incredible education, and it was that I raged against the conservative culture of that school.

But but I but it was a great education.

How many kids in the family.

Two?

Who's the other one?

My older sister and she h four years older than me.

She and she made several of our videos.

She was a professional ballroom dancer.

Her name is Tricia and and she after the Treadmill video which we filmed at her house, she she switched into filmmaking herself, and she's now a successful film director.

How did she get into ballroom dancing?

She I think she's a lot like me.

She just it was the thing that made her, that made the world around her more magical.

She she was she was studying it for fun in college and there was a job open at the local teaching studio and she started as a sort of intern there and the next thing, you know, she was she was competing on the circuit and she was.

She she built.

She managed to get enough students that she could build a small ballroom in her backyard in Florida, where she had moved.

And it was a that's some hell of a way to keep your art alive, you know.

Okay, So you go to school.

Do you play sports at all?

I did a little bit.

I wasn't.

I wasn't very good at any of them.

And I'm and but it was a requirement, so I did.

And what about friends?

You have a lot of friends?

You're alone or what?

What were you like?

I was a pretty social kid.

I had a lot of I mean, there was a small group of kids at my school who were who were sort of the punky outsiders.

I mean, you know, you know, the band of the Walkman.

They were all the great ahead of me and the singers a couple of guys behind me, and I mean, and there were up there was a there's a you know, five percent of each year was what was kids like me and there but there was that was enough kids to for it to be a scene.

And no, it was weird.

It's like we didn't we weren't at odds with the rest of the school.

It wasn't like the the combative cliche I see in movies about about, you know, high school experiences.

We were just we had our own thing.

We didn't care about those kids.

Okay, what degree did you have pressure from your parents to do well in school?

I self pressured.

They my parents, I think we're smart to let me rage against school when I wanted to have blue hair.

They're like not going to try to stop me.

You know, they let me.

They let me try to shock enrage my my conservative teachers instead of them.

So I was pretty much a straight a student.

And you know, I went to school at Brown after like I went to you know, an ivy League school, and I was always I was fairly pragmatic about this, Like I knew I wanted to be that all I cared about was art, but I also knew that that you don't.

Really it's not very very few people get to live their life making art.

And so when I got out of school, like during high school, I thought of myself more as a visual artist.

During college it switched to music more.

You know, in high school, I was putting out, like I said, records for my friend's bands, but that was much more of a kind of like social hobby than it was my my calling.

And I went to I got to college and the the academic art program was going over stuff that I had already learned about.

It was it was sort of like abstract art and was blowing the minds of my my peers.

And I felt like I didn't know this ship and and there was a sort of pretense of I didn't like that it was all about the the it was about the essay that you write to go along with your piece, not the piece itself, and what and and I fell in whereas music that there, uh, there was an electronic music studio there with incredible equipment, and I didn't know how to use it.

And I could go into this place and the actual experiential uplift I got from like I go in there and find magic, and that was incredible, Like that was just addictive to me to go into.

I would spend hours and hours and hours, and by by my sophomore year, I was the I had gotten the role.

I had gotten the position of the ta who got to schedule the hours in the music studio.

So then any any all the two am to eight am hours that weren't being used, I would block off for myself and I would just go in there every night and learn how to record music, learn how to write music, learn how to make music.

And by the time I came out of college, that's what I cared.

I mean, that was my calling.

And so my years right after college I worked as a radio engineer at NPR one day a week and the other four days I was a photoshop retoucher for a for an ad agency.

All of this in Chicago, where I had moved to rejoin my old friend Tim Basis of Okay Goo, who I had met at summer camp ten years prior.

Okay You talk about buying the pamphlip making the records, When did you start playing an instr of it.

In high school.

I mean I played violin as a kid.

I was terrible at it, and in high school I played guitar a little bit.

I was bad at it then too.

I didn't even when Okko started, I was it was it was, man, I was.

It took me a lot of a lot of practice to be able to sing any of our songs and play them at the same time, you know.

The I fell in love with playing instruments in college, but I of course was too impatient to spend the time really necessary for them.

And it was the years of touring that actually taught me on a plan, you know.

Okay, so when you were in high school, you were coordinating making records for other groups or did you have a group yourself.

I had a group myself, but we were terrible and we were I only put one song on one thing.

Mostly it was other groups.

And did that band ever play outside the basement once?

Maybe twice, you know, in our own school gym, like not not, But you know, the other the other band that night was the band it with the same kids that wound up being first Jonathan fire Eater and then eventually the Walkman.

You know, So why do you end up going to Brown.

I it was the I knew I wanted to.

I knew I valued my good education.

I knew I liked the feeling of my brain being pushed by by my superiors in a good way.

But I also knew that school was for me.

Was not going to be a trade school.

I was not going there to learn to be a computer scientist or to learn to be a doctor.

I was going there to learn to grow up, you know.

And this was the one that the good school, where the other kids that were there seemed like they were comfortable in their own skin and making and and and learning to make decisions as opposed to learning to game the system.

You know.

Okay, so you're at Brown.

Do you form a band at Brown?

And did?

Yeah?

Several?

But yeah I had.

I had a sort of punky band my first two years, and a sort of electronic band my second to you, two different electronic bands my second to you.

And did they play out of the practice room?

Yeah?

We played a lot.

We had jos.

Really, so you had gigs?

Where were these gigs?

There were?

Providence was pretty good at the time for that stuff, because you know it Risdy's right there.

So so we played a lot of club Babyhead, and there's a there's a club on the Brown campus called UH called the Underground to believe it's called there was you know, loop Os.

And in Providence we used to get get gigs opening for people.

I remember opening for like Karen Black and and UH.

I remember opening for Blonde Redhead, you know at Brown like we we did we did pretty well and and that and man, they're like the that talk about getting into the sort of the art project side of it.

I remember learning about screen screen printing while I was there from from Risdy students and and just like that started my love affair with with design for the band.

Like that that you could actually screenprint your own posters, like and make them a thing of beauty was what And it was like so thrilling to me.

It was not, you know, it didn't feel like the necessary marketing.

It felt like the life value add that now I get to I get like that part of the part of going to do this show next week is going to make posters this week, you know.

And that that carried on into our Chicago days.

We did a lot of screen printing into Chicago and urged okay Go's earliest UH fan base in Chicago is definitely because of our absurdly overprinted for color you know, screen prints that were all over Chicago in the late nineties.

Okay, you graduate from Brown, you moved to Chicago.

What's the dream?

The dream was to continue to be surprised and thrilled by make an art.

Like I was rational enough to know how unlikely a job as a rock star is, right, but irrational and hope and delusion driven enough to see all these converging things in the world around me and and think there's a way to make a living out of that.

Right that that technology was making recording a different thing, you know that that like during college, I remember my love of of hip hop.

You know, DC growing up in high school had been all about punk and hip hop, right Go Go is from DC, and the nineties were like, you know, it was the era of Tribe called Quests and Black Sheep.

You know, it was like it was an incredible time for all that stuff.

And I remember being in college and going how come punk rock doesn't have hip hop beats?

And being like how someone's going to make this album?

And then the next thing, you know, there's like I remember Odelay by Beck coming out and being like, there is a person who just made rock and roll with a sampler, Like, actual, it's not it's not just like trying to write songs over a sampler.

It's rock and roll with a sampler.

