Want to write a song?

Posted May 15, 2008 11:00 pm

By Lisa Balde Beep Staff

Long before OK Go became synonymous with treadmills, public radio's Ira Glass described the Chicago-native quartet as a "brainy" group who manages to find creative ways to write pop songs without dumbing them down. Still championing that opinion while signing up for human rights concerts and fighting for Internet neutrality via the New York Times, OK Go visits Northwestern University today to answer questions about music's common denominator -- songwriting.

Set up workshop-style with a few song performances to boot, the band's "So You Want to Write a Song" songwriting lecture prefaces a free public concert at 8 p.m. in Grant Park. Bassist Tim Nordwind gave us a preliminary glimpse at the workshop's topics (without giving away too much, of course), as well as some of OK Go's songwriting techniques that landed tunes like: "Get Over It," "Invincible" and the song that launched treadmill choreography into infamy, "Here It Goes Again."

Q. So let's say your audience wants to write a song. What tips are you going to share with them?

A. Well, you know, I don't want to give away everything, unless no one will come. (laughs) Well, you've got to admit it's a loaded question. There are a million different ways to write a song, obviously, and if nothing else, I kind of encourage people to try different things. A lot of times I kind of get into a songwriting rut where I try to write a million songs on acoustic guitar and then I switch to the piano or bass or just start from a beat instead. I think it's kind of important to write with different instruments and start with a melody rather than come up with a (whole) chord structure or something like that. There are so many different ways to do it.

Q. Plus, when you're in a band, the dynamics are different, right?

A. The initial sort of, like, "you're by yourself and you're writing and you're trying to come up with that spark of an idea that you can bring to everyone" -- obviously once you bring something and you share it with the band, everyone has a say in it all of a sudden. (laughs) It's really interesting that (what) you don't think about in songwriting so much is practicing your writing in a band situation where it's like once you've sort of given it over to people, it's not just about you anymore. It's about other people's interpretation of what they think it is. It's pretty interesting to see how many songs come into our rehearsal studio, and it's interesting to see how many of those stay in tact as they originally came out and how many of them changed drastically. Some kind of make it all the way through without really being touched and others are like, it's just not the same song anymore.

Q. What's that process like, that process of editing a song list?

A. For our last record, we probably had about 60 very solid ideas. I wouldn't say finished from-head-to-toe songs, but we had 50 or 60 ideas that we could have (used) any one of them. I can remember sort of having a couple of different levels of, like, it was like the primaries. We whittled it down to about 30 that we really wanted to inspect more and try to flesh out a little bit more fully. And of those 30 -- and this is all before we went into the studio with our producer -- I think we brought in something like 20 ideas that we would've been happy to work on. And then we sort of added a new person in the mix -- which is the producer, and his opinion matters to us -- and he helped us whittle it down to about 15, of which we put 12 on the record.

Q. Can you give us a little bit of a glimpse into OK Go's songwriting process?

A. Usually how we do it is we all sort of work individually and on any given week, we'll have one to three ideas that we sort of like and would be happy to chase down with everybody if everyone likes it. We get together a few times a week usually and just sort of play each other what we've got. Sometimes it's just a drum beat, sometimes it's a verse (for) a chorus, sometimes it's a complete song, sometimes it's just a guitar riff. We usually just kind of go, "Well, I like this. I don't like that. I think we can make a song out of (this). Your three-chord sounds like a good chorus to me. Why don't we go at it like this is a chorus and try to make up a verse." Then it becomes kind of collaborative like that. Sometimes we'll then kind of work on it together and get real drums out of things because oftentimes we'll just bring in a demo with programmed beats. We write by recording; we pretty much write using Pro Tools. We don't jam so much. Maybe we should, but we don't. It's never really been part of our process to just get four guys in a studio and hash things out.

Q. Do you think that in the Internet age, songwriting has begun to get lost?

A. I don't think that. I think it's certainly easier for anyone with a drum machine and a voice to record something and put it up there. But there are still a lot of great bands out there. If you look for it -- and you don't even have to look that hard … (you'll) find stuff all the time. If anything, it's almost easier to find good stuff online because you can search and search forever.