You’ve seen Tim Nordwind. He’s the guy in the safety goggles who kicks off the Rube Goldberg machine “This Too Shall Pass” video by pushing a red toy truck into a row of dominoes. He rocks half a beard in last year’s elaborate optical illusion video for “The Writing’s On the Wall.” He wears a pink shirt and white shoes in the “Here It Goes Again” treadmill dance video. Of all the delightfully deadpan members of YouTube-friendly Chicago rock band OK Go, Nordwind, 38, is the deadpannest. “I inherently want to treat it in this way — that I am this small thing in this really gigantic production,” he says, by phone from Seattle, “and playing it deadpan feels the most playful, in a way.”
Although all four members of OK Go play essentially the same character in most of the band’s viral videos (“This Too Shall Pass” is up to 47 million views), Nordwind draws immediate attention with his nebbishy cool quality. He seems comfortable in these productions, unlike the rest of the band, which appears humorously out of place. Maybe that’s because of his background as the star of “The Invisible Dragon” and “Peter Pan” at age 9 in Kalamazoo, Mich., as well as acting in a few musicals in high school. Later, he earned a bachelor’s in playwriting from Chicago’s DePaul University.
“Our process of making these videos reminds me of what it’s like to put up a live production — we budget so much time to just play with the ideas,” he says. “Usually there’s two or three weeks of us in a warehouse somewhere, playing and working things out, and that’s very similar to how you rehearse a live show in theater.”
OK Go began when Nordwind, a bassist, joined guitarist Andy Duncan and drummer Dan Konopka in a Chicago rock band named Stanley’s Joyful Noise. (The band played gigs at the old Fireside Bowl and, as Nordwind recalled to a reporter recently, “We screamed a lot.”) In 1998, singer Damian Kulash moved to the city and joined the band. After building a local following with its boisterous concerts, OK Go signed to a powerful record label, EMI. But despite small radio hits such as “Get Over It” and amiable power-pop albums beginning with 2005’s “Oh No,” the band stalled out.
It wasn’t until Duncan quit the band and guitarist Andy Ross, who had a talent for making funny, arty videos, took his place that things began to happen. Ross steered OK Go into a backyard video for “A Million Ways,” starring the unexpectedly photogenic band members as masters of complicated choreography. The video landed on a website called iFilm and quickly racked up 300,000 views. “We hadn’t sold that many records in our entire career at that point,” Nordwind says. “We all thought, ‘Wow, if we could do that accidentally, we could try to do the same thing, but ratchet up the level of absurdity and see what happens.'”
The next step was “Here It Goes Again,” and this time it had an even more powerful online platform — a new post-your-own-video website called YouTube. Actually, OK Go was reluctant to post it at first. “We sat on the video for a while,” Nordwind says. “We were a little fearful we’d put the nail in the coffin and be known as ‘that dancing band.'”
Despite selling relatively few albums, the band had a Top 40 single, invitations to perform all over the world and, eventually, a slot on MTV’s Video Music Awards. OK Go continues to work in these two lanes — videos and albums, including 2014’s “Hungry Ghosts” — topping each idea with a more elaborate one. “I Won’t Let You Down,” posted last summer, was an old-school musical co-starring more than 2,000 dancing Japanese girls in school uniforms. “The Writing’s On the Wall” was more elaborate, with the band members gliding through a room of trick mirrors and black-and-white cubes. For that one, OK Go lived and worked together for four weeks in a warehouse.
“Grueling is one way of describing it — going back-and-forth between ‘This is crazy and so fun!’ and ‘This is the 15th hour we’ve been working on this now and we need a break,'” Nordwind says. “It certainly can be tiring. … Once we get to that end result, we inevitably hit that super-proud moment of ‘That was an insane journey,’ but I would say 99.999 percent of the time, we look at the finished product and feel like it was all worth it.”
The next step? A Chinese furniture commercial, of course. “When I was 15 and wanting to be in a rock band, I don’t think I ever thought that’s what it’d be like to be in a band in the 21st century,” he says. “Because of our trajectory, we get some of the strangest offers, and it’s fun to go down those paths.”
When: 9:30 p.m. Friday
Where: Metro, 3730 N. Clark St.
Tickets: Sold out; 773-549-4140 or metrochicago.com