And I was like so so in love with that record and also so jealous of it, you know, but but that was I remember feeling that convergence in the late nineties, in the early offs that it was like every that you could fluency with the with the world around you.

What technologically was it was a huge boon to creativity, like you could make things differently than than than our parents generation had to like it that you could get a sampler and make rock and roll with it.

That was a whole that was really really inspiring to me.

And it's hard to say exactly how that crosses over individual but like, the reason I know how to use photoshop was because a couple of punks in DC had hired me to work for their software publishing company, where they they got a job putting out the CD ROMs of Time Magazine in the early nineties when when Time Magazine didn't want to didn't digitize anything themselves, they would send all their issues to these two punks in DC would get them all digitized, and I literally my job was put them on a scanner, scan the thing and and digitize from the physical copy of time magine goats, take off the barcode, and and fill in Hillary Clinton's hair, you know, like and and the idea that that visual art like this was that it was all malleable, that you could get into your computer and start playing around with the way this image looks.

That to me, it's hard to explain about how that connects, but that and the sampler at the same time, you could see they were heading the same place, you know.

And so that was the dream to do that.

Okay, you moved to Chicago, your old friend is there.

Do you immediately form a group?

Yeah.

They were gonna they were gonna be my backing band for a bunch of shows of sorry, a bunch of songs I had written in college.

That was the first practice.

But after the first practice, we're like, now we're just a new band.

Because it was all the guys in the band had They had all been in a band called Stanley's Joyful Noise prior to this, and they were they were not quite on hiatus yet.

But they were just going to be this other they were going to be my backing band for this thing, and then we just decided it was an evand.

Okay, you have this incredible marketing with the posters.

What happens Usually it's a slow grind.

Did you play a lot of gigs?

When did the light go on?

What happened?

Yeah, we played a lot of We played.

We played as many gigs as we could, I would say it was I mean we were playing at least once a month in Chicago, and and and as many times as we could in this surround, you know, anywhere within a six or eight hour drive of Chicago, and that I We did that for a couple of years, I guess, and it it we started to get I think we like Chicago at that time was a scene not too different from DC ten years earlier than that in terms of like the small scene of kids that were there.

Everybody was in a band, like all my friends were in bands.

Everybody went out to shows pretty much every the night of the week.

And what I think the way the reason we stood out in some way was because we were just all kind of pop focused like the other bands we were living in with as roommates and playing with were all these sort of aggressively post punk sort of art bands, and that was like it was an awesome scene.

But like it was like all these mostly dudes playing, you know, playing math rock and and trying to push the boundaries of a of a particular scene.

And we wanted, like I said, we wanted cheap trick and Elvis Costello and a certain type of Catharsis.

And so I like to joke at the time that basically like they'd all come and their girlfriends would all like us, you know, and it was Our shows were just really really fun.

It was like a really really joyous, playful event.

And they got to be really popular in Chicago and that sort of growing regionally, and and uh we we found a manager.

We went on tour opening for they might be giants at some point, and and they might be giants themselves, Like you said, they wanted to start managing us, and uh it in in the end we wound up being sort of co managed by the by there man.

It was an awkward deal in the beginning, but you know, Jamie, our first manager, and he who I loved dearly and who I think was did wonders for us and uh, and then we got signed.

Eventually got signed.

We thought we'd be an Indian.

We sent our demos to all the the indies you would have imagined, you know, like we figured we belonged in the sort of you know, sub pop lane.

But we wound up there.

There was a big It was the majors who were interested.

It turned out like we had a demo for a the song get Over It that caught fire and it you know, it's a big bidding war between I think it was Universal and Capital at the time and who are now the same?

Right?

But so you signed with Capital with the Andy Sleader, you know, there's a deep line of demarcation of between the wooing and then the making.

So now you had a deal.

What was the making like.

Well, Andy is famously very involved in the making of the album center Man, and he was I he was.

We like we were an easy sell on over production because it was it was this moment of of when most of the industry was so was chasing garage rock and we just didn't want.

We were we were like we wanted we wanted Roy Thomas Baker and glam you know, and so we were happy to go along with the with with like with with just you know, no do it again, try and make a bigger version, make it, you know.

And I I have a hard time listening to our first record because of that.

But also I think it's I think it has more to do with the fact that, like, who wants to hear their them their own voice twenty years hence, you know, like I hate the little guy who's singing in those albums, but other people don't, you know.

And there's some things I'd do differently, but I don't.

But I'm also like, I can't be mad at whatever brought us here, you know.

I like that how it's gone.

Okay, So the record comes out, and what was the experience.

Well, it was whirlwind.

It was just like we just we toured for two straight years or something.

And I think it was young and naive enough to think that everything was just the next step, you know, that every that that every opportunity was just another door open.

You don't get that, like I didn't have the sense that I didn't really have a sense of whether it was going well or poorly.

You know.

It's like we had a we had a we had a single that I think broke the top twenty, but not the top ten.

So it was like it was the kind of it was exact.

It was big enough to get you a second album, but not big enough to make you a household name, you know, and it I don't know.

I as you can tell from all these answers, it's like there's a part of me that like is willfully delusional, right like, because I I if you only listen to the rationalist part of yourself, you you don't get to chase art.

If you only listen to the arty side of yourself, you'll you'll you're going to do it, you know, alone in your basement.

So you've got to keep these two things in balance.

And especially in my twenties, you know, fueled by a lot of caffeine and alcohol, I was it was easy for me to stay delusional when I needed to, you know.

Okay, did you make any videos for the first album?

We did.

We made two videos for the first album, one with with Francis Lawrence.

Uh, you know, Mega Mega director who I think we were.

We were stuck between Will Smith and Pink in his schedule.

He had one day, you know, and uh, and it was for the song get over it, and it was.

It got some rotation on MTV, but not I think no one yet knew how how how dying MTV was right, like YouTube had not yet eaten it.

But but it was rapidly moving towards reality TV and away from music videos.

Some people saw it.

It it It did its job.

But it was the biggest budget video we would make for the next twenty years.

How big was the budget.

I think it was something like five hundred K or something.

You know, it was whatever it was was thatt you know, It's like it was something we that could only be approved by a Slater like Slater had to pick the I had to pick the the director cool right, like you could say, pick between these three kind of thing.

You know, Okay, you make the second record, tell me from the beginning, not the mechanics, but the inspiration and how you gain control to make the treadmill video.

The treadmill video was it was the follow up to the backyard dance that I described earlier, right that that's for the video that the song was a million ways and on the on the first album.

Prior to this, we had been ending our show with this ridiculous dance routine that for a song from the first album, and again it was a way to be in that that that indie rock club in Chicago where all of the hipsters are shuffling their feet and to be like like fucking smile or get out, you know what I mean.

And because you can't watch a bunch of nerds like us try to do a dance and uh and and not laugh at it in some way.

And and so we knew that it was like we wanted with our our second record.

We didn't want to keep on ending our show with that, but it was so fun, right, So we came up with a new dance routine for a new song on our second album, and that clip got we we we made a video of us.

In fact, i'll give you the full story.

We heard from a friend a cap that Michelle Gondree, best video director of all time, had a dance video he was gonna make with some unheard of from Chicago named Kanye something.

And we were like, wait, he's gonna make a dance video with someone other than us.

We're the dance band.

So we we videotape ourselves doing this and you know, again, we have a delusional side here.

Thinking like, we're going to convince Michelle Gandrie he has to work with us, But that video has made.

The clip in my Backyard was made for the of an audience of one.

It was just to convince Michelle Gandri that he should make a video with us.

I don't know if he ever even saw it, but it wound up so ludicrous and sort of like, you know, there was just something so ridiculous about it and popped the bubble of self seriousness in rock and roll enough that we when we showed it to our friends, somebody put it on a site called I film that was before YouTube is a download site, and a few months later we saw that it had been downloaded three hundred thousand times.

I think our first album had sold three hundred thousand copies, which, you know, great, but we just reached the same number of people accidentally, Ya this nerd website, right, And like at that time, you can assume the people watching that are all working in the IT department, right, Like it's not like normal people don't do a lot of video downloading circa two thousand and two, two thousand and four, whatever it was.

But and so, like I said about the sort of like us going out into to the fans with spiral notebooks.

It was like this was we suddenly had a direct, a direct connection to a fan base almost as big as the one Capital had had helped develop for us.

And there were one click away and it was sort of like, well, if they if they like that, let's make them another one of those things.

We didn't really think of it as a music video.

It was just like we now have a bunch of people who get our sense of humor, who think that because there's something about that that's not quite like you know, we've been very careful never to make joke music, right, And there's bands that sort of like think of themselves as funny in a way that I that never appealed to me, but I did it.

But I did like bands who don't take themselves too seriously, you know, And and it was sort of a way of connecting with those people.

So we my sister is a professional barum dancer.

We said, like, we want to make another dance like that, but we don't want to dance.

We can't just be a dance band, right, so like, what are we going to do?

So I remember brainstorming with my sister, what could we do to make dancing different and that, and we came up with this idea of the treadmills.

But that was it.

Like we didn't tell the label we were going to do it.

We didn't tell our manager we were going to do it, because they would taking ten days off from tour to go make this thing.

Was a terrible idea, you know, like what were you going to do with that?

So we made it and and and it was.

We figured we'd use it as a sort of like love letter to those nerdy fans when we were done with the album cycle, right like when everything else is, when we've done the big rock videos, when we've done all the touring, we'll have one more thing to give those people to kind of keep the connection alive until the next record comes out.

So after eighteen months of touring, several rock videos, you know, and won by Michelle Gondry's brother, Olivia Gundry, and you know, decently successful.

You know, our shows are bigger than they were on the first album, where our audience is a little bit bigger, but like we're not, we're by no means a household name.

You know.

We put that video out, well, no I'm sorry.

The label who had never okay the making of it, but did say okay, all right, well that's kind of cool what you made.

They're the head of their internet department, without our permission, put it up on stupid videos dot Com.

And we were in we were in we were in Moscow, playing at the i think second to annual rock festival in Moscow, when our roadie goes, hey, I saw your videos up on stupid videos dot Com.

And of course we freak out, you know, we'd go ballistic on the label and they're like, what what what I mean?

It's got tons of traffic, and you're like, you don't think there's some there's maybe a little bit of an optics problem releasing the video with as Stupid videos dot Com.

We got them to take it down before the US was awake, and we put it up ourselves without the permission on YouTube.

This this new site which just the guy who ran our you know, our email list at the time was like, you should check out this one.

And we'd had an we'd had a a request from Chad at YouTube dot com.

You know, the founders in that first year were sending out anytime they thought they saw something cool.

They just write to them.

So we had some emails from them saying you should put your stuff up on our platform.

So we did, and within a week it was you know, like we thought, we thought maybe we'd reach those same three hundred thousand people after a few months, but it was a few million in the first few days, which back then was you know, that was breaking the entire internet.

And vh one added it with in a week, and and and we had been asked to perform on the VMAs, and and you know, a few months later we got a Grammy, and and we toured for another We toured for another full year.

I mean like our record, which had debuted at the top of the heat Stickers chart, went back to number one in the fifty third week.

So it was like literally a full year after the record was out, we started a whole other record cycle, and we toured for another year, and and it was awesome.

I was very very spent by the end of that.

Okay, where was the label on all this?

They were very cautious about us because they they they they wanted look that record.

They they they were very anti sort of you know, the youth and sharing, right, Like there was this there was.

There was a worry with that album.

When that album came out, they wanted to put DRM on it.

You remember the whole DRM thing, right, they wanted to put DRM on it.

We looked at it.

We were like, look iPods in the in the in the three years since our first record had come out, iPods had taken over.

And if you're telling our fans they that they can't they can if they buy our CD legally they can't put it on their iPod.

That's the same things as shooting the band in the face, right, like it like, no one is going to listen to something that they can't have on their iPod, So please don't do that to it.

They we had a long argument with them about that.

They in the end decided, okay, no, we're doing DRM.

So we added as a a the secret track.

You know, the final track to our album was exactly as long as there were bites left on the CD.

We made it thirty two minutes and whatever seconds long, which filled up every last remaining data bought on the CD.

So they couldn't fit the DRM on it, you know, which they didn't realize until QC sent it back and sudden they couldn't put a DRM on it, and it was too late to deal with it.

But that obviously set off that was the relationship.

Right, They were like we were the band that that was that wanted our video to be embeddable back when that was an issue, right, and I had written op eds for The New York Times saying like, yeah, our label won't let us embed our video and here's our problems with it.

That was the sort of thing that that put us, you know, not on great footing with the label.

We were all, you know, sort of aligned in terms of like all, all of the attention this is getting is good.

But the same person who had when I when I first showed the label our backyard dance video, the first response was is if this gets out your because it was because they thought it made they thought it made us look gay, if they thought it made us look nerdy, they thought it made us And it was like We're like, yeah, like it makes us look different than everyone else.

Like that's the that's the point, you know, Like that's that's we are different than everybody else.

And and the same person who had said that then had made very sure that when you know, like a USA today wanted to do a piece on the on the on the Treadmill video, and it's grammy, you know.

Eighteen months later they that person had to be sitting in the room to make sure they didn't.

I didn't repeat the story I just did to you, you know, And so they I don't, And honestly, like I think everybody, I don't.

I never had a like an a super combative relationship with the label.

It just became pretty clear that like what success looked like to us and to them were very different.

Like they needed success that was replicable and scalable across all of their investments.

Right, we needed to be able to make art the next day and to have to chase the things that are working and optimize them, right, Like that thing's happening and people love it, and that's an opportunity for us to make more things like that in the future.

And that's like, that's what I care about for my life, you know, And being able to do that wasn't was not a good business model for the label.

I get that, like, but it's a good business model for our band.

So it got to a point where it was obvious that we just needed to go different directions.

Okay, but in the interroim, you made a third record.

What was the story with that, Well, I.

Mean they were so look, the same video that they thought would was going to sink us.

They then, you know, we're once we were getting Grammys for for breaking MTV.

They loved that right, like there it was.

They loved taking credit for it once it was successful.

And so we were off onto the idea of a third record where we would we would really lean into the video thing.

Awesome, We're gonna make a video for every song, and they gave us a budget for that.

And then when we started making the videos and asking for the budget payoffs, they didn't pay the checks.

You know, they were like, yeah, but we didn't say yes to that one, and we didn't say yes to this certain like and so our manager at the time, good friend of yours end mine, basically just went to them.

It was like, if you're not gonna pay, look, if you don't want, if you don't want a band like this, just let us off the fucking deal.

And they did.

It was pretty shocking.

Okay, you described it with the emotions of you know, from the side of creativity and the differences with the label, but at the time, not today.

Leaving a major label was not what people did.

No, it was scary.

It was scary.

But again remember the DC background in the sort of like anti establishment roots of of of the things I love.

Uh, you know, obviously too cocky about it because I was also you know, twenty something or whatever.

I we knew we had a connection to our fans and that that was valuable, you know, Like I think what we now recognize as like the attention economy, it was back then.

What it felt like was we're able to make things that that these that that our fans love, and they know how to get to us, and we know how to get to them, and what we used to need a label for.

We it like that that that pipeline is shrinking, right, There's still lots that we need, but it's it we're less dependent on them than ever and they don't want to do the things that we know will work.

So it was kind of gold.

Okay, so you've been independent for an excess of a decade.

How does that feel great?

I mean, I look, I don't like the business part.

I don't like as you can tell from from all my squirrely artsy answers.

I don't like thinking about budgets.

I don't like thinking about money.

I don't like thinking about you know, return on investment.

But I but I really don't like not being able to make the things we want, you know, and so we make some So we make we we you know, have to.

We have to assume a lot of risk that in terms of investing in things like, you know, a six figure of video which we don't know if we'll find a sponsor for and that's scary as hell.

But no label except my own.

Okay, So at this point, you know, things have been sort of weird because of COVID et cetera.

But how many gigs a year is?

Okay, go playing.

It right now?

I mean where we have it down fairly low number because we all have young kids.

But so like, if we wanted to make a lot more money, we'd play a lot more.

But we but like this album and this year, I think we did thirty five shows, maybe forty.

Okay, you know you are the record company, you have costs.

Streaming is a winner take all proposition.

You could work thirty five days a year and everybody could pay all their bills.

I didn't say we worked thirty five days a year.

I say, we tour thirty five days a year.

Okay, then what are the other revenue streams?

Oh?

I mean first of all, those even those shows take a lot more work than the days are on.

But but the the I mean, our videos take months.

So I'm not to worry about.

No, I'm not saying you're not working.

I'm saying where does the money come from?

Oh?

Uh?

The the I mean the our our shows are profitable, right, like so our shows are merger profitable.

Sometimes our videos are profitable, like this album, We've only gotten to break even on them.

But there are like we made on our third out I'm sorry, third album, third and fourth album, we made videos that were sponsored to the degree where we could get feed like one of one of them was a super Bowl commercial.

Like we you know, that's a that's a hefty, hefty check.

It used to be that a lot of that that we would also make a lot in licensing.

We do okay in licensing, but you know, our our sort of ongoing streaming and licensing revenue is enough to pay for our infrastructure.

Okay, what does it look like going forward?

Because if you look at the business at large, Okay, the barrier to entry is very low.

You have name recognition in the history from the twenty first century.

The lot of people have name recognition from the twentieth century who still can't get over the fact that A labels not supporting them.

So as you look forward, what does it look like?

I am terrified, But I also have always been terrified, like we've are.

Our financial model has basically been the roadrunner off the cliff forever, right, Like, just keep on going, keep on making the thing you want to make, and if there's money in the bank to do it and you can stomach the risk, it usually pays off, you know, or rather the one out of ten times it pays off, it pays off tenfold.

And so that has sustained us this long, and that's all.

I just have to hope it keeps doing that.

I look, what I know of the industry at large is not a good bet.

But it's the only one I can make because I want to, because I this is this is what I love doing.

Okay, If I spoke with the other band members, are they on the same page.

I think so.

I mean, we would all love to have bigger paychecks.

But but certainly no one, No one wants to tour more during this phase of our lives.

I could see us touring more when our kids get a little older.

But it's do you have kids, No, it's it is the period during which they really want to be with you and you really want to be with them is short and different, and and I I would have a really hard time being gone more than I am right now.

That right now, that as you know, that sort of service industry model of music, of music industry where you can get paid as long as you're out there pounding the pavement is the only way to really make it profitable.

We're we are happy to live fairly frugally right now and keep on making, keep on making this weird art that we get to make, and and look at where that leads us.

I mean, here's one thing that we do that no other band can.

We have a performing Arts center show where we live, score our videos, and we do the circuit.

You know, we we'll do some of this again, like you're asking about next year, We'll do some of this next year.

This is like we're playing in you know, like Disney Hall style things, right Like we're sit down show where there's a you're you're invited to bring your kids.

The volumes are a little lower.

There's a lot of Q and A with us, and and and instead of trying, instead of trying to put on the most energetic and most uh moving, sweaty rock show where we're inviting you to watch the film and we're gonna live score it for you, right and those that that tour is pretty evergreen, like we've never had trouble, Like we can do that anywhere, And we can only do that if our videos are as great as they are and every and every album we're gonna add to, you know, and that that show is a real, a real pleasure.

I would I think that there's a real opportunity for us to do similar theater type things with with the videos that we have in the future.

That may or may not happen, but we have a lot of offers from science institutions and from from theaters you know, Broadway and Broadway adjacent stuff Like I don't know if we'll do it or not, but like I'm not sitting here trying to figure out how we're going to make ends meet by the number of shows we're playing next year.

I'm trying to figure out what art projects are going to remain exciting and and worthwhile and riveting and worth putting our lives into.

Because so far, if we're able to make great stuff, there will be a revenue stream that attached to it.

We're not always sure where it's going to come from, but it happens.

Okay, you've gotten older, the band is evolved, but there's been rapid change in the world.

You had this moment with the Treadmill video the VMAs.

One can ask whether anybody can have a moment like that anymore, But are you searching to equal that?

How do you metabolize having that peak yet keep going on.

Well, that's why the Grammy nominations this year are such a big deal to us, because like we've been look, I went away and made a film after COVID, which shut down things for it, like it was ten full years between it.

In fact, a little more than ten years between our last two albums.

That's the kind of you know, we didn't intentionally go on hiatus.

We were just busy, but that's the type of thing that when we were putting out the record, we were like, look, this could easily come off, as you knows, as the has beens trying to make a comeback or whatever, but the fact that we're nominated for multiple Grammys is like, it is I'm very gratified by this nod from our peers that like it still matters, you know, and our shows have been selling out.

We have you know, we have our fan base is as big as it ever was, and so I'm I feel very gratified that it's still here.

It's something we can be doing, and it's you know, it's this is sort of related to the like how do you deal with the videos being more famous than the music question.

It's like that's only the case to the broad shallow audience.

The narrow, deep audience go like those who go down the rabbit hole with us.

Man, it's a deep rabbit hole, and I that's the one I get to live in, right because they're my songs and my videos and they're my art projects, and so where I live that the shallow thing is just like that's just a catchment for more people who want to come in, you know, and I love it.

Okay.

Simultaneous with this career, you're married a number of times.

When were you first married.

My late twenties to my early thirties.

And how did you meet that woman?

And where were you in your career at that point?

That was my just after she and I met in college, but we weren't romantically.

After college, I followed her.

That's how I moved to La She went to grad school at UCLA, and I followed her out there.

I was already spending more time in la than Chicago because we were recording our record there, and and and we we got married during the middle of that law that that that thirty two month tour for our second album.

I think the law guest we ever took off of that tour was so that I could get married.

We took ten days off and and uh it we were just too young and too in our own worlds for it to last.

I mean, she's a wonderful woman, and we we maybe in a different life, but it was by the end of it, it was we were just we had different lines like being in a relationship like like that.

Trying to have that close relationship when you're on tour two hundred and fifty days a year is crazy, you know.

But how long until you get married again?

It was then, I guess three or four years.

So I got married again in a I fell head over heels for someone too quickly, and and we we had we had like a fantasy relationship where I think we were both in love with an idealized version of the other.

Slightly slightly, I mean, at least the touring was less of the of the downfall of that relationship.

But we weren't grown ups yet.

So how long did that last?

The full relationship was less than four years, including a marriage of two.

So how long after that do you meet your present wife?

I met my present wife at the very end of re met my present wife at the very end of that.

But we were just friends for a full year and then we were romantic for two before he got married.

And then we've been married.

Ten Had she been married before?

She had been married once before.

Yeah, And did she have any reluctance to marry you because you were a two time loser?

Yeah?

I think she probably did.

I think she probably did.

Luckily she gave me the benefit of that.

Okay.

Her father is al Gore's like being the sudden law of al Gore.

It is very humbling.

It's it's really good at reminding you of what's important in life, because if you think what you're doing matters.

Look at what he does, you know what I mean, it's it is ah it.

He's a he's a spectacularly smart and soulful man who I really looked up to great deal.

But he's also he's also a grand granddad, you know what I mean, Like he's my My kids didn't know, didn't know he had a famous history until just this last year.

Like because he's just to him, he's to them, he's his granddad, you know.

And my wife grew up you know, my my wife, I knew her in high school.

We we we knew each other in high school.

She and at the time she was the daughter of the vice president, and we didn't know each other well.

But you know, that was a brutal, awful thing to go through as a teenage girl.

Uh.

And so like it's not a The last thing I'd ever want from my kids is for them to feel to really have any relationship to my public life.

Like I want them their lives to be their own, you know, or their grandfather.

And so how much contact does your family have with al Go or how often you see.

Him several times a year?

I mean we we overall, we he's a very he's a he's a very busy man, but but he's also a very active grand so we see him a lot.

And how about his significant other?

Tiper Gore, of course, was involved in the whole Lyrics controversy.

Is that something you've ever discussed with her?

Only only superficially.

She is an incredibly playful and incredibly wonderful and incredibly artistic woman.

You know, she like has played drums with that with the Grateful Dead, like she and you know she and Frank Zapp were like really good friends after all of that, Like the I think that was a that whole episode was I have realized with distance is was greatly greatly I'm amplified by the Right, Like the whole point is to sew division and and in fact, all she was was a young mother who was like, didn't didn't want her wanted to know if if an album she was buying for a kid was filled with the word fuck, like I would want that for my kids, you know.

And it turned into this whole like it got the Right used it as a wedge between lefties to be like, look they're trying to center you, you know it, and it worked like the it's easy to convince us that we're being that, that the powers that be are trying to to shit on us, you know.

And how did you end up living in Santa Barbara.

Because of her?

We went she during the fires last year, we escaped, We escaped La.

My kids school, sorry, our house was fine.

My kids school was too close for comfort to the eat and fire in East La.

I mean in Pasadena, sorry, Alaina and uh and we came.

We came up to stay with with Tipper, and we loved the community up here so much that we stayed.

Okay, you have a very full life, Okay, go and all its permutations.

You're married, you have a couple of kids.

Is there any time left over for other things?

Whether it be streaming television, movies, books, whatever.

I read a lot.

I read a lot of books just because that's how that's my like nighttime routine.

But I know, I mean I I have even before kids, I had a problem where anything I find interesting gets sucked into the art.

Right Like if I if I get fascinated with something, let's make a video out of it.

If I get fascinated with, you know, some instrument, let's make a record out of it like it.

It's hard for me not to take everything I love and make a job out of it, which is a blessing and the curse obviously it means I don't have a lot of of of hobbies.

Well, I'm trying to play tennis.

I'm trying to play tennis.

But then once you add kids to that, there's really there's zero time left for ant of it.

Just so I understand why is it a curse?

Well, because you'd like to be able to shut off sometimes, you know, like every when you professionalize your passion, there's it also means, you know, like you sap it of some of its purity.

You know that that I want to learn to be a better piano player.

So I'm so I'm taking piano lessons right now, and I love practicing and I feel it.

I feel it coming in when I start playing something and go, oh, what's that I got to I should make a song out of that?

Right, And that's a beautiful thing.

That's that's my that's what I want to feel.

But it's also almost impossible for me not to be kind of like looking for the opportunity, you know, just to be and there, you know, and there's a, there's a there's a I I just don't really understand the idea of hobbies the way other people do, because everything I've ever had as a as a demi hobby has turned into a.

Job of something you know and what books do you read?

Well?

I kind of vacillate between different things right now.

I just I've just gone through a big Ted Chang phase.

You know, the sci fi writer.

He's absolutely fantastic.

And I let's say, I just read James the you know, the Personal Ever book, and I'm I'm just finished now one called Same Bed, Different Dreams, which which is sort of a broadened my understanding of the Korean War and Korean history quite a lot.

Every once in a while, I go through a uh a non fiction phase like have you have you been?

Have you read?

If anyone builds it, everyone dies.

No.

Well, it's it's about AI, obviously, and I find it very I find it shockingly convincing.

It's very well written.

I there are many there there are many arguments to the contrary, but it's it's it's but I recommend it as a good read.

And uh, I don't know.

I I I've been doing a lot of audiobooks recently too, because if there's a lot of driving back and forth between La and Santa Barbara and I, when I'm not in love with a new band or a new a new uh new piece of music, an audiobook is a good way to pass that time.

And what's your take on AI?

It's very complicated.

I mostly like, I think it's inevitable.

So it's it's sort of like it's it's like what's your take on streaming circa ten years ago?

You know, it's sort of like, what are you gonna stop it?

Like, it's not like the major labels thinking they can sue it out of existence is crazy.

Like it's coming.

It's coming, and it can do all the things you're worried it can do.

And so how quickly will we adapt?

And what will it mean for creativity?

You know, it's already the case.

I think that like people are just even bands like in our echelon, are re recording things that they demoed using AI.

They just demo in an AI and then and then record like and I to me, it just it SAPs all of the joy out of it for me.

Uh, Like the idea that you that you could create something more efficiently and also without any of the joy of creation, sort of like, well, then what's the point, you know now, I but I do understand, like as a as a as a person, you know, as the director of a of a you know, relatively high budget feature film.

If if if my choice were to make this really difficult shot out in the middle of the wilderness, in this incredibly beautiful place that's going to be really expensive and really hard to do, or do it all in ai I I would want to do the former, and my film would require that I do the latter.

You just can't waste you can't waste all the money to do the thing and not pay every you know, like you you have to make everything in the most efficient way possible and under circumstances like that.

And it's hard to know where that how to flip that switch when you get back down to sitting in a room with the three your three lifelong friends trying to make music, you know, and it's hard to know what to do when you flip yourself onto the other side and just say, now I'm not caring about what I make.

I'm caring about what I consume.

Like you know, if you don't know it was made by AI.

Does it matter to you, like if it still moves your soul?

Who cares?

Right?

Like that scares the living shit out of it.

But I also believe it's it's possible, you know, like there's no I'm not enough of I am enough for romantic to want to spend my life doing this and enough for rationalists to be like, yeah, I'm sure that the AI can mimic the types of things we're doing well enough to be good at it.

Like there's no I know, no guitarists who learn guitar by reading right, you learn like everybody heard a guitar and mimicked it.

That's all AI is doing, you know.

Yes, but AI cannot come up with the idea for the treadmill video yet.

Well, according to you know the experts I read in the paper, not that diamond expert, they say any level of being a sentient being is at least thirty years off.

You should you should read the other books too, Okay, Okay, I hope, I hope you're right.

I hope you're right.

My concern like I worry for the creative industries, but I worry about them actually less than every everything else because like, why would you hire a paralegal right now, right like why would you like when even like wouldn't you, to be honest, trust an AI cancer diagnosis if if it's suitably well trained and as really good data inputs, Like all it's doing is really high level pattern recognition, and almost every job that humans do is really high level pattern recognition.

Yes, so is creativity, right.

Yeah, okay, but just staying since we're talking about the hallucination rate is extremely high in terms of lawyers.

They're getting busted on a regular basis where they have AI right there briefs, then the judge reads it.

No such case exists.

Oh I'm not look, I'm not a booster.

I'm scared of shit.

No, no, no, I'm looking at it.

I think it's inevitable.

Okay, but I think the paranoia is not warranted.

If it is something simply zero's in one's digits programming, it is proven that it works extremely well as soon as you get to conceptual things and thinking.

You know, the previous version of chatch EPT was chatch you know three that hallucinated more than two.

I might have the numbers wrong.

And the latest version that got some of the hallucination down.

You have uh elon musks, which he tweaks one way or another.

You know the way this stuff works.

I don't want to be a louttite and say it can't be right, but I believe it's a tool.

As I say, at this point in time and the way it works, there is no way it can take a great leap forward conceptually and artistically.

That is still with the artists.

You're talk about learning how to play the guitar.

Yes, this is something from my generation.

A lot of people spend time in bedrooms learning how to play, and you have people today who can barely play, who promote themselves saying listen to me all over the internet.

Okay, but I am savvy enough to know that the new tools can be used in a new way, not really as replacement of what we have, but as a stepping stone to the next place.

Yes, I I think I agree with everything you've just said.

I don't have any way of predicting how fast it moves or what it can do eventually.

I hope you're right.

I'm because I'm old enough to be scared of change, right, Because I like I I like making the things I make and I like.

I like the constraints i'm up against.

I like the tools I've gotten good at and I don't and I'm not I'm not looking for you know, like, even if the street the attention industry isn't it's a lottery, you know, like it feels it feels like, well.

Well, I wouldn't say it's a lottery.

I'd say it's a tower of Babbel, but not a lottery.

Okay, I guess I mean in terms of in terms of how music works with it, it's sort of like it hits our our our memes, you know it.

Hits are are like a thing that spins up out of a out of the mailstrom of attention on on social media in a way that it's much hard like it doesn't Not that I haven't understood how culture works entirely, but it's very hard to understand how how art interfaces with that anymore.

For me, that's already hard enough without it without putting in.

Oh, okay, what do we know?

Prior to maybe twenty twelve or so, you could be pretty sure that if something was great, it would surface.

I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

Okay, I agree with that I'm not even sure I agree with that prior to twenty twelve, but.

There's some period along the time.

But let's I don't want to argue, you know whatever.

However, there are very few great things out there, and if you find something great, you want to tell everybody about it.

Okay.

It can be as simple as a one off Gangnam Style, or it can be a whole ovuh whatever you however you pronounce oeuvre okay, And they're different things.

And I think because of the focus on money as opposed to art, people are constantly bitching I'm not making enough money.

I mean, I can go on about this.

You know, if you were trying to get a record deal in the sixties and you didn't sing, well, everybody say, well, what's up with this?

Or or like you'd have to be Bob, don't you have to be like the best writer of all time?

Whereas today we have bands they're not great writers and they're not great singers, and they're wondering why they're not getting noticed by the said, did you watch the TV show Adolescens?

No, but I've heard great things about it.

Well, it's a type of thing.

If you see it, you want to talk to other people about it.

Now.

It's interesting to me because it being on Netflix, where they drop it all at once, is supposed to go over time.

It didn't get the mind share of White Lotus, even though when White Lotus finished more people had seen Adolescens.

So I mean, listen, there's so many issues there, publicity, mind share, how you measure it.

All I know is if you say the word adolescence, someone's going to have a reaction, whether they saw it, liked it, didn't like it, like the way it was made, or you know, are not interested.

Whereas I can name twenty things off the top of my head that even you were going to say, I had no idea what you're talking about, and I can't say, you know, well, if you check it out, it's gonna be phenomenal.

I mean, I can talk about adolescents and say that's phenomenal.

You may or may not like it, but we're all looking for those things and those things that you're gonna get me going here, those things have been buried under a tsunami of hype and reaction.

Okay, I have a different feeling about social media.

Let me just make it the Internet, which then blends into social media.

Man, if I could connect with all these like minded people in high school, what would have been better?

Sure there would be etcetera.

But there's always bullying and parents can't protect bullying whatever, et cetera, et cetera.

But I can talk to you virtually, I can reach people all around the world.

Does it come at a cost?

The example I always use, you're a little young.

Prior to air conditioning in every car, cars came with vent windows.

Once every car had air conditioning, they got rid of the vent windows for cost control.

Then windows were great, but air conditioning is a lot better.

So with every step forward there is somewhat of a loss.

The other thing is you say, listen, I you know, just living through this whole napster thing.

Change is tough, and I'm someone who doesn't like change in many ways, but it's happening.

And it's same thing with AI.

I mean, the best thing I've heard about AI is we can decide whatever we want to do with restrictions in America.

That doesn't apply to China.

They're gonna do whatever they want on anyway.

Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, I'm not before I get into AI restrictions like when, but but suicide ras and teens go up as soon as they get social media.

You know, this is just like I don't want to sound like a right winger here, but the data can be interpreted multiple ways.

They had the guy I said, I forget his name, he's the anti social media guy.

A lot of this right, A lot of this stuff is the way the data is parsed.

You know, they've been studies saying no, they're really social media doesn't have a negative effect.

Really, Okay, yes, absolutely, but I wish I had it at my fingertips.

Okay, but I'm not pulling it out of my ass.

Okay, but now I get that.

But do you do?

Do you personally when you're on social media?

You don't feel that poll of just like that dopamine another thing to look at, another thing to look You don't you don't.

Wait a second, Wait a second.

You went on a about emotion connection.

If you get a sponsor you want to have in the production, you make a connection where the audience can connect with the maker and see all the stuff is.

Suppose something that's fast and flat, they saw it.

Whatever, let's just talk TikTok because it's a dominant platform.

Okay, are there influencers on TikTok who are hawking stuff, who are sold out to the max.

Absolutely, Okay, there is raw humanity there when I see people across the country testifying about their stories and here that I love that.

In addition, there's a lot of informational stuff.

Okay, but the raw humanity on TikTok is not evidenced in the superhero movies and the Spotify top fifty.

Okay, so that for me, you know, this is like the New York Times.

Okay, they are constantly listen, it's the best we have.

I'm a subscriber or whatever.

But they're constantly anti technology.

All they're saying an infinitum is put the phone down.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The phone is the best thing that ever happened.

I can connect with anybody anytime I have all this information.

Do I like it when I go to dinner and somebody's on the phone.

No, Okay, I'm not saying it's perfect.

But these are people, these are baby boomers and gen xers representing the largest percentage of the population.

We're very self satisfied saying they know better.

And the other thing is I grew up in the era of television.

It was called the idiot Box and a lot of it was junkie.

Okay, but didn't stop the kids from watching.

Yeah.

I my experience of kids with social media is not It is not that that it makes them feel connected instead of make them feel disconnected, because they're not.

They're not.

They're not.

It's not one to one and it's not in person and it's not human.

It's one to many and it is it's judge yourself against this because the algorithm is sending it to you.

I agree when when social media.

A lot of what you're saying is true and Instagram is more fomo look at me, et cetera.

But I went to public high school, not gigantic, but not small, sixteen hundred people.

There was a stratification.

There were the jocks, there were the popular people.

On the other hand, there were real nerds, people who had no friends, not what they call nerds today.

Okay, yeah, finding your like minded people was difficult to be able to go online and find all these like minded people.

Is the dages, Well, but I just playing Devil's advocate here.

Finding the like minded people was difficult, and then they meant some like in the same way that finding the song that you loved was difficult back in the day, but but boy, your relationship tool there was a lot more when you went to Tower Records and you bought it.

And I I'm not I'm I just I think the community.

I think physical communities are very different than digital ones.

And I think echo chambers are a dangerous thing sometimes, so like it, especially if the echo chamber is set in motion at the same time that your brain is still developing.

Like, I think it's pretty hard to argue that that, you know, adolescent female brain should be fed lots and lots of pictures of of you know, the swimsuit issue.

Well, needless to say, you can just google that stuff.

Okay, sure, but that's but that's different than that than not having an algorithm that specifically picks it for you.

That is, like, these algorithms are designed for our attention, and they were.

What you're talking about is a very serious issue, and it is problematic.

This may sound too adjacent, but when I grew up, my parents were not about restrictions.

When I grew up, that's when the movie reading started.

Okay, it's like my parents were not protective, and that's the background that I come from, and social media is it's beyond that.

But the protection of children to this level, it's like a friend of mine, his nephew okay, even went to private school and was complaining to the mother about bullying, and the mother went to the principal.

I guarantee you that had no effect, if anything, that the kid ended up of course, because this is the nature of life.

You cannot protect people from the nature of life.

Okay, And let's let's let's use the example John.

I don't want to get too many crazy things.

Some people are just crazy.

Some people are just prone.

Some of the best raised kids become drug addicts.

Okay.

And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathroom and the ongoing paranoia with you know, it's amongst the classes in power, whether it be AI, the smartphone, social media, it's all negative when we see, you know, in foreign countries that gen z is bringing down the government using these platforms.

I don't want to oversimplify it and make it twenty ten in the Arab spring.

But I guess the narrative is the one you were uttering.

The question becomes does the narrative reflect what is really happening?

I mean all these anti technology, all this other stuff.

If we were to the classic case here is they wanted to get rid of poornography.

This is a true story on the cable systems in Utah, and the law was community standards.

Well, they did the research.

More people in Utah were watching porn on television than in other states, so they couldn't ban it.

So the question becomes other than the people screaming loudest, what are people really doing?

You would know better than I for sure, and I definitely don't like I am not a big crusader on technology, and frankly, like you know, it would be an incredibly strange and hypocritical position for me, like the the YouTube guy to to to to get angry at new platforms just for existing.

I what my like to bring it to bring it back off of the precipice of sort of like where is culture going?

And what is what is the whole world doing?

Just back to like my own life.

I I like investing lots and lots of time in one piece of art that I think is transcended.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty much the opposite of what works on social media these days.

One thing I don't believe in is the short attention span.

I believe people have incredible shit directors with they used detectors even what they used to watch, it wouldn't people are binging, streaming television, they're watching All the Friends twenty four.

How short of it is henshon spin can you have?

If people find something is great there, they have unlimited amount of time to dedicate it to it.

That's what your fans are doing.

You're saying, they are tapped into your mind.

They go deep.

This is not someone who heard something in the Spotify top fifty has to go to so far and you know, go to the show and buy merch and then think about something else.

They're living for this.

In addition, you're not in the Spotify top fifty, and that that means we have the luxury of all these other things that can surface.

Now.

We used to have gatekeepers and we used to be able.

It used to be more comprehensive.

It's so incomprehensible how you find stuff, et cetera, et cetera.

But people get to play and there will be a few steps.

It will become more comprehensible.

This is the flip side.

As much as the older people who are anti technology.

You have all the people who have who can complain.

Now I'm not I'm not getting paid.

That becomes the narrative.

Daniel Leck is the devil.

It's like it's too detached.

As I say, if you create something that resonates with the public, you know there are plenty of things when they say many people consider it to be astral Weeks to be one of the best albums of all time.

I own it.

I've seen Van Morrison performing live.

I don't agree.

Okay, public didn't resonate with it.

Some things of public resonates, some don't.

And the em and sent stuff is such oh yeah, yeah, that was something I listened to.

It's like it's the beanie babies.

I think I agree with that.

Okay, this is a much longer discussion.

I'm gonna leave it here.

A great deal.

I'm enjoying it, A great deal.

I am.

I'm I'm I'm glad to hear like.

It makes me excited to hear someone so pro I'm not because I don't feel like i'm particularly anti like I like, I feel I'm happy in my little community, Like I'm really happy that we've developed this relationship to our fans.

It does not seem to be dependent on the ebbs and flows right like the and the and the and the the the platforms service serve it pretty well, I guess.

I mean, I don't mean to keep dragging you through this, but like when we've put up a video as a music video and we put up the same video with factoids that you can read at the same time, the ones with the one with the factoids is what goes viral, I think, because that's what works on social media.

Now, I'm not saying I'm just making the point that the platforms do that a different type of of thing resonates there.

Right, I'm taking taking all value judgments out of it because it's not about like is it good or bad?

But what I mean is that like that, if you want to develop a career on social media, what you're making is a lot of material that's very that's very repeatable, very quickly.

It's all about I think you have multiple things there in order to survive with social media.

It's a full time job and that's fucked up.

Okay, but there's a lot of stuff that's lengthy whatever reason.

Okay.

The algorithm on TikTok found that I'm interested in car repair.

Have I ever repaired one thing on my car?

No?

Okay, there are certain people I can tell you.

There's Royalty Auto in Georgia, there's the Car Wizard.

They have multiple things.

It ends up being like fifteen or twenty minutes.

I will watch or even Jay Leno's garage whatever.

It's not hid and run.

Are there people trying for hit and run?

Yes, but you know as an artist, that's a different business, and you don't want to be in that business.

You want to be in the blue sky business.

Absolutely, But I also know that they at least Instagram stopped.

You cannot put something over three minutes and have it shared algorithmic TikTok you can.

But you know what they do to our videos.

They put do not try this at home, which also keeps it off like their algorithm puts do not try the zero gravity video at home.

What are you going to try?

Who's going to try a zero gravity video at home?

Well, I mean you made a video with meta, so there are limits to what you can say.

And this is the thing right now.

Is Apple winning by losing the AI war?

Are they losing?

If you look at the history of Apple and it was all Steve Jobs.

They were late to every everything.

Yeah, and then they won.

Okay, So Mark Zucker has not invented anything in his life.

Did invent Facebook, didn't invent Instagram, et cetera, et cetera, which is why they could come along with TikTok.

Okay.

So the only good thing about Instagram reels, which is not great but not terrible, is that you can play music at the same time.

You can't do that with TikTok.

But as I say, the other thing is we talk about this, the world is so broad and so amorphous.

I mean, you're obviously in listen.

I could talk about this for hours.

I'm gonna stop because it's about you, not me.

So when you when you do a podcast, you can you can have me and I'll I'll go on and on.

It'll be a terrible podcast if I'm if I'm hosting, well, thank you.

I really enjoyed it, appreciate it.

No, I really you know, you're obviously a thinker in you're an artist in the intersection of what people don't understand.

As I continue to go on, it's about conception.

Execution is secondary to conception.

So you can get twenty people together to write a song and make it perfect.

It could be trump by something that someone came up with, an instant that touches people, and we live in a mercenary society where that people don't even recognize that.

But that's the business you're in.

How can I push it far enough that I get to a space You've said it very early.

It's about the emotion and lenk iguan emotion.

You can listen to people talk about hit music all day long.

They're not going to even use the word emotion.

It's true, it's true.

I'm not going to say anything about AI before about whether or not it can ever get real emotions out of us.

I think it's going to get real emotions out of us, and then we're going to be really confused.

I mean, there are there are does, right, aren't there already?

AI hits?

Wait?

Wait, hold on a second.

First of all, they're not hits.

If you look at the statistics, you know this is typical.

I usually get more magazines than anybody I've ever known.

I subscribe to the Apple News.

There's so much clickbait there.

Okay, it's like the record went to number one.

Yeah, in Bulgarian Chance and Zanzibar.

There's a chart for everything.

You look at, how many people you know?

There's a country one which also wasn't successful.

But the woman wrote, has you know wrote the lyrics?

Et cetera.

Okay, so far they have songs.

Okay, this is really going back.

I was a big Beach Boys fan.

However, big a Beach Boys fan you were, you could not predict California girls forget good vibrations.

Okay, when you're a California girls, she said, this does not sound like what came before, with a lengthy intro.

The way AI works is there's a query, it is sent out in a million different places, Everything comes back with data, and it assembles an answer.

This is the whole thing about training in the model that shit that already exists.

No.

I get that it's definitionally at current it's definitionally copying.

Yes, my What scares me about it long term is that what it's good at is pattern recognition, right, Okay, and so what it's currently doing is figuring out what patterns fit fit your query?

Right.

But if you are to extrapolate, like I don't think we're that many steps away.

I hope you're right.

I really really hope you're right, because that that's what that's the world I want to live in.

But it seems to me that you can actually look at the at the twentieth century and and find a pattern in what broke the music industry, right what like you can go of course punk was doesn't come because as soon as as soon as you get this far into disco, you're gonna have something counter that, right, or you know, as soon as you've got this far into a racism, you're going to you're you're going to add actual pleasure to soul and hip hop too, right, Like you you can you can look at the the cultural dynamics and see the patterns playing out, and I would and if we can make if we can see that pattern, it can see that pattern.

Right.

Let me ask you this.

Though we used to have a new sound every three to five years, since the turn of the century, we haven't had a new sound.

Yeah, so the pattern doesn't exist.

It's like uh, skew lines or if you really look at how you know, I'm not good on science.

You know, the protons of the new time, they don't get around in circles.

They bounce all around.

Okay, I'm not saying that I have the answer.

We have no homogeneity period, So there's no way to have a sound because they have everything.

It's so what we have now is akin to religion.

The religion is answers for the unknown.

It's a little bit more than that, but that's the genesis.

So we have a lot of people acting like they know in order to feel good about themselves.

I don't want to make it about social media, but I'll use exactly.

I hear negative stuff about TikTok all day long.

My first question is have you been on the service?

No, they've all not been on the service.

You may hate it if you're on the service, but you you don't have any self, you don't have any knowledge, no experience.

Well on that one, I mean, I'm much more Instagram than I am TikTok, but I find it incredibly it but it's not a good feeling.

Wait, wait, it is addictive.

I'm not saying it's not.

Is that a good thing?

No, but that's not the only thing that's there.

I will then, then we have arrived at our point in perfect agreement.

Because I do think like as a connector fantastic I have no problem with that with with with technology connecting us.

I it's it's that I feel like it's disconnecting and I feel like it's it is it puts us into the into sort of you know, the classic thing you've heard over and over again, that you are, that you are the product.

You know that your attention is what's being sold.

And and I and I feel that because I can feel I got like I can feel the urge to pull my phone out because I need another hit of of I haven't gotten any emails that I want to read today.

I got thirty that I don't want to deal with, but I haven't gotten any more that I want to read.

But I but there's another platform where there's probably more, and and I can feel, I feel that pull to it, and it is addictive and and not devoid of inspiration.

And I've also found tons and tons of inspiration and and and made real connections there.

So it's not like it's definitely it's definitely not one or the other, but it is.

But the dangers are real and and I and I and I what I want to do is believe like if we could cherry pick all the good stuff from what's there and and your version of what could be like that's that's wonderful.

If if AI only it only acts as a more efficient tool that I than then that it's going to be a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I I you know, like I've worked you know again, put put yourself in the position of a film director who who's on a tight budget and needs background music?

How are you not going to use AI for them?

Right?

And you know we live we live through this with the drum machine?

What did it reyield yield programmers?

Yeah, you can use drum machine.

But these guys who make a fortune programming the drum machine, well, it's not gonna it's not gonna be the If it's not gonna be the director, they're gonna hire somebody who puts in the right prompts to get the right.

Oh well they're gonna hi there.

But that's a much smaller industry that like there are those are the only the orchestral composition jobs left in the world, right is film film score?

And and and I just came through that, right, And it's and they make a lot more money than I do.

I'll tell you that it's like it's a it's a it for for for to hire a set of union violinists, and you know, to hire a union orchestra to play for six hours.

Is you know that's that's several rock and roll albums worth of money right there, and that and that job will go.

In without going down the rabbit hole of that.

I'll just say one thing leading out all of what we just said.

Pretty much, you have a device in your hand where everything is playing to you.

How many times have I been in environments where I say I can't relate to these people.

I can't talk to these people.

But here on my device is stuff specially curated just for my interests?

Is I say you have to you have to see it.

Down And I do love that, but that also just stopped you from connecting with those people.

Now you don't have to understand.

Yes, but there's a fiction that everyone.

Let's use it.

Musicians as example.

You know, I've met a lot of classic musicians.

A lot of them can't talk to anybody.

Oh yeah, we're the worst.

They can play their instrument and that's how they connect with people, but they can't have a conversation.

They can't do it.

Okay, So all these people say, well, you got to meet face to face.

There are a lot of people can't do that.

Fair enough.

Let's leave it at that, because it'll go out forever.

David, I really enjoyed this thing.

Okay, it's been great talk you do, great hearing about you.

You're being in your insights and creativity.

In any event, Thank you.

Till next time.

This is Bob Left sets